[Urbane Guerrilla]

I would disagree with Griff on that point, because particularly the LP Veep candidate, Wayne Allen Root, agrees with me that one business of the freedom people is going to be liberationism -- he's willing to shoot at ultra-statists. Applying coercion to totalitarians, who are all about the coercion anyway, seems hardly to be sin from the Libertarian viewpoint. Although poster Radar will insist, in his usual disagreeable manner, that it is. He's very uncomfortable with eliminating, or apparently even annoying, tyrants or tyranny. His sympathies and habits of mind seem inclined towards tyranny in any case, as the body of his posts shows. If he is any description of genuine libertarian at all, it is Left-Libertarian, as his recent public swerve to those Socialists, the Democrats, indicates -- not that he'll admit it. But hard leftists do seek to hide their nature.

Too bad the Republicans are better at shooting at the ultra-statists -- too bad from a partisan point of view anyway.

Reason Magazine, the Libertarian monthly, finds three main streams of libertarian thought: Left-libertarian, Right-libertarian, and Anarcho-libertarian, all of which describe the paths by which libertarians arrived at the libertarian persuasion. There are some distinctive favorites of each. Left Libs like small government and have a penchant for pot; Right Libs sound like an amalgamation of Robert A. Heinlein and William F. Buckley and regard Republicans as insufficiently committed to balanced Federal budgets and small government; Anarcho-Libs once were anarchists but gave it up as an unnecessarily despairing view of governance and an overly naive view of a social order, and tend to be great fans of Murray Rothbard's writings. But they still really really think that government is best which governs not merely the least, but least needs to govern.

As a Right-lib myself, I am no longer wholly persuaded that all of power's coercion is necessarily evil. There are coercive functions in society, to perform those things a society thinks are necessary, but which also are not economically profitable. Most of these necessities (and the debate over just which are indeed necessities is perennial and acrimonious) are in aid of protecting those activities which are profitable ones -- that you can make a living at, and which create wealth. The coercive functions are generally in aid of the wealth creationg ones.

At least, they damned well better be.

It isn't always the case. That's where the trouble lurks.

So, with conservatives generally, the right-libs keep the social coercive functions to their barest minimum consonant with orderly wealth-creating and liberality of the social order, as wealth-creation needs things to be orderly enough to reasonably predict a profit.