I once met Jefferson "F**k" Poland. Fully clothed.

Now there was one Freedom Fetishist. Evidently he went too far. He is now a registered sex offender. Some people don't get the difference between liberation and license.

So I guess you will now have to worry about a four way.

BTW the Ron Paul line on foreign policy is fully in accord with that of the Socialist Workers Party. Funny thing is I joined the Libs to get away from those very kinds of influences.

I prefer the term "civil societarian." It defines itself pretty well, without the connotations of libertarian.

I think with Flynt, the third member of that triad would be a chicken.

Thank you for giving voice to one of my political pet peeves: the obsession with labeling.

You may have picked a poor example; I believe a bank could have a dress code (if a night club can have one, why not a bank?). The bank would lose business, but that is another matter.

Thank you for that vivid mental image. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go rinse my eyes with bleach.

Forget about a dress code for bank patrons, just make a pump-action shotgun part of the required dress-code for bank employees.

Ever wonder why we don't hear about many daylight robberies of gun stores?

I use "postliberal" for myself now. It seems to get in a little more information.

As a Libertarian myself, I too object to those who proclaim that only the nutball extremists like Ron Paul get to define the term. But when I say I'm a libertarian, I am invariably asked how I feel about those nasty EEEVILLLL drugs. I say that I fully support complete drug legalization, and that I hope that society's worst elements will quickly OD and perform their proper evolutionary function of DYING OFF. After all, "Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money."

As a Libertarian, I support the war - but I would oppose a draft. I think abortion is wrong - but not my business. I think smoking is stupid - but I would oppose tobacco taxes. I _do_ think that health insurance companies ought to charge smokers more. I oppose seat belt laws - but if life insurance companies wanted to rule that dying unbelted in a traffic accident was actually suicide, I wouldn't fuss. Ditto helmet laws.

There isn't much difference between liberals and conservatives; they just want to ban different things.

As to Libertarianism, Ken Mitchell has it well-defined in two short paragraphs.

Similar to the evolution statement, I've frequently referred to some laws and the legal system as attempts to "cheat Darwin from his just due."

Unfortunately, just as the anti-tax party has been taken over by religious nuts that make the neocons look pagan, every candidate who has ever been associated with Libertarianism seemed like they'd been thrown out of the tin-foil hat crowd for being too weird.

So while Libertarianism is probably the best model for government, so far it has sucked as a political party.

One of the more insidious attacks on freedom that you'll find in academia is the habit of whining about the lack of certain "freedoms" in the constitution ... freedom from lack of healthcare, freedom from poverty, etc.

Guess it never occurs to them that if you're going make a document to run a gov't and put "freedom from's" into it, then it'd make sense to make them various freedoms from said government (just as, say, the 1st amendment protects speech against the gov't)

But no. And in the meantime, they label the freedoms *to do* things "negative freedoms"

How the hell does that work? Maybe in the same way that tax cuts consist of the gov't giving you money.

"Civil societarian" is really good, as it's as descriptive as it is optimistic. (I have to admit, it's a distillation of my aspirations.)

The problem is that "libertarian" has been around for so long and reveals itself in so many of the self tests I've taken that much as I'd like to get away from the word, it's tough to ignore; hence the post.

What I tire of is being called something in order to tell me my perceived ideological shortcomings. (Not that I don't have shortcomings; it's just that I don't need the added aggravation of failing to live up to a label used that way.)

If you're able to discuss the distinctions between liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, you understand that political views are not arrayed on a one-dimensional ("left-right") spectrum, but distributed throughout a multi-dimensional space. At a minimum, there are the axes of economic and personal liberty (The World's Smallest Political Quiz has explicitly used these for decades), but there are a few issues that seem to be at least somewhat orthogonal to those. One is abortion; another is foreign policy.

If you are looking for a name that has yet to be loaded down with negative connotations, a promising candidate is 'minarchist'. It encapsulates Jefferson's dictum: "That government governs best which governs least". Some take it to the apparently logical conclusion that "none" is least of all (anarchist), but that leaves out of the calculation the forces that spring up to fill the vacuum, governing people by force every bit as much as a nation-state with flags, badges, and other trappings of legitimacy.

The trick is to find that 'sweet spot' where the total amount of force used to constrain behavior in a society is minimized. That is generally done by deferring to property owners (such as banks) broad authority to define proper conduct, which is checked by the freedom to take one's business elsewhere.

What no one has ever been able to explain to me is how a person who allegedly isn't competent to choose from these sets of rules to regulate his own behavior, magically becomes able to legislate everyone's behavior by entering a polling place.

Well, if you're for bottom-up emergent order in your own mind as well as in society, then you probably don't want some bossy label dictating your thoughts from top-down anyway.

Freedom and independence are two different things. Maximum individual freedom is anarchy and unworkable. We're paying the price right now, but won't realize it until we've gone too far.

Independence requires discipline, standards and rules. However, it also assures the maximum amount of sustainable freedom. Too many libertarians want freedom of action without consequences.

I'm an anti-idiotarian.

