What follows is a line of thinking that I think is pretty interesting but it fell on deaf ears in the first place I posted it. I'd like to know what MemeStreams readers think about these thoughts: I think Libertarianism is broken - I feel like the vast majority of "Libertarians" are big-R Republicans who define themselves as Libertarian because they don't think the Republican party is radical enough. A lot of these people don't so much care about social or civil liberties as they are ambivalent about them. They just want a lower tax burden and they don't really care about anything else.
In Libertarian circles voting for a socially regressive Republican is acceptable as long as he plans to lower taxes, but voting for a Democrat in order to gain civil liberties is never acceptable if there is any risk that taxes might increase. A movement that was truly concerned with both economic and social liberty would be willing to make deals with both of these devils if either of them. The clear preference for one over the other sort of reveals the whole thing as dishonest. They are really just a part of the Republican tent.
At the heart of the modern Republican party is an allegiance between southern social conservatives and libertarians. This allegiance functions because both camps want to limit the power of the federal government, but its important to recognize that both camps have different reasons for desiring this. Libertarians seek a lower tax burden and less government interference in business, both at the federal and the state level, but the social conservatives want to empower the state governments as opposed to the federal government. They want more powerful state legislatures. This is precisely because they want to pass socially regressive policies that the federal government would seek to constrain and did constrain during the civil rights era. When federalists show up offering projects that would limit the power of the federal government but not that of the states, the question one must ask is who is fooling who? Is it really about "limited government" across the board or is it about making the state governments more powerful at the expense of the federal government? Guys like Ron Paul don't believe in concepts like incorporation of civil liberties, for example. What does left libertarianism mean? Hopefully not just a liberal mirror of the right libertarians - voting for social liberty with a cryptic ambivalence to economic issues. Is it possible to reconcile a social safety net with resistance to the unnecessary rent seeking that it often produces? Its not strictly about making government less powerful, but about limiting its power in specific ways while empowering it in others... Perhaps a desirable concept would be the establishment of certain economic rights along side the civil liberties protected by the Constitution? Congress shall make no law interfering with an individual's right to practice his or her profession in a manner that does not bring harm to others? | 
