Nevertheless, though I enjoy impugning the Libertarians, I respect their general purism and lack of hypocrisy (so rampant in the two major US political parties.) I'm still a bit bothered by some of the more fringe planks in the party's platform.
What's your position on maintaining a standing Army/Navy?
And, if I may ask, although the US constitution certainly doesn't justify them, is the concept of the public school an offense to you?
Those two issues, and a third, abolition of the IRS, are the main points of inhibition for many would-be libertarians I suspect. (plutocrat is a fighting word, and I apologize for using it so frequently and inaccurately.)
1. I agree that I like our lack of hypocrisy. I think the libertarian ideology is probably the most consistant, since all positions are based on the premise of individual rights. I will agree that some of our planks can looks scary, I don't agree with everything on them, though I think incrementalism would be the best way to do any of them.
2. Most libertarians are perfectly for a standing army/navy. Some are for decreasing spending on it, some aren't, but we realize that it is necessary to have one - it is in fact one of the few absolutely legitimate and necessary functions of any government(not to mention one of the few things it does well). Most of us would prefer the army be mainly for defense and retaliation purposes only, no preemptive wars like Iraq. My personal position is that our spending level, though high, is fine. I would like to cut some spending, but not at the cost of quality. Our military kicks ass - I'd like to keep it that way. We could make cuts by bringing troops home from the various unnecessary bases in foreign countries(do we really need troops in Europe?), or cutting down on inefficient beauracracy.
3. No, the concept of public school doesn't offend me, and I think in today's modern world it may be a necessary thing for government to be involved in. However, I definitely think it is unconstitutional on a federal level, so they should not be involved at all in administrating education - but the tenth amendment would allow the states to do as they like in this matter. I would prefer to localize control of schools as much as possible, to keep accountability when schools go bad as local as possible - right now the local school boards could blame the state and federal government for their own problems, rather than fixing the problem themselves, and they thusly stay in office and continue to screw up. Indiana Libertarian guberntorial candidate Kenn Gividen has an interesting idea - make all schools charter schools, in which the parents receive vouchers($4500 in this case) and can send their children to any school they wish, and the parents elect a board of directors to run the school, it's a system New Zealand uses if I'm not mistaken.
4. Yeah, I agree, sometimes our position on the IRS is a bit extreme, though I would like to get rid of it ONE DAY. I'm an incrementalist when it comes to implementing libertarian solutions, so we'd have to replace the income tax somehow and cut down on a lot of government spending before we could actually consider doing it, and doing those things would take time. It took a long time to get government as big as it is, it will take a while to shrink it back down as well.
