Since the closest of these to me is libertarian, I will say that the “get off my lawn” thing is somewhat tiresome. Some folks take it so far so as to think that the default libertarian position is “I am an island”, when, for me at least, nothing could be further from the truth. One of my favorite essays is the pencil essay. It’s an argument for fiscal non-intervention, but it makes a powerful argument that no man is an island and that voluntary transactions are the most productive transactions in the world. My bleeding heart libertarian side says “if this is true for productive transactions, why can’t it be true for personal transactions – including charity?”

> Thanks, I know what words mean.

Never meant to imply otherwise. Sorry if it came across as such.

> And I would have to disagree that classical liberalism (which I assume is what you mean by your vague first definition) is truer to the concept than the beliefs of modern-day liberals.

I agree. And I wasn’t referring to classical liberalism specifically, but rather to the fact that liberalism is a big umbrella. Even modern-day liberals aren’t drones. If I was vague it was because I perceive liberalism as a living, breathing ecosystem of diverse ideas and perspectives.

> Why do you assume that people on the left and right can’t also feel this way?

I don’t. I’m quite certain there are plenty of moderate liberals and moderate conservatives. But not everything is as clear cut as arithmetic and evolution. Many political controversies are over differing goals, both among groups and subgroups and even individuals (where the liberties of one person end and another begin; how to manage limited commons; how to interact with political externalities). But it strikes me as absurd to take the view that there are only two (or even three) prepackaged absolute hermetically sealed political stances – that you’re either with us on everything or you’re our enemy – or that only the people on the absolute furthest extremes of the Right/Left spectrum can hold valid opinions. To assume that all of one’s opponents are necessarily evil or stupid seems wholly unconstructive. And to assume that any dissent within one’s own ranks is a sign of treason is insidious, IMHO.

Note that I’m in no way saying this was what you or Erda believe. I was replying to Erda’s assessment that all moderates are simply trying to rise above the rest by not choosing sides, when in fact I expect quite a few moderates choose sides on a regular basis after thoughtful consideration. I don’t doubt that, as you said, a lot of moderates are moderates because they just ASSUME the middle position is always the best one and never really examine it. But I do doubt that everyone who isn’t a liberal or conservative hardliner is therefore delusional.

I hope I rendered no offense. If I did, it was not intentional. Thank you for replying back. I’m glad I decided to check back and see if the thread was still growing.

This blog if full of awesome people! I’m glad I read John Scalzi’s novels so I came looking for it.

It’s almost as if every political person in the country read this and thought, “That is the template we should be using!”

To take Libertarianism as an example, at the highest level, it breaks down to what political scientists call Right Libertarianism (of the Ron Paul and Cato Institute variety) and Left Libertarianism, which covers several very different political philosophies.

Right Liberalism is sometimes termed by its adherents – as well as the Cato Institute – as “anarcho-capitalism.” Under this system, the individual is said to be ‘freed’ from a government shrunk into insignificance and existing only to protect the country from foreign invasion and to protect the wealth of the elite and the ability for them to grow that wealth. The governing force that replaces the lost democratic form of government is a totally unrestricted, unregulated and unpoliced capitalist laissez-faire “free market” system. This sect has tied itself very closely to Ayn Rand’s >i>”Objectivism, a philosophy which is focused entirely on an extreme form of individuality, where the only goal of any person is to seek what he or she sees and best for themselves. It elevates greed and ego to the only values that count, and considers money to be the primary measure of the success of their efforts. It is so extreme that, if your brother needs a kidney transplant and you are the only 6-point match, you should refuse, because you are depriving yourself of a kidney that might prove to be a lifesaver for you in the future, giving up a personal advantage solely for your brother’s advantage. The same negative view is applied to even giving your brother some of your money to help pay for his medical bills – a help to him, but, in Objectivist terms (greed, selfishness, ego, and money) a naive loss to you.

It is not a question of whether today’s Libertarian is for or against legalizing drugs or prostitution, or for or against any given regulation or government function, but that it is a view of society that is so toxic that it will inevitably create a vacuum of personal sovereignty and unity that will simply be displaced by an oligarchical dictatorship of the wealthy elite and corporate powers.

Left Libertarianism can be divided into three antithetical sub-headings. The first is anarcho-socialism in the sense of a democratic socialism, where a sovereign people decide as a society to fund a democratic government not just to do for them as a society what they cannot or will not do for themselves, but to extend this people’s sovereignty from social to economic grounds. The idea is putting the ordinary people in a position to control the manufacture and distribution of goods and services – through their elected government representatives – instead of leaving this to a cold and uncaring profit-only-driven “free market” under which they have no control and which has no accountability to its “customers,” or, as we are all pigeonholed in Capitalist societies, mere “consumers” of the products and services the corporations choose to sell us at the prices they collude to set.

