This is an attempt to contrast right-libertarians vs. left-libertarians.
<EDIT time="Thursday Morning">
I have been told that my opacity is a bit high for the average reader. I will attempt to clarify the intent of the following questions.
My goal here is to point at the focus differences between left-libertarians and right-libertarians. While there are substantial areas of agreement, there are reasons one might wish to call oneself (or more importantly think of onself and act as) a left-libertarian, and I wanted to try to point at "standard" libertarian deficiencies.
I am not claiming that anything said by the rightist-libertarians is technically wrong. But I will suggest that it is misfocussed to the point of effectively serving wrong goals.
Also, I am reorganizing (not rewriting) the below to see if it's more comprehensible
</EDIT>
Topic: Racial Discrimination.
Focus Question: Guesstimate the amount of energy spent by right-leaning libertarians on the topic defending the practice vs. saying it's wrong.
Topic: 3rd world hunger/poverty.
Focus Question: How much energy is spent saying "This is a big problem that any human should want to help solve" vs. "I'm not obligated to help":
Topic: Unions
Focus Question: How much energy is spent saying "this is bad" vs. "this has helped a lot of people".
Topic-free Focus Question: How much of the libertarian credo are rooted in the atomist-individualist paradigm vs. the obvious truth that we human beings are fundamentally pack animals.
Topic-free Focus Question: How much of libertarian discussion is framed around making individual, and especially poor individual's lives better now/soon (rather than their children)...because it's a fundamental human preference.
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My follow up question is at a personal level how are you connecting with these issues more than you have in the past? Are they elevated in your mind/actions?
Are there many/any Right libertarians who defend racial discrimination? (among those who are literate enough to write?) There are certainly those who are against affirmative action, but this seems rather different to me.
Switching government schools in low income areas to use DI would be the biggest policy move to equalize things...just to throw that out there...as a totally non-libertarian solution~
On Poverty, I would expect right-lib's to actually be doing more on a personal level because I associate them more with being religious. In terms of charity statistics show the christian right does more than any other group.
On the policy level however emigration is probably the best anti-poverty program we have, and it fits better with left-libs. The second best policy is free-trade but I expect the two sides to be roughly equal there.
I like the Copenhagen Consensus analysis of world issues. At the idea level I think about this modest amount, but on the personal level I only help close friends.
For world poverty bad government still seems to be the biggest inhibitor to the enrichment of people. So any effort to improve it would seem welcome.
On Unions I have a unfavorable opinion of them as practiced in the modern time. They seem much more about concentrating political power, and creating competition between worker groups than about capital vs labor. As things become more dynamic capital will move where the returns are, I don't see how sporadic unions can improve the overall labor piece of the pie. I think its no accident that most unions are for public employees. The recent peak for labors share of the economic pie was during the doc com bubble and unions played no role in this.
The voices for individualism are so small and rare that its definitely a comparative advantage for libertarians to talk about. But the whole question of politics is how we are all going to go about getting along...the whole goal of minimizing government is to make room for other institutions to have space to grow and function. Free market folks go to great lengths to talk about the delicate transactions that take place to bring the simplest item into production... pencils what have you. The difficulty is the libertarians "solutions" to problems are inherently non-political, so they cant be talked about as politics. And its also why libertarians have no political power. Those that want to do something to solve a problem get out of politics and go solve it.
I am just free association rambling on your topics. So there ya go :)
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