🚀 go-pugleaf

KStahl wrote:
> "Peter H. Proctor" wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 11:20:00 GMT, KStahl <ktsahl@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>This whole thing has shown the moral bankruptcy of the conservative
>>>movement.
>>
>>       No,  just the bible-thumper cultural conservatives--- Rush,
>>Willian Bennet with his gambling habit,  not to mention assorted TV
>>preachers,  etc..   You can see all the projection that goes on-- they
>>can't control their appetites and compulsions.  So they figure
>>everybody else is similarly lacking in self-control.    Or maybe they
>>think it is just a good way to make a buck.    The real thing is us
>>libertarians..
>>
>>Dr P
> 
> 
> But don't you see? Everyone has those desires. Conservatives are just
> far less honest about it and are constantly trying to spin things away
> from their own misconduct. I like some of the things from the
> Libertarian party, but I'm a dyed-in-the-wool independent liberal. I
> just don't like political parties because.........well, because they are
> filled with politicians and politicians are going to ruin this country.
> I want honest, open leadership that is for the good of the people, not
> for the good of a select few who happen to be in power.

The only significant difference between conservatives 
and liberals when it comes to hypocrisy is the issues 
involved.  The fact of the matter is, BOTH sides, as 
embodied in the Republican and Democratic parties in 
the U.S., are ardently authoritarian and statist, 
despite trying to project an image as lovers of liberty.

I'm indebted to the person who first got me interested 
in small-"l" libertarianism for elaborating on this: 
conservatives and liberals both publicly mouth support 
for an agenda of freedom, while both really promote an 
agenda of statist control.  Conservatives *claim* to 
support economic liberty, but what they're really 
interested in is social and religious control, and 
they'll jettison free markets just as quickly as you 
can say "farm subsidies" if doing so will enable them 
to inject prayer in school and arrest you for looking 
at dirty magazines.  Liberals *claim* to support 
social, cultural and intellectual liberty, but they'll 
ditch those in a heartbeat if doing so will allow them 
to institute redistributionist socialism.

Neither side supports liberty at all; those are just 
the "nice" public faces.

Gene Seibel posted this link, 
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/, to a 
site that allows you to take a test to reveal your 
leanings along two axes.  It should be noted that this 
test is promoted by the Libertarian Party, and is 
intended to promote libertarian thinking.  However, it 
is very useful for helping to illustrate that what may 
appear in one dimension to be a liberty-loving label 
can be very consistent with rigid state control in another.

It was very revealing that Seibel himself and the most 
hypocritical conservative moron in the group, Bob 
Adkins, both came out in the upper right quadrant of 
the graph.  This helps to illustrate the real 
distinction between libertarians, who often are 
incorrectly called conservative, and real 
conservatives.  Both are on the right side of the graph 
for economics, but for *very* different reasons. 
Conservatives are there because they are pro-business; 
libertarians are there because they are pro-liberty. 
Libertarians recognize that there can be big problems 
if business as an overall institution is too big and 
powerful, but they recognize that any attempt at state 
control is only going to yield an even worse result.

Seibel and Adkins are blindly pro-business, not 
pro-market, and also - and not contradictorily - 
authoritarian.  They are both ardently conservative in 
the worst sense of the concept:  they WANT Big 
Government, the better to make the "wrong" kind of 
people knuckle under.  Both of them would rather the 
Bill of Rights had never been written, except for the 
second amendment, and they now view any defense of the 
bill itself as well as the liberties it enunciates as a 
danger to The State.