5 responses so far ↓

• 1 Christopher M // Jul 16, 2007 at 1:42 pm

  Wow, nice nailing-down-Jesus joke in the first paragraph.

• 2 JasonL // Jul 16, 2007 at 3:52 pm

  Julian seems dead on to me. I raise my eyebrows constantly when libertarians claim to be some sort of sleeping giant out there based on polling or Ron Paul having more money than John McCain or whathave you.

  The salient question for me is, How many people are motivated to political or even social action by their libertarian values? Uh … not many.

  This kind of, I don’t know, delusion? bothers me because I think it redirects libertarians into rabbit holes. We can be effective in the arena of policy because we share certain specific policy goals with people who aren’t libertarians. If you pretend that those people are libertarians, you wind up A) writing how shocked you are that they didn’t act like libertarians after all and B) acting like libertarians are going win elections and bring about a sweeping revolution.

• 3 berger // Jul 16, 2007 at 4:08 pm

  Just wanted to say that the question you get at in the end was just great – terribly incisive. Nice job. (I like the Calvary dig too.)

• 4 Kevin B. O'Reilly // Jul 16, 2007 at 9:19 pm

  Julian, your entry is excellently written and dead right too. Just because the country is a lot richer and more tolerant than it was 40 years ago — as great as wealth and cosmopolitanism are — doesn’t mean it’s more libertarian.

• 5 Larry M // Jul 16, 2007 at 11:47 pm

  I think that really it’s a lot more simple than your post suggests (not that your post wasn’t dead-on, it was). If Mr. Lindsey was correct, there would be a massive outcry about habeas, wiretaps, and the rest of the whole ugly descent towards a police state. But the general public greets that stuff with a yawn, at best (i.e., when it isn’t greeted with outright approval). And don’t get me started about the war on drugs.