This may come as a shock to you, but I really don't care who you think I should and should not support.
Great. It's still a thread that's public to all members and I answered your question. I asked one of my own because I found an element of it bizarre. I still do. It's not "black and white" as there are multiple parameters involved in looking at a candidate; left vs. right alone does not cut it, especially since that is merely an economic consideration. How much authority you want to give the government also matters. Foreign policy also matters. I guess economic considerations just don't matter as much to you.
Okay. Your response was a bit harsher than my question warrants. If you don't like my tone, then let's be frank - you have liked to question my bonafides as a libertarian in other threads. Well, the LP is a strongly rightist, uncompromising free market party. That's why I like it. The mainstream GOP gives lip service to libertarian ideas but doesn't follow through.
To be frank, there is a much larger percentage of libertarians that agree with me on that single wedge issue in which we vocally disagree - by virtue of the DoI's declaration of unalienable, individual human rights and the central axiom of non-aggression - than there are a percentage of libertarians who could ever support someone advocating for collectivist economics. And that makes sense, because see above - individual human rights. Individualism is important to the LP, it's given lip service by the GOP at large, and it's vehemently opposed by everyone else.
I am wavering between Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Why? Because they are the same on most social issues (gay rights, pro choice, legalize drugs, etc.)
I doubt Jill Stein supports overturning Roe v. Wade because she supports federalism and the Constitution as written; Gary Johnson does. That's hardly the same. Speaking as someone who lives in a state that has a legal ban on the books that was specifically violated by that court case because of a lie 7 men perpetrated about the contents of our Constitution, that's a rather large gulf between them, and it certainly makes a difference to me, because it means appointments to SCotUS would actually do their ****ing job instead of spitting on it.
civil rights (abolish ndaa/patriot act, reign in nsa, stop racial profiling, demilitarize police, etc)
Okay, yeah, those are libertarian notions, and that's part of why I support the GOP primary candidate I do (and potentially Gary Johnson afterwards). This is also a case of the mainstream members of one major party giving lip service to these notions but not following through, but it's the leftist party this time.
On the same point, I am both socialist and pro-gun.
Okay, so it's all about priorities. I get that. You are socialist but economics isn't that important to you. You are pro-gun, but the Second Amendment just isn't that important to you.
I understand, because that's how I feel about gay marriage; it does matter to me because freedom of contract is important and the government should not be involved in issuing licenses, but in the big picture, since it only affects so few people and in such a minor way, it matters less to me than probably anything else, far less of a priority to me than life or death matters like gungrabbers trying to eliminate my right to self-defense or socialists trying to violate everyone's right to property.
I am for both helping the poor and for ending or at least shrinking most national bureaucracies.
Now
that is absolutely not possible. Socialist entitlement programs demand a bloated bureaucratic infrastructure. Leviathan, thy name be "the welfare state."
If you want to help the poor but you want to shrink the size of government; well, that's why us libertarians believe in voluntary private charity.
I am for both unions and homeschooling.
Ehh. Being for unions can theoretically work for a libertarian if they are strongly freedom of contract and don't mind unions' collectivist bent, I guess. What's bad is when the government coerces private businesses into making that sort of contract under duress, which is why I'm glad I live in a "right to work" state.
So I get what you're saying. You've explained it so that it kind of sort of makes sense. Your priorities are what they are, and they are such that right vs. left doesn't actually mean much to you. Got it.
