On Monday, 29 August 2016 2:49:43 AM AEST Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
Quoting russell@coker.com.au (russell@coker.com.au):
I should have just said "Libertarians" instead of "Libertarian party" when referring to the legalising of child porn.
Libertarianism aims to be a logical consistent way of running society.
I tend to think in operational terms, and the USA Libertarian Party seems to have only erratic and inconsistent adherence to any specific theoretical framework for 'libertarianism'. The latter term is so ill defined in USA political discourse that a slightly different term, 'civil libertarian' arose in contradiction, meaning someone protective of fundamental liberties.
But in contrast, 'libertarian' (in USA discourse) is just a political football and means any of a variety of rather different things depending on the speaker.
It seems to be usually about liberty for the powerful people to oppress others and almost never about liberty for the less powerful people to not be oppressed. An example is the discussions about freedom for business owners to discriminate against some customers.
As to political parties, it is in my experience more useful to classify them according to what they _do_ rather than what they profess to believe, for lots of reasons including the professed beliefs often being given only lip service. Unfortunately, it is difficult to judge the USA Libertarian Party by that metric, because to my knowledge its candidates have won exactly zero national offices, and only a few hundred state and local ones in its entire history.
Doesn't Ron Paul count?
Of course, it can be equally objected that it's not clear what the two _major_ USA parties stand for. Of the two, the Republican Party is the one that's always stood for an ideology, though the ideology it stumps for has changed repeatedly and drastically over its 162 years. By contrast, the Democratic Party (mine) really has never had a unifying ideology. It's always, over its 188 year history, been a disparate coalition of interests, some of them sectional.
Both the main parties are stumping for the rich quite effectively. Although Trump seems to be changing things, not that he wants to stop giving money to the rich (he wants his share) but he seems too crazy for the Koch brothers etc. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/