Liberaltarian
So, I’ve been kicking around a new phrase to describe myself, because I’m very much a liberal (pretty hard core), but I would like to see competition get used as a tool in helping everyone do better much more often. I’m also pretty much about less government intrusion in the recreation sphere of humanity (think sex, drugs, and rock and roll). I also think that Intellectual Privilege causes a lot more harm than good. Meaning people should be “free” to “take” people’s ideas, more or less. You should not be able to live your whole life on one good idea, song, book, whatever. You should have to keep thinking up new good things to keep making a living.
So, I jokingly started calling myself a liberaltarian. This was about 4 weeks ago.
Today, I see this.
Sadly, my “new” idea is about 2 years old. LMAO.
I’m always a day (year) late on these things. If I’d been 4 years older, I would’ve made some bank in the dot com era. ;-)
Pretty much right there with you. I wish I had thought up that word though, I’ve just gotten by with the big long explanation up to this point.
Yeah, there’s a pretty long list of things that I overlap with libertarians on…it’s just I always disagree with their reasoning. And therefore with their approach for how to get there.
Brink Lindsey *used* the term four years ago, but hasn’t really done much with it since then, mostly because he doesn’t describe himself as a liberaltarian — he just coined the term.
But if you’re interested in actually being part of something, several of us are trying to get a community blog going over at http://www.liberaltarian.net — it’s a regular blog, but anyone who registers a user name can post articles to it, and you don’t even have to register to just chime in with comments.
If there’s ever a time for political alliances and paradigms to shift, this is it. Hope you’ll lend your voice to the effort!
I’ve added that blog to my RSS feeds and I’ll keep an eye on it. However, I think that in my case, I am a liberaltarian, and you folks at the blog seem to be liberal?tarians. From my cursory reading (one post each) of both your blog and the liberaltarian.net blogs, you seem to be idealistic libertarians who prefer the ideals, whereas I am only libertarian in a strictly pragmatic sense; I think that highly detailed laws, especially at a federal level, have severe unintended consequences and should be used much more cautiously. That’s the reduced complexity extent of my libertarianism. (I.e., it’s more complex with that, but that’s the best way for me to distill it to a single sentence.)
Also, I find that if you stop off at dailykos, and spend some serious time there, you’ll find that they tend to be very pragmatic and have a significant libertarian streak. So liberaltarians already exist and are making themselves a political force to be reckoned with. :-)
Actually, to put it in your terms, you’re self-proclaimed liber(al)tarians, whilst I’m a self proclaimed liberal(tarian).
It’s all a matter of emphasis.