Quote:
Originally Posted by rhyds
The difference between conservatives, socialists and traditional libertarians is as follows:
Socialists: What you do with your body and with other folk is your business, but what you do with your money is government business
Conservatives: What your do with your money is your own business, but what you do with your body and with other folk is government business
Libertarians: What you do, who you do it with and what you spend on is none of the government's business
There's been a lack of a truly Libertarian political party in the UK for many years. The Liberals used to be one, but since the SDP Alliance and the coming of the Lib Dems they've slipped more towards the Socialist/Social Democrat idea of tax and spend and green "initiatives" (aka banning things).
The biggest problem is that no politician has the guts to campaign on a manifesto of what they won't be doing, and no politician ever wants to reduce the state's (read: politicians') power over daily life. The only PM who came close to it was Thatcher, who privatised the big state run monopolies, but continued with authoritarian social policies regarding sex education and so on.
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I like your attempt to characterise Conservative, Socialist and Libertarian, but I'm struggling a bit with this semantic discussion we are having, because it could become completely arid and is probably impossible to resolve. We may talk about Liberalism as if it was something different than Libertarianism, but they are differentially towards the same end of the same spectrum and are qualitatively similar in many ways. Meanwhile, the desire to have a common understanding of the terms we use, is constantly frustrated by the continuous morphing of meanings in common parlance. e.g. For a long time the right of the Conservative Party and the GOP have been referred to, pejoratively, as 'NeoCons', then that term quickly drifted out of use and now they get labelled as NeoLiberals! Perhaps they are both.
I'm fascinated by your characterisation of green initiatives as anti-libertarian because it involves banning things. In fact, green initiatives are ways of bringing about urgent change by offering better and more sustainable ways of doing things. Well-executed initiatives are enabling. Ironically, resistance to such change comes from 'neoliberals' like Murdoch, clinging to the old ways and technologies of money-making. It is they who denounce the green movement as being a fascistic, authoritarian scam. I'm waiting, tapping my desk, for them to realise, as the left has, that the future is green and that there is money to be made. Trump, for example, ought to be massively investing in the development and manufacture of green tech in those old coal and steel towns he used to win the election. Instead he wants to contribute to the demise of our civilisation by digging up coal again and extracting shale gas.