{"id":7919,"date":"2009-06-11T11:43:53","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T18:43:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7919"},"modified":"2012-10-02T10:02:38","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T17:02:38","slug":"why-are-so-many-libertarians-republicans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=7919","title":{"rendered":"Why Are So Many Libertarians Republicans?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day, I quoted from Bruce Bartlett’s editorial about libertarians<\/a>. It’s worth quoting more:<\/p>\n

Libertarians’ views on social policy and national defense make them sympathetic to the Democrats, while their views on economic policy tend to align them with the Republicans. If one views social, defense and economic policy as having roughly equal weight, it would seem, therefore, that most libertarians should be Democrats. In fact, almost none are. Those that don’t belong to the dysfunctional Libertarian Party are, by and large, Republicans.<\/p>\n

The reason for this is that most self-described libertarians are primarily motivated by economics. In particular, they don’t like paying taxes. They also tend to have an obsession with gold and a distrust of paper money. As a philosophy, their libertarianism doesn’t extent much beyond not wanting to pay taxes, being paid in gold and being able to keep all the guns they want. Many are survivalists at heart and would be perfectly content to live in complete isolation on a mountain somewhere, neither taking anything from society nor giving anything.<\/p>\n

An example of this type of libertarian thinking can be found on the Web site of a group called the Campaign for Liberty<\/a>. It pays lip service to the libertarian philosophy on foreign and social policy, but says little about them. The discussion of economic policy, however, is much greater. But its only major proposal is abolition of the income tax. No ideas on how government spending would be cut to make this possible are put forward except to eliminate the congressional pay raise. Perhaps this group really believes that will be enough to abolish the income tax, but I suspect not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Naturally, this reminds me of one of my cartoons:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bartlett points out that the libertarians you meet in Washington, D.C., aren’t goldbugs or survivalists, but they still seem focused on economics above all else. Ezra argues<\/a> that it comes down to who pays the bills:<\/p>\n

But if the country’s libertarianism is a reaction to taxes, D.C.’s libertarianism is a response to subsidies. And it turns out there are rather a lot of folks interested in subsidizing libertarian arguments against regulation and progressive taxation and not a lot of folks interested in subsidizing libertarian arguments against abortion restrictions. And that’s because libertarianism in D.C. is more of a tool than a movement. It can’t command votes and so can’t wield broad power. But it can summon funds to apply direct pressure to discrete issues of interest to, well, funders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rad Geek<\/a> and Roderick Long<\/a> both argue that Bartlett unfairly ignores those libertarians who do, in fact, argue quite a lot about foreign policy and civil liberties — although Long concedes that the Libertarian Party has pretty much the focus Bartlett describes. I also think that Bartlett’s case about CATO is fair. Since CATO and the Libertarian Party are hardly small and irrelevant parts of American libertarianism, I don’t think it’s true that Bartlett’s argument is, as Rad Geek says, a “ridiculous strawman.” But it’s true that there are some kick-ass libertarians (like Rad Geek and Long) who aren’t all about how paying taxes is just! like! being! mugged!, and those folks deserve more notice and acknowledgment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day, I quoted from Bruce Bartlett’s editorial about libertarians. It’s worth quoting more: Libertarians’ views on social policy and national defense make them sympathetic to the Democrats, while their views on economic policy tend to align them with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,25,153],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cartooning-comics","category-economics-and-the-like","category-libertarianism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7919"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15890,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7919\/revisions\/15890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}