Libertarians who vote Democrat

I'm a Libertarian and a libertarian. They're not the same thing. Small L libertarians believe in limited government, in the right of individuals to do anything they want so long as it causes no direct harm to others. We find the U.S. Constitution to be a fairly reasonable law of the land, but we think the government has been using it for toilet paper since FDR took office. We think the three branches of Congress should actually provide the checks and balances that they were designed to provide, rather than falling all over themselves to back each other up in their stoopidest moments. We believe in freedom of religion although many of us are atheists. We believe the government has no right to tell citizens what they can put in their bodies even though most of us have no respect for drunks and addicts. We believe in equal rights for women, gays and minorities even though most of us are straight white males, but with emphasis on the word "equal," so we have no respect for affirmative discrimination. We believe that the U.S. should respect the sovereignty of other nations but also leave them to find solutions to their own problems.

As a movement we don't have a position on immigration, abortion, the response to terrorism, and many other important issues because they don't conveniently yield to an analysis based on individual liberty.

Capital L Libertarians are members of a political party, one that every sensible person knows is a footnote. We find that both Conferences of the Republocrat League sold out to the authoritarians long ago and there is little substantive difference between them. They both adopted every plank of the 1929 Communist Party platform; Eisenhower completed the adoption by founding the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Every party must have a platform that covers all the important issues so we have to bang out something on Iraq, abortion and immigration, and it distracts us from our true philosophy. We're starting to look at the Sierra Club and noticing how much more successful it has been at pursuing its agenda than the Green Party, and wondering whether we should shut down the party and form a Libertarian Club. At least we wouldn't need positions on Iraq, abortion and immigration.

Most Libertarians are former Republicans because that party once stood for smaller government and strict construction of the Constitution. They also tend to be businessmen who appreciate the party's opposition to income taxes and most government regulations. They're in it for the politics. But many small-L libertarians are former Democrats and some of us were even once registered Peace & Freedom. We're in it for the philosophy, the opposition to the draft, prohibition, and morality laws.

When we go into the voting booth we have a quandary. Libertarian candidates are never elected to national office. Yet neither did Communist Party candidates, but their strong support scared the Republocrats into adopting their platform. Waste a vote in the short run but cause change 25 years from now? Sometimes there's so little difference between the main party candidates (from our perspective) that that's a reasonable thing to do. Other times we try to engineer a President and Congress from opposite parties, to prevent them from doing very much and save the country from being screwed up any further. And other times one stands out as the lesser of two evils and we vote for that one.