There has been a lot of chatter recently about the idea of liberaltarianism: the potential political alliance between libertarians and contemporary left liberals. Being someone who came to libertarianism a few years back from a pragmatic left liberal p…

Libertarians, on the other hand, are okay with the notion that a modern society is an exercise in spontaneous order, and that optimal solutions are often reached if you simply let society or the economy work out the problem and adapt. Most libertarians accept that society has to work within a framework of social order and civil society, and that government has a place in maintaining the conditions which allows markets to work and people to be free to choose without coercion. This separates them from anarchists.

Conservatives get along with libertarians because they share the same fundamental beliefs when it comes to the economy, only they tend to personify it by saying that the family and local community are the drivers of social order, and they seek to protect them. Both Conservatives and libertarians have an inherent distrust of central planning, and this overrides their differences on social policy enough to allow them to work together.

Where conservatives and libertarians differ is that conservatives think the central government should be the protector of established social norms and morality, and libertarians do not. But compared to their agreement that central planning of the economy is bad, this is a much smaller area of disagreement.

I do not see how libertarians and liberals can work together so long as liberals seek to continually increase the state's power to plan society and control the market. This is a very deep, very fundamental difference in philosophy.

Um, Craig, reality check: here in NYC all that “nanny state nonsense” was pushed by um, the then-Republican, Bloomberg.

I find most liberals are too busy telling me that FGM can't be judged because it's an issue of multiculturalism and oh no they wouldn't ever judge; it's conservatives who are making me infantile, telling me how I have to live my life and how I can't get birth control inexpensively over-the-counter because they have religious beliefs.

Well, yes.

I've read too many libertarian screeds about abolishing the Federal Reserve, “taxation is theft,” getting rid of OSHA, the evils of environmental rules, and even zoning, repealing civil rights laws, etc. to believe otherwise.

The fact is libertarians generally come across as fanatic ideologues – the kind of people you edge away from at a party so as not to hear about how fractional reserve banking is the source of all our troubles, and how wonderful things are in Somalia.

The libertarian seems all too willing to focus on hypothetical benefits of unfettered market interactions while disregarding the cost.

I'm not trying to say who's wrong or right here, just that sometimes a look in the mirror is worthwhile.

I’m always game for a good liberaltarian discussion (or meta-discussion, as the case may be), and I generally think Will Wilkinson and Ron Chusid are two of the better idea-generators for such discussion. Lately, Will responded to some critiques …

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