Right, I never suggested that one group or another has a monopoly on compassion. I said that libertarians have faith in the efficacy of that compassion, and faith that most of the time if given the chance the majority of people will make good choices for themselves.
You fallaciously attempted to cloak Libertarianism as being a "faith in the inherent goodness of man" and used natural disasters as "evidence".
Now you are backpedaling because your allegation was proven to be based upon a fallacious attempt to disparage other political parties.
So unless you can prove that the Republican and Democratic parties are
NOT based upon the concept that the "majority of people will make good choices for themselves" you have nothing but a feeble attempt to usurp the best attributes of the American people for your own partisan purposes.
Whatever it was that failed in Kansas, it wasn't libertarianism. That's the main point, as a few others have made.
In the big picture, a national shift toward libertarianism can only occur by small degrees of change. You just aren't going to be able to identify
The Libertarian in office and call him a success or a failure.
I am not backpedaling after a
fallacious attempt to disparage the two major parties, which are really two sides of the same coin. I remain a critic of that false-dichotomy, and as such I express critical opinions about them/it.
The starting point for any libertarian is that faith in men and communities of men to make proper decisions, local solutions to local problems, within the framework of the Constitution. I offer a frivolous example of the antithesis of that philosophy, which may be called Bloombergisms, like as with banning of super-sized sodas and buttered popcorn. Or, social engineering through sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco. We can have differences of opinion on these issues. The point is that the libertarian trusts individuals to regulate their own behavior. The statist feels more comfortable with top-down social engineering.
No one is purely anarchistic, and no American would support a hegemony with limitless authority. Obviously, my anarchistic views break down at some point and I would not be in favor of allowing people to have personal nuclear weapons or drive down the freeway with a rocket launcher mounted to their hood. There's a spectrum.
What happens though, when we allow authoritarians to define 'anarchy' or 'libertarianism'... that is where things get truly fallacious. Defined by the authoritarian, anarchy is some sort of radical get-mine-and-screw-all-others, destructive, non-cooperative, undisciplined, spiteful manifestation of anger and frustration.
“
Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man's worth couldn't be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn't cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don't know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.” <sarcasm>
-John Lame Deer
