Is there a place for luke-warm libertarians?
I am a radical libertarian; an anarchist. I recognize that any government is too much and can never really be controlled or contained. It is a cancer. The US Constitution was a good try, but its failure to rein in government should be a lesson to all the minarchists out there. Statism of even the mildest sort is hopelessly Utopian.
Those who are bold get scolded that they "make us all look bad". How can that be? The pragmatists always lose their consistency somewhere along the line. That is where they part ways with the bold libertarians. Somewhere they betray liberty in order to look more like an authoritarian of the "right" or "left". Have they then betrayed their own principles in order to be accepted by some authoritarians? I can't say since I don't know what makes up any other person's principles, but it does appear that way to me.
Is there a place for "pragmatic" minarchist libertarians? Yes. They can follow the bold libertarians who are not afraid of the scorn and ridicule that comes with telling the plain unvarnished truth. As I often say, as long as we are going the same direction -toward more liberty and away from a powerful government- I consider us on the same side.
This struggle is like a tug-of-war, with some pulling harder than others, and all pulling on a very slightly different tangent, but those on the same end of the rope are all contributing in some way. If, sometime in the future, society becomes as free as you are comfortable with, you can rest while others of us keep pulling.
Whether it is "you don't really think there should be NO laws against drugs?" or "but you don't think people should be able to own nuclear weapons, do you?" the answer is always, consistently, that freedom of any sort is less dangerous than authoritarian control- but even if it weren't, liberty is still the birthright of every human. Someone needs to stand up for that.
