Well, you see, here's the trick: So do I. Yet I'm constantly being accused of being a statist government loving oppressor.
But, and here's the trick, Ron Paul doesn't want 5% of the liberty which I consider absolutely minimally acceptable. So who's the real libertarian? It's all in what you consider liberty, and what you think is necessary to get it. And in this, those people who claim that the modern conservative or libertarian is the heir to enlightenment liberals, and that the modern liberal/progressive is not are dead wrong. The opposite is true. The only people in the modern American political context who are working for liberty are the liberal/progressives. That is, these are the only people for whom the liberty of others matters.
Liberty is not a zero sum game. But there are cases where the liberty of some requires limits on the liberty of others. That is, the liberty of the slaver requires the elimination of any liberty for the slave. But, when those extremes are factored out, then the increase in liberty for some can come with an increase in liberty for all.
Liberty also requires protection. It does not exist in a vacuum. I've had the discussions with people, does liberty exist without government to protect it? In theory, yes. But in practice, you can have all the 'liberty' in the world, but when someone says frog, if you're afraid to not jump, then how much liberty do you actually have? No law required you to jump. The fear of the consequences of not jumping is why you jumped. And those consequences have nothing to do with government. The difference between a liberal and a libertarian is the recognition that private actors are every bit, and in many cases far more, of a threat to liberty as the government is. In the US private actors are much more of a threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than the government is. Your employer is more likely to kill you than the government is. The company that you are a customer of is more likely to kill you than the government is. A random stranger is more likely to kill you than the government is. Why do some people only look at the danger of government, and dismiss the other dangers? More, on a day to day basis, your employer, a company you do business with, or a random stranger, is a lot more likely to say frog, and you will jump.
Where is your liberty now?
What I call the First Liberty, or the First Freedom, is the fundamental human right of choosing your own government. Conservatives oppose this, for the fundamental reason that they oppose liberty. But many who call themselves libertarian also oppose this. And that is because they really aren't libertarian at all. Liberty, in their worldview, doesn't belong to all. It only belongs to the chosen elite. The liberty of the slaver requires the elimination of any liberty for the slave. The Confederates used liberty as their rallying cry as they killed 100s of 1000s for the purpose of holding millions is perpetual bondage.
The First Liberty, the liberty of having a say in the government which governs your life, is the necessary foundation for any and all liberties which come after it. If you don't have the first, you can't count on having any of the rest.
And America's Founding Fathers knew that. The Age of Enlightenment Liberals knew that. No group of people were as steeped in the ideology of Enlightenment Liberalism than America's Founding Fathers. They all read it. They all debated it. They all tried to understand what it meant.
And it never meant "no government".
America's Founding Fathers embraced Enlightenment Liberalism, and then set up governments. No one made them do it, they did it on their own. They set up town governments. They set up county governments. They set up state governments. They set up a Continental Congress while the War of Independence was going on. Then they set up the Articles of Confederation once the War was over. And then when that wasn't adequate to the task, the held what was effectively a silent coup and held the Constitutional Convention and created the still existing US government.
America's Founding Fathers weren't just government creators, they were serial government creators. Unrepentant ones at that.
And these are the same men many modern conservatives and libertarians point at and try to use as an example of anti-government fanatics. As if men who created not just one, but many, governments, when they had no external need to do so, could be anything other than the ideal to which anti-government forces should look to for inspiration.
And what did these FFs do with the government once created? They immediately practiced socialism. Washington and Jefferson, and the Congressional majorities of their days, built lighthouses. These lighthouses benefited the private sector, so obviously they were central planning the economy before the ink was even dry on the Constitution. Hell, man, everything that Marx wrote was just plagiarizing Washington. (Or maybe Marx had a time machine and went back, or Washington had a time machine and went forward, it all becomes so frakked once someone has a time machine.)
My point, before I wander too much further afield, is that having liberty requires the ability to enforce that liberty. And that requires a government. You can be as free from government interference as pure anarchy will allow. But of you're afraid to act on it, then how much liberty do you actually have?
Does welfare increase or decrease liberty? Well, for the recipient it is a massive increase in liberty. They get to not die. They get to not be homeless beggars. Does the slight loss of liberty to the 'taxes are theft' crowd then justify not allowing the liberty of the welfare recipient? Think about it: That welfare not only increases the liberty of the recipient, but it also increases the liberty of anyone who might become a recipient! The woman afraid to leave her abusive husband, but can't, because he has the money. The person afraid to leave the abusive or dangerous job. These people have more liberty because they have more options. And the price to the rest of us in taxes is trivial.
But to the slaver, taxes are theft, because they open the door for the slave to get free.
I've had the discussion with others elsewhere, the term 'libertarian' has been hijacked by people for whom real liberty isn't in any sense on their radar at all. The 'libertarian movement' in the US is, to all intents and purposes, dead as a doornail. There is instead a zombie libertarianism shambling about, spouting the phrases, and eating the brains of anyone it can catch. Those people who really care about liberty need to bury the corpse of libertarianism and come up with a new name and start over.
