If there’s any doubt that liberals generally focus more redistribution issues than all others, I offer 2 data points:

1) Executive compensation, especially Wall St. bonuses. They even have a pay Czar now.

2) Health care reform, which — for liberals — is necessary because of greedy insurance companies and doctors.

That doesn’t work.

Let’s see, Libs go on and on about lousy government. Veterans programs are among the worst. And your silence has been deafening!

Is that focusing on telling your story ????

As to your other two comments. We can write a whole lot of literature and never come close to what you are suggesting.

Perhaps we should make clear the libertarian stance on necrophila before we address any other issue.

Leading with “we oppose the initiation of force” is likely to elicit lots of blank stares.

Leading with “we oppose the corporate form” or “intellectual property,” ditto.

I guess we could say your first comment is correct. So are you suggest we not say anything?

As to your other two comments. We can write a whole lot of literature and never come close to what you are suggesting.

Perhaps we should make clear the libertarian stance on necrophila before we address any other issue.

“We should focus on telling our story and see who comes….” [Lake: and, as the small government party, quit ignoring poorly preforming and even lethal public funded veterans programs!}

Bob’s experience dovetails with mine when he reports that liberals care more about redistribution than about tolerance or civil liberties. It sounds like you’re reporting from another planet when you say that most liberals start with “general civil and social libertarianism” and then support redistribution merely because social conservatives oppose it. On that theory, merely meeting a libertarian should make the scales fall from their eyes. It doesn’t.

In fact, my conversations with liberal friends always bottom out at their judgment that too many people simply are not competent to make the right choices in their economic lives. This is precisely analogous to the conservative judgment that too many people are not competent to make the right choices in their personal lives. That’s why liberals want the State to be your loving nanny/Mother, and conservatives want the State to be your stern minister/Father.

Ron Paul is certainly an iconoclast, but let’s not confuse iconoclasm with radicalism. Paul had his chance on network national television to show how radical his 2008 campaign was, and he wet his pants. When cornered by Tim Russert, he stammered that “abolishing public schools, welfare, Social Security and farm subsidies” is “not part of my platform”. Paul also said he’s “the one who has saved Social Security”. But what did Bob Barr say about the nanny state when he got his shot on national network television? He said on the Stephanopolous show: “You stab it, you shoot it, you cut off its head, you put a stake through its heart, you burn it, and you scatter the ashes to the four corners of the Earth.” Unlike Paul, Barr didn’t back off one iota when confronted with his own position on the nanny state. Never in the entire 2008 campaign did I see Barr give the nanny state a pass like Ron Paul did — and certainly never on national network TV.

Michael, I totally agree that the LP should not rule out or de-emphasize recruitment from either the Left or the Right. Indeed, I’ve always said that they key to our branding is to point out that we are the only choice that is neither Left nor Right, neither liberal nor conservative.

Bob, we don’t have to use the exact words “initiation of force” in announcing our opposition to aggression. We can say it in other ways:

Leading with “we oppose the initiation of force” is likely to elicit lots of blank stares.

Leading with “we oppose the corporate form” or “intellectual property,” ditto.

Actually if we shape our message with the right words and examples we can appeal to many groups, young, old, black, and white, conservative and liberal.

You seem to be suggesting that the media finds “radicals” interesting, but I see no evidence of that, short of their coverage of violent radicals like McVeigh and the Unabomber.

Barr certainly called for a more significant change in direction than Obama and McCain.

And, while there may well be liberals not mostly interested in “economic justice,” your experience differs vastly from mine. Most liberals I know are concerned first with redistribution, then environment, then choice. If only your sampling were true! Liberals should be our top target market.

Now, perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps I’m assuming it’s easier to convert “liberals” than conservatives because I actually used to be a “liberal.” But it seems to me that the thing that primarily attracts “liberals” to the modern, American perversion of liberalism is a general civil and social libertarianism. They don’t start off saying, “Man, I love social security,” only to later think, “maybe marriage equality is good and censorship horrid.” No, it’s just the reverse. They only ever start supporting government control over the economy because (A) they are convinced that a person who opposes homosexuality must also be wrong about everything else, including economics; and (B) because the democratic socialists seem (and usually generally are) genuinely concerned about people’s well-being (even if their solutions create problems for the very people for whom they are concerned).

I understand how “liberals” think, what I cannot understand, and have never understood, if how conservatives think. As a result, I really don’t think I have a good grasp on how to approach them. I mean, after all, how can someone understand something as esoteric as economics and yet not understand something as exoteric as marriage equality? And this is precisely why modern “liberalism” even exists.

Now, I must say that it does seem much easier to convert minarchist libertarians to anarchist libertarianism than to convert non-libertarians to libertarianism. I have converted (or helped to convert) a number of minarchists to anarchism, but have only helped to sway a single non-libertarian to libertarianism. But, very interestingly, while discussing market anarchism a couple weeks ago with a democratic socialist I know, I found that he was very receptive to my suggestions. I pointed out that people have a natural demand for safety from rape, theft, and murder, and that thus private protection companies could arise on a stateless, purely-free market, and although I suspect he has not adopted my position (he specifically rejected the idea of advocating anything that sounds too radical or voting outside of the Establishment), he nevertheless seemed very receptive and appreciative of my position.

Converting “liberals” appears to simply be a matter of explaining why the free market is far more humanitarian, and far less utopian, than the state; they will thusly revert to their underlying libertarianism, the very same underlying ideology that informed their first, core views, the very same anti-government persuasions that would have blossomed if not for the fact that they found democratic socialists and modern “liberals” were the only people actively courting, in large numbers, their core, social and civil libertarian beliefs.

Conversely, converting conservatives appears difficult for it involves first explaining why free markets work, since conservatives tend to be much more lukewarm on economic libertarianism than liberals are on social and civil libertarianism.

To Mr. Robert Capozzi,

If Barr had become a libertarian, or better yet, a libertarian anarchist, he would have made for a far more interesting candidate to the media. Think how interesting it would be, and how much you could do with ratings, if you are interviewing a former member of Congress who has since become an anarchist. Granted, I do not wish to imply that a candidate is only worth voting for if she or he has become an anarchist—it merely suffices for a candidate to advocate massive reductions in government control like Ron Paul. Nevertheless, I found it disheartening that Barr, despite being in a third party, was not at least as radical as Dr. Paul who, notably, was in an Establishment party. When Barr goes on Hannity and tells the world that he supports the war on drugs, that ending modern prohibition would be crazy, this just makes our party look like advocates of more-of-the-same, and who would ever vote for a third party in order to get more of the same? In the future, we ought to resolve never to nominate any candidate who is not at least as radical as Ron Paul.

Respectfully,
Alex Peak