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Libertarian Poll

What Kind of libertarian are you? Libertarian poll only.

  • Deontological (coercion is always immoral)

    Votes: 1 12.5%

  • Consequentialist (non-coercion has better consequences than coercion)

    Votes: 5 62.5%

  • Pro-Proprietarian (for personal property)

    Votes: 7 87.5%

  • Anti-Proprietarian (against personal property)

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Statist (state is necessary)

    Votes: 7 87.5%

  • Anarchist (state is harmful)

    Votes: 1 12.5%
  • Total voters
    8
JustinS said:
How does one make such a great ideological transformation? How long did that take?
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I was already an eclectic thinker. I had discovered Burke already as a radical decentralist or an anarchist and I had already discovered the infinitely more important Saviour. It simply took me a few years to get rid of any lingering leftwing and liberal presuppositions I had.
 
JustinS said:
How does one make such a great ideological transformation? How long did that take?

I have heard of people switch from libertarian to socialist before, but never from anarchist to traditionalist.
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You do know that Proudon was a minimal statist at the end of his life.
 
Antiderivative said:
You do know that Proudon was a minimal statist at the end of his life.
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Interesting. Was he still a left-winger, though?

Next we are going to see realpolitik Stalinists make the transformation to deontological An-Caps. :)

My bad attempt at a joke.
 
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JustinS said:
Interesting. Was he still a left-winger, though?
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Yes. He was anti-statist and pro-market. While his views changed slightly as he aged, Proudhon is a true liberal.

For those who do not know, Proudhon and Bastiat both sat on the left side of the French Assembly. Liberalism has always been a political ideology of limited government, anti-war, and personal freedom until radicals and socialists hijacked it during the 20th century.
 
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Wessexman said:
I was already an eclectic thinker. I had discovered Burke already as a radical decentralist or an anarchist and I had already discovered the infinitely more important Saviour. It simply took me a few years to get rid of any lingering leftwing and liberal presuppositions I had.
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How do you straddle Burkean Conservatism with Goldwater Conservatism who wasn't a fan of Burke or the Jacobians?
 
Antiderivative said:
How do you straddle Burkean Conservatism with Goldwater Conservatism who wasn't a fan of Burke or the Jacobians?
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I have never read Goldwater's book. Of the American conservatives I tend to read Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet and the New Humanists and similar traditionalist and paleo- conservatives.
 
Wessexman said:
I have never read Goldwater's book. Of the American conservatives I tend to read Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet and the New Humanists and similar traditionalist and paleo- conservatives.
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You should read Conscience of a Conservative. It is a good read, even though it was ghost written.
 
JustinS said:
How does one make such a great ideological transformation? How long did that take?

I have heard of people switch from libertarian to socialist before, but never from anarchist to traditionalist.
Click to expand...
I know this isn't the topic of your thread, but you did ask the question. I was more a radical decentralist than anything else and I tried, not completely successfully, to absorb all sorts of decentralist thought, from left to right, into my way of thinking. The human scale decentralists, like E.F Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Ivan Illich, Lord Northbourne, Kirkpatrick Sale, Lewis Mumford and the distributists like Chesterton and so forth, were some of my favourite thinkers and they, along with reading Burke, Hayek and Robert Nisbet, did nudge me in a conservative direction, but not a crass, corporate-capitalist one. I still retain my broadly distributist and decentralist, though I'm not as radical a decentralist as I once was, position. This is why you won't find me with the other conservatives on this site, defending corporate-capitalism, indeed you will probably find me more anti-corporate than most leftists on this site, though neither do I defend social democracy or liberalism either.

The Mutualist writer Kevin Carson, who I believe came up with the phrase vulgar libertarian to describe those who claim to be free market but defend and claim the successes of state capitalism, showed me how many of these human scale writers had so much to offer. He is an excellent author, that all should read on the massive and endemic place of the state in capitalism since its inception.
 
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Wessexman said:
I know this isn't the topic of your thread, but you did ask the question. I was more a radical decentralist than anything else and I tried, not completely successfully, to absorb all sorts of decentralist thought, from left to right, into my way of thinking. The human scale decentralists, like E.F Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Ivan Illich, Lord Northbourne, Kirkpatrick Sale, Lewis Mumford and the distributists like Chesterton and so forth, were some of my favourite thinkers and they, along with reading Burke, Hayek and Robert Nisbet, did nudge me in a conservative direction, but not a crass, corporate-capitalist one. I still retain my broadly distributist and decentralist, though I'm not as radical a decentralist as I once was, position. This is why you won't find me with the other conservatives on this site, defending corporate-capitalism, indeed you will probably find me more anti-corporate than most leftists on this site, though neither do I defend social democracy or liberalism either.

The Mutualist writer Kevin Carson, who I believe came up with the phrase vulgar libertarian to describe those who claim to be free market but defend and claim the successes of state capitalism, showed me how many of these human scale writers had so much to offer. He is an excellent author, that all should read on the massive and endemic place of the state in capitalism since its inception.
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That makes more sense - going from a decentralist anarchist position to a distributist position is definitely less of a leap than going to a center-right, lasseiz-faire position.
 
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