Personal 100%, Economic 30%. Makes perfect sense per their definitions as posted below:
Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.
Liberals usually embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded “safety net” to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations, defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.
While the “liberal” definition fits me almost 100%, there are a couple of things that could be interpreted in ways I’m not too wild about. For example, the terminology “significant government control of the economy.” I believe in free markets, but I believe they must be regulated. The role of business is to make money. The role of government is to protect and serve its citizens. This is basic, I fail to see how anyone can argue with that on the surface, but as they say, the Devil is in the details. The problem as I see it is that when the point of your work is to make money, the goal will be to maximize the money you make. In doing so, some times the actions one would take to accomplish this would be the same actions one would take to serve and protect the public good, but some times what one would do to maximize the money one makes would do the exact opposite. Most of the time, what would be done to maximize profit falls somewhere between the two extremes. As I see it, the role of government is to make sure that what business does in pursuit of profit is simply NOT detrimental to the public good.
To my way of thinking, putting in place regulations to ensure that the profit motive does no harm is part of the government’s duty to serve and protect its citizens. (I’m not looking for all businesses to ultimately serve the public good, I just feel the public interest is more important than a private party’s profit, but I do not begrudge the profit in any way). Now, contrast this with Libertarianism, which says economic issues should also be free from government intervention and that people should take personal responsibility. Now I’m all for personal responsibility, but the problem as I see it with saying that all economic issues should be left up for individuals is twofold.
First off, an entirely free market system where everyone is responsible for his or her own prosperity has no counterbalance to the force exerted by the desire to maximize profit, which means that when there is a conflict between the public interest which serves all citizens and the private interest that serves a very small group of individuals, the interests of the smaller group always wins out, and it seems to me that the greater good is, well…a GREATER good. Second, any characteristic that can be measured across an entire population will become a bell curve with a normal distribution, see graph. So, basically what this means is that your truly brain dead are going to comprise .1% of the population, the stupidest, least skilled, least employable people comprise 2.1% of the population, your below average folks comprise 13.6% of the population, and your average person comprises a full 68.2% of the population. That means that a full 84% of the population is average or below average. So, what happens is people who employ other people (something you can’t do unless you have yours), have a pool of 5 out of 6 people competing for the jobs which don’t really require someone with exceptional skills or intelligence, and in a system of supply and demand, well when you’re talking about a supply of 84% of humanity, supply outstrips demand, and as such wages in the absence of regulations to keep them high enough to earn a living, will continue to decline. And minimum wage is just one facet of it, there are a number of ways businesses can make money besides depressing wages which hurt people.
So, I don’t see basic, common sense regulation as being “significant government control of the economy.” In my estimation, significant government control would be closer to a system where the government owns the means of production, I do not support that, but I consider myself to be strongly liberal.
Another big problem I have with these definitions rests within the part about Libertarianism embracing individual responsibility. The connotation is that if you believe the government should in any way look out for the economic interests of its people, the people who are having their economic interests served by the government are somehow eschewing personal responsibility, and I do not see this to be the case at all. In fact, it’s often the people who take the most responsibility who end up the biggest losers. Consider the couple with a couple kids, both are of average or less intelligence and skill, but they take responsibility for paying their bills and taking care of their kids, even though it means that each of them puts in 60 hour weeks in 3 jobs each, none of which gives health insurance benefits, they never see each other, but they manage to make sure one of them is with the kids at all times…even now if neither takes a vacation, gets paid for 52 weeks a year, between the two of them they pull down 45 grand a year (based on the current minimum wage of $7.25/hr which is way higher than it was a couple years ago). It took regulations to get us to THIS level….when I was in high school/college about 20 years ago, minimum wage was $3.85/hour….and it was only that high because of regulations. Imagine if regulations went away in 1990, would employers have voluntarily gotten anywhere NEAR $7.25/hour?
So, I reject the economic tenets of Libertarianism as nothing more than economic Darwinism. You want no taxes to support people if they become too old, too ill…well then you’ve got a system where people who’ve spent a lifetime, maybe more than 40–50 years taking personal responsibility, working for whatever they could get, they could never afford to save, or they were forced to have some money withheld and they invested it, but they’re regular people, not investors, they lost most of the value (because let’s face it, the stock market is just like gambling…for there to be winners, there have to be loser), and so they have to work till they die (or work themselves to death). Social Security for example is meant to be insurance, to ensure that you can survive if something happens, i.e. you get too sick, or too old. Basically Libertarianism effectively demonizes people who rely on a social safety net as lazy because they lack personal responsibility. I see it as a ruse meant to be capitalized on to win elections (which the Libertarian wing of the Republican party does quite well).
So, as much as I believe in personal responsibility, Libertarianism is supposedly about having a government protect people from coercion and violence, but it turns a blind eye to the indirect coercion and derivative violence brought on by a system that is run by those with a profit motive without a counterbalancing force to protect people from the side effects of the system. I believe people should be able to make their own decisions on both social and economic issues, that’s my definition of personal freedom, but I guess I look at the issue of taxation as being something that comes off the top, really a portion of the money you make never belonged to “you” in the first place…we live in a capitalist society where success means the possibility for unlimited prosperity, unlike other systems. And just like all opportunities it does, and should, come with a cost. Consider it the price of admission…you pay your admission to enter a system where your effort and skill could pay off, that admission is taxes, and it comes back to you in the form of services you rely on every day, or some day may or may not have to rely on, but you don’t have to worry. Yes, you can be lazy, and you may even survive in this system, but survival is all you really should be guaranteed, that’s humane, everything else comes with effort. And you can’t do that if you have an unregulated economic system.
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