Keep working at it. Somebody needs to. You go for help. I’ll stay here and keep pressure on the wound.

I disagree with your comments that merely voting for divided government is a successful strategy to staunch the hemorrhaging of our rights. If you want candidates to pander to you in ad spots and marketing efforts then you will achieve success; however, if your goal is to actually impact legislation – then there is no way to achieve that except by organization. Legislators do not pass laws for individuals – they look for organizations – PACs, unions, industry, etc.

I realize how enormous this task is, but I do believe it is possible.

In electoral terms Libertarians seem to divided into two camps. One always votes for the GOP, the other always votes for divided government.

The divided government folks already know which way they’ll vote in 2010. GOP. Ergo courting them is stupid. They won’t vote for us. Besides it’s hard to avoid the feeling that they are actually Conservatives with a rebellious streak. Obama changed a lot of the Bush policies they hated on the very first day, and a few weeks later pushed a tax cut through Congress. But the divided government folks are up in arms because it also funds a lot of pre-existing government programs.

There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with the stimulus package. But ya’all are declaring the end of the coalition after a single bill. We don’t mind being coalition partners, but it’s pretty clear you don’t actually want a coalition with non-libertarians. You want a libertarian majority.

I have plenty of problems with other members of the left-wing coalition. But I ain’t going to post on my blog that one bill signals the death knell of the coalition. You win some you lose some. If I did that I’d have bolted to the Green Party years ago. And then left them because they put up with anti-GM Food wackoes.

“One of the major reasons I continue to support the concept of “liberaltarianism” is that ultimately I think it can only serve to increase the pathetic influence of libertarianism on American politics, turning libertarians into true political free agents that must be pandered to, year in and year out (if you use the broad “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” definition, we’re large enough a group to be worth pandering to).” – MT

Great post. This is a theme I’ve been mining for a while. In one sense, it is the central concept of my blog. Your unstated premise, is that the permanent minority of libertarianish “social liberals, economic conservatives” must vote as a recognizable block in order to acquire the political clout to be an attractive target of the kind of policy pandering you allude to in this post. Which brings you to the classic libertarian “cat herding” problem. At this point, I am afraid I have to quote myself:

“Libertarian organization is going to have to look different than traditional politics, after all, it is something we will have to be able to accomplish while sitting in the hot-tub. What is needed, is an organizing principle. Ideally, a principle that is so obvious, so logical, and so clear-cut, that no leadership is needed, no parties are needed, no candidates are needed, and no infrastructure is needed. Ideally it is this easy: You think about the principle, and you know how to vote. That organizing principle exists. It is Divided Government. It is absolutely clear-cut and easy to understand. Divided Government is documented by Niskanen et.al. to work in a practical real-world manner to restrain the growth of the state. As a voting strategy it can be implemented immediately. More importantly, it can collectively be implemented individually as we sit in our hot tubs and ponder the sorry state of the world. Whatever the percentage of the electorate that libertarians represent, whether it is 9% or 20%, if they vote as a block for divided government, they immediately become the brokers of an evenly split partisan electorate. They arguably become the single most most potent voting block in the country, specifically because they are willing to vote either Democratic or Republican as a block. Specifically because they are not fused to one party or the other.”

It seems a no-brainer to me, that libertarian principles will always point to opposition of either major political party if that party controls both the legislative and executive branch. That is where the greatest threat to liberty resides, whether it is Republicans from 2000-2006 or Democrats now.