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Originally Posted by wolf
There's noting bad about being a libertarian, per se ... but it has a lot more shades of meaning than just radar's version, is what I'm getting at.
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Wolf's putting her finger on it. I've been giving this some thought, as I find Radar an interesting foil/opponent, in between any offerings by either of us to tie the other one's dick into a figure-8 knot.
One thing I better clear up right now is that I am not a paid-up LP member -- yet. What I am is registered as a Libertarian voter in California. I involve myself fairly deeply in the voting process, as I'm a polls worker on election days. (I've a decision to make as to whether I should work in the county Elections division for a bit of temp work or again be a polling place's Inspector for the upcoming special election in November. They pay you if you want them to, not a huge lot, but still grownup money.)
With a body of philosophy with three major and separate streams in it, the right-, the left-, and the anarcho-libertarian, libertarianism is already an umbrella term, and here lie the shades, or the varieties, if you prefer. The individual libertarian likely accommodates ideas from more than just one of these three in his philosophy of libertarianism -- for an instance, there is a lot in Rothbard's
For A New Liberty that I strongly agree with, but I do not share his (tempered) enthusiasm for anarchism as a remedy for anything that actually needs curing.
You've described the Non-Aggression Principle. I am here to say that if you want libertarianism to have real influence on Earth, you must dump the Non-Aggression Principle as here described. The Non-Aggression Principle does not serve libertarianism. It castrates it, making it not merely vitiated but sterile also.
Without the physical and mental capacity to resist the goon-squad suppressive tactics of the antilibertarian rulerships out there, libertarianism will not spread to those very places that need it the most: goon-squad country. The NAP would keep the Libertarian Party and libertarian ideals as a sort of hothouse plant ranging only within the United States, producing only a bouquet of parlor politicians. They can talk nice talk, but where's the action? Where's the effect? Concentrate more on deeds than on theoretical ideological purity, or you won't have a party. You'll have a philosophers' hobby -- and nobody makes a better world by mental masturbation no matter how good it makes them feel, okay? Not that I'm complaining about aesthetics! You need men and women of action now. Make no mistake: peace is preferable -- but there will be wars. You want a libertarian world? -- wars must not defeat the libertarians.
You need trench fighters. You need the people who can make Republicans into Libertarians and people who can stop socialist Democrats cold. Yes, I'm for the time being begging the question of how the socialist Democrats might be better converted than merely brickbatted across the bridge of the nose. But do you have these people? I've been asked myself, out of the blue, if I might consider running for the office of harbor commissioner for Port Hueneme. Talk about your long shots! I declined on the grounds that I didn't think I understood the job well enough to expect to discharge it competently if elected. IIRC the LPoC did not field a candidate for that office that year. You need people who are prepared for a protracted conflict, for conflict there will be, and it will take a steely determination to carry us through times of not much reward or even times of defeat.
I contend it is miscalling things to say Iraq is either unprovoked or a separate war -- hell, the big thing our foes have in common is there isn't a libertarian thought in their fevered heads, yet democracy, which is not antithetical to Islam, is a more libertarian sort of governance than the feudaloid despotism most of them are stuck in. Iraq is a campaign in the overall war with people whose interests and privileges are threatened if political power and its attendant economic opportunities get spread widely around in the population -- the sine qua non of a genuine republic. It's even more sine qua non of libertarianism.
Paul, in one regard I'm a better libertarian than you are: I say to you liberty is every bit as good for Yusuf al-Iraqi and Dost Muhammad al-Afghani as it is for Joe "Freedom Freak" Sixpack. I say liberty should not be confined to within the shores of North America -- in some measure because we don't have anti-liberty-by-law troubles springing from within this continent. These problems come from places where libertarianism isn't practiced, or even thought of. We can think of people who aren't remotely as freedom-minded as we are, living just across town, but these do not have the weight of the State behind them. I say we must be prepared to operate in environments where they do.
I'm a better libertarian precisely because I support, in supporting the Iraq campaign, the removal of the tyrant, even if he doesn't want to cease his tyranny. The tyrant is anti-libertarianism, personified. This means prosecuting a just war; if you're going to fight a war it may as well be a just one. The tyrant will not hesitate to prosecute a war against you. If he does it efficiently enough and you die, what then of the liberty you hoped for? Better for liberty if the tyrant dies in your place. Better for your soul if you arrange to kill him instantly rather than, say, by impalement. Impalement gives the tyrant time to contemplate his sins and appreciate his passage from this life to the next -- but it gets your soul muddy, too.
In viewing wiping tyrants off the world's slate as some kind of evil, I say you fail libertarianism: your view is too short, your ambit too narrow. Time to see what Libertarianism can do for the world. That's the greater picture.