If housepets were libertarians....

[John Dibble]

Funny, and perhaps true of the most extreme libertarians, but not true of most.

Of course, if those were liberal housepets, they'd start demanding things of the humans:

Sure, I'll fetch the paper, but you need to buy bigger cans of dog food.

This filter is ok, and necessary, but we need a better one.(by the way, that filter actually is unnecessary, the snail there does the same function at zero cost)

I demand you adopt all the stray cats, now, I don't care what you have to do, make it equal for everyone.

[John Dibble]

MarkDel,

1. The higher ups of the LP are a bit inflexible, I'll agree with you there. The mainstream libertarians(the little l's) generally don't join the party for this reason. The party needs to realize that we can't instantly transition to a libertarian style government - any quick transition to a new style of government generally causes a lot of harm before it starts doing good. The transition must be gradual.

2. I agree, extreme libertarianism is dangerous, as is extreme liberalism, conservativism, populism, or any political ideology taken to its extreme. Moderation in all things, after all. Communism is an extreme and we all saw how long the USSR lasted because of it. For instance, extreme libertarianism would be economically laizze-faire, but we all know that that can lead to trouble(monopolies, people breaking deals, ect.) - you will always need at least some government intervention in commerce, to help regulate and enforce interstate and international trade deals at the very least.

Edit - I also think having only Libertarians in power would be bad. I'd prefer to have Libertarians, Democrats, and Republicans(and any other parties would be fine too), I would hope that would keep us honest and sticking to our principles. Also, would help prevent us from going too extreme.

[John Dibble]

MarkDel- That is why my avatar is orange not yellow. The libertarian philosophy is tough to argue against because it is so totally internally consistent. The problem is people are not internally consistent. What I think I hear you saying is we need more libertarian beliefs injected in the public debate but it would be dangerous to turn government over to pure libertarians.

Exactly what I was just sayin.