The second Left Libertarianism is often called “anarcho-syndicalism” and is based on trade unions and working people replacing many of the functions of our corrupted and non-responsive government. It stresses not so much a national agency (an elected government) acting as a surrogate and enactor of the peoples’ sovereignty, but of localized implementations where the workers in a factory or other company share in the ownership and decision-making of the company, rather than be mere serfs to a professional managerial and executive class whose goals are often in conflict with what is best for the workers and the customers in general. This has been implemented innumerable times in the U.S., when companies in danger of failure are, instead, bought out by their employees and turned around successfully. One example that comes to mind is a cab company in Madison, Wisconsin. It was on the verge of bankruptcy and its owners had already announced it would cease business when the drivers and other employees decided to pool their money, with the help of their trade unions, and buy the company. As an employee-owned company, every worker felt a commitment to make its services the best possible, instead of harboring the old resentment against the executive elite who controlled all the decision-making and siphoned off most of the profits of their employees’ labor. Before long, this “people’s” cab company not only became successful, but now is the premier cab company in Madison and outperforms all of the older-model companies.

In the same state, the pro football team, the SuperBowl champion Green Bay Packers, are not owned, in the usual way, by a group of obscenely wealthy elites. They sell shares in the team, and, at last count, have over 120,000 citizen-owners instead. A classic anarcho-syndicalist success.

Today, many of the best domestic software developers have tired of being exploited over the last decade as corporate salaries and independent contract wages being cut by the corporations – often by as much as two-thirds – and being forced to bid their worth down to meet the costs of hundreds of thousands of temporary workers on three-year H-1b visas, who send most of their wages home (primarily, to India) as companies like AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, all of the banks and financial houses, Amtrak and hundreds of other corporate entities not only teach the temps how to create American-style business software (knowledge that they will take home to make their off-shore companies better equipped to lure American jobs and projects to their own country), but get paid by our corporate elite in the process. The result is that American commercial/corporate software development has priced itself out of the range of the small minority of the most highly-skilled developers, the only ones truly capable of mastering the complexities of modern highly-distributed enterprise software. Few of our most capable software writers will entertain working for grossly substandard wages on teams filled with mid-level coders who simply lack the multitude of skills and rare aptitudes to t contribute quality work in the almost impossibly complex projects in today’s business software world.

Many have left the field, have gone abroad, have retired early, have turned to writing open-source code, or have gone to the West Coast to form small entrepreneurial companies. These companies typically have about five or six employees – all equally skilled programmers – and have a totally flat management structure. There are no managers or executives. All members of the company hold equal shares of ownership. They typically work designing and coding software four and a half days a week and meet around a conference table on Friday afternoon to discuss as equals the business details and goals of the company. Conservative “free-market” industry newsletters and magazines on the West Coast are hailing this new trend in terms like “entrepreneurial innovation.” However, with my education and degrees in Political Science before I went into consulting software development, I recognize a Socialist communal organization – a perfect anarcho-syndicalist model – when I see it. It is ironic that the best quality software, both open-source and commercial packages, is not being produced under the free-market corporate umbrella, but by small employee-owned or volunteer-staffed independent entities with no Capitalist or market elements in their structures.

The third Left Libertarian form is the one Conservatives always refer to when they raise the epithet Americans have been conditioned to dread – Socialism. This is not really a Libertarian philosophy or even a Socialist philosophy, though it masquerades as such and is the example used by Conservatives and Right Libertarians to ‘discredit’ Socialism as a failure and an evil. It is comprised of an authoritarian or totalitarian government that arrogates unto itself the power to decide “what the people want” and to act for them, when, in fact, the people have NO sovereignty and no input into decisions made by an elite that believes it knows better than the people what they want and need. This model, referred to by many as State Socialism or State NeoCapitalism is the caricature of a peoples’ Socialism that we have seen fail in Russia, China, Cuba, and many other countries. It is no more Socialism than our system is a true Jeffersonian “virtual” Town Hall Democracy.

And the article hasn’t even touched on the Radical political philosophies, which differ from Democrats and Republicans, in that they believe that mere twiddling of the parameters of our current system to the left or right will provide us with a dramatically improved society. Instead, they feel that it is time to cast off centurys-old economic “truisms” of all sides and begin to consider radically different 21st Century economic and political models for a 21st Century world.