SecretSquirrel wrote:Electoral victory is not the goal of libertarianism and never will be. Democracy is not compatible with liberty. Period.
Exactly. Beck's concerned with winning the struggle for votes, when that's not going to solve anything. The Tea Party tried to influence the GOP, and look how that went: the social conservatives co-opted their rhetoric and everybody else tried to dismiss them as racist and crazy. The plain fact is that most Americans don't want liberty, they want to be coddled by Mommy and Daddy.
And this, from Ann Coulter, is typical of the nonsense that passes for conservative thought:
We’re living in a country that is 70-percent socialist, the government takes 60 percent of your money. They are taking care of your health care, of your pensions. They’re telling you who you can hire, what the regulations will be. And you want to suck up to your little liberal friends and say, “Oh, but we want to legalize pot.”
Just once I'd like to see in response something like this: "We're living in a country that's allegedly the beacon of individual liberty, and yet you Republicans keep coming up with different reasons to lock people up. You talk about individual liberty and federalism and yet you do nothing but enlarge the federal government and propose creating even more criminals."
When libertarians talk of decriminalizing pot, it's a consistent application of their guiding principle. And that is exactly why it so flummoxes Republicans, because that's apparently a foreign concept to them.
"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." - Thomas Sowell