Libertarian Democrats... Not Really, but OK...

Reason editor Nick Gillespie's essay on, or survey of, the "Libertarian Democrats" is pretty solid, overall. The honest libertarian list of all of the Democratic bad ideas is quite a long one, and yet I still tend to go into the polls and mark the "D" column. When the subject of my political orientation comes up, I generally say, "ex-Democrat, but PLEASE don't think that makes me a Republican." My only quibble with Gillespie, or at least the great majority of libertarians who have traditionally cast their lot with the GOP, is that I've never understood that affiliation-the current administration may have made the GOP's rampant statism more glaringly obvious, but I think it has been there all along.

My own theory is that libertarians and their cousins, the small government conservative Republicans, must make one or both of a couple of major (in my view) errors.

Libertarian - GOP Fallacies

1. Cutting taxes is somehow an absolute good. Sigh. What gives here? The Laffer curve simply doesn't hold up to any serious scrutiny. Then there is/was the "starve the beast" meme-you know, go ahead and cut taxes without cutting spending in the hopes that this will somehow constrain future growth. This always seemed patently ridiculous on it's face… but can we finally put it to rest now? As long as the government gets to borrow or print money at will, it's going to do so. Period. If you want to reduce the size of government (and I'm for it, in general), you're going to have to cut spending. Or at least restrain spending growth so that it lags behind economic growth, which is, I believe, what happened under the Clinton/Dole/Gingrich regime, along with some modest tax hikes under Clinton and Papa Bush (after we read his lips, of course, and saw that he was fibbing).
2. Reagan was a small-government conservative. I can only figure this comes down to giving the man credit for "talking the talk". OK, I'll go over it again. Huge deficits. He actually raised taxes a couple of years after he cut them. He and darling "Nancy No" accelerated and abetted the institutionalization of the drug war. (The term "drug war" actually comes from the Reagan/Bennett era, does it not?) In practice, the man was nothing like a small-government conservative, but he gave some very compelling speeches in which he spoke like one. Hmm, good acting, bad governance--just about sums up the whole Reagan presidency, no? (Actually, I do give Reagan serious props for generally striking the right moral tone at the end of the cold war, but I'll leave a full treatment for another day.)

I have always feared the religious right's moral crusade to meddle in my private life more than the lefty urge to lighten my wallet for the public "good," hence my nose-holding support for the Dems. That uneasy equation still holds, just barely. Sadly, the Democrats have adopted their own strident brand of meddling moralism, even as the GOP has abandoned any sense of fiscal restraint, even rhetorically. Not happy times, for this voter. I may well become a principled non-voter, if this keeps up. But for now, George Bush's unbridled bid for unchecked executive power (and a craven Congress predisposed to give it to him), has me voting and hoping for anything and anyone that might get in his way.