AST:

Agreed completely. The way I put it is "personal freedom requires personal responsibility".

Sorry guys, "civil societarian" won't fly. The first impression the phrase emits is as egoistically smelly as "progressive."

Increasingly I use the term "libertarian" less and less, and instead substitute a term that the late, great Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education like to use: "pro-freedom." Simple, but says it all.

So, those of you who find yourselves using the word "libertarian" less and less to describe yourself...what did you think it meant when you started calling yourself a libertarian in the first place?

English has the distinction that it has two words for something that in many other cultures is only described by one: Freedom and Liberty. However, it appears that even in the English language these two terms are used interchangeably. These words are used so often and their definitions have become so broad that they have become almost meaningless.
Liberty is the word used in the declaration of independence, which indicated release from arbitrary government, and political, social, ethnic and political leeway of the individual.
Freedom can mean simply the ability to achieve the desired result, i.e. Justice, or it can describe “free will” Freedom as Justice is a child of the French Revolution, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. Liberty is the child of the American Revolution, John Locke and Adam Smith. Liberty in that sense is a barrier between Government and the individual. Freedom in that sense implies Government as teacher, referee, and executioner. However, since most of us use the two words interchangeably, a discussion about freedom and liberty is often a fruitless undertaking, since neither side understands the other.

"There isn't much difference between liberals and conservatives; they just want to ban different things."

So they're the same, only different?

Geez.

"What no one has ever been able to explain to me is how a person who allegedly isn't competent to choose from these sets of rules to regulate his own behavior, magically becomes able to legislate everyone's behavior by entering a polling place."

You're mistaking the tail for the dog.

If we can't use Libertarian, how about Freedomite? Kinda conjours up a tag-team image of Freemasonry with Sodomites.

Freedomarian? Why don't we just name the movement "Bob" since the power isn't in the name but in the idea and ideals. -cp

My bank has a dress code for its customers that does not allow sunglasses or hats.

Yours,
Wince

"libertarian" has been getting polluted anyhow by the msm referring to american criminal liberties union types as "civil libertarians". i like to label msm types as liars.

The way I describe libertarianism is in 4 words -- "Get Off My Land"

(Actually, I stole that line from writer John Scalzi)

Ha ha - 'freedom fetishist', that's a good one! Don't take it personally, I sincerely doubt it was intended as a comment on you personally. But it perfectly captures the perversity of hard-core Libertarianism.

The perversity that, for example, denies people the freedom to shape their own communities. That blights society with prostitution (in my country), drugs, gambling and pornography -- even though we long live free of these scourges, in fact we cry out to be liberated from them.

As left and right libertarianism causes our communities to be overrun by vice and taken over by criminals, we cry out, "we want to be free!". But our Left and Right libertarian-dominated masters don't hear us. "They call for freedom, then give them more vice", and the more we are enslaved.

...not to mention the mundane side of libertarianism, the one that seeks 'market forces' as the answer to everything, and conflates the properly expressed will of the people -- and there are certain matters where only government can produce action -- with 'big brotherism' (both are real, but they are not the same).

Man, Libertarianism has nothing to do with real freedom -- 'freedom fetish' is exactly what is is! I hope that term catches on.

I'm not sure why, but this reminds me of the Libertarian, Mesa, AZ city councilman named Tom Rawles. He refused to pledge his allegiance to the U.S. at a city council meeting, to protest the Iraq war. http://www.azcentral.com/community/mesa/articles/0122mr-rawles0123.html

At the time, he was supported by Libertarian governor candidate Barry Hess, who supported this misguided protest.

Apparently, they could not differentiate a pledge to one's fellow citizens and a pledge to one's government. Or, perhaps they could and failed to make their case clear.

Either way, they turned me from a Libertarian to a libertarian. I no longer support any official party.

Every few weeks I get an email from Zogby asking me to fill out a survey, and there are no less than three questions on political identity -- what party are you a member of, what do you consider yourself to be, what party do you vote for the most. And I still manage to feel grumpy and dissatisfied at the end of it, as though they failed to capture my actual position on things. Though the part where I get to say I'm not a fan of NASCAR (that one is ALWAYS there,) does make me feel a little better. I have a clearly defined opinion on racing (it's hideously boring), though regrettably that doesn't have anything to do with anything.

If everyone would take the smallest political quiz, I'd be able to walk around calling myself a "+5/-2.15" and leave it at that. I'm stuck with saying I'm a libertarian and then following it with a gazillion qualifiers, instead -- but it's better than what I'd have to do if I called myself a conservative or liberal, and WAY better than what I'd have to do if I called myself a Republican or Democrat. Most of my friends already know I'm not typical -- nearly everyone I know has at least one issue that they completely agree with me on, and two or three that we're complete opposites on. They're used to it, the ones who call themselves "Very Liberal" and the ones who call themselves "Very Conservative" alike. And the general public doesn't need to have an opinion about my political stance, thank goodness.

I could, I suppose, call myself a Tchaikovskiite, since he's usually the famous person who's closest to me in those silly "where would dead people appear on this graph" political compass websites.

Thomas Jefferson: "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."