“I’m a tax-and-spend libertarian”, he said.

You can let your head explode over that, or you can (as I did) keep mulling it over.

This is a very poor and myopic understanding of what exactly “liberals” are, and their prevailing attitudes on various policy topics. In particular, the author seems to conflate “liberals” with “positions taken by Democratic Party U.S. Presidents”.
Liberals are, by far, the strongest anti-war bloc in this country of any significance. Committed liberals have been overwhelmingly opposed to essentially every U.S. military intervention in the past 50 years. Various *democrats* have supported various interventions – these people are “moderates” or “moderate democrats”. Committed, serious liberals have a hard time getting into government service, especially in areas like foreign policy. Unsurprisingly, government officials try to avoid putting critics in power. If you’re not clear about this, go check on the political leanings of every serious anti-war protest in this country since about 1960. Come back and tell me what you find.

Similarly, liberals are overwhelmingly in favor of legalization of pot for sure, and decriminalization of most other things. They may not be as hardcore as most libertarians on this subject, but they’re a lot further along then voters who self-identify as ‘conservatives’.

Much of our environmental and social issues are not the result of what many Liberals sloppily call “capitalism” but from government intervention. Urban sprawl is the result of over a half a century of top-down engineering – encouraging people to buy homes and cars they can barely afford and using taxpayer dollars to build roads. Under a true free market, trains and roads would be given relatively more equal footing and it would pay to use “brown space”. Roads would have to pay for themselves, encouraging people to drive less often since roads will all be toll roads. There’s also the politically difficult issue to tackle – farm subsidies. Water is free for farmers and farmers are given subsidies to create more produce than we need. Without having to face real (international) competition and scarcity, farms are wasteful of land and precious water. It’s destroying the environment and making people fat and it’s not filthy capitalism at work, but capitalism poisoned by steroids. This is a form of corporate welfare and, again, so much political inertia is behind it that a strong alliance is needed to address the problem.

Similarly, on foreign policy, now is a great time to do writing on a less aggressive foreign policy vision. Questions like how do we get out of Afghanistan and Iraq efficiently? What happens next after we leave? Would reducing troop levels to say 10,000 be a useful compromise, or is leaving an all or nothing proposition? Do we leave bases in these countries and how long should we keep those running? What, if anything, is our part in these countries once we leave? The point being, there are alot of questions to hash out for the “liberaltarian” foreign policy view.

In both of these cases, I think it is important that people write about these issues at this time. You certainly have groups writing about a more aggressive foreign policy, and harsher drug laws. If we solely say “no” and don’t offer a complete policy concept, the perceived center will drift towards the more aggressive side, but it doesn’t have to be that way. This is exactly the sort of time that a think tank is most useful in my eyes.

Libertarianism in theory would, to my thinking, cause all kinds of harms and injustices in practice that I’m just not comfortable with. Yes, it’s fine to give people the ability to do as they see fit in the market—to relax environmental regulations on car dealers, for instance, so that they are not burdened. But what happens when that same car dealer begins pouring waste oil into the culvert behind his lot, and it pollutes a public stream, thereby depriving others of their liberty? On a whole range of issues, these harms cause me to move toward a more traditional liberalism: gun rights, climate change, social security, progressive taxation, school choice, etc etc.

My feeling is that the American left has ceded these arguments to primarily right wing or right-libertarian think tanks, allowing them to define positions that have to do with reducing harm as something else entirely—some secret desire by liberals to spread the tentacles of government into every human endeavor. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Most liberals are market-oriented, democratic, and strong believers in liberty and freedom. Most liberals think in a relatively nuanced way about these issues. But liberals have had trouble defining the terms of their own beliefs. Perhaps if liberals emphasized the libertarian aspects of their beliefs more heavily, they’d find more support from places like Cato etc.

In other words, within your liberaltarian alliance, you’ll end up negotiating your economic freedoms away, while taking uncompromising stands that align perfectly with left-wing positions on social issues. Thus liberaltarianism will become indistinguishable from liberalism.

The real irony is; since we’ve moved to a fiat currency system, and money is now entirely imaginary – they don’t even bother printing it on paper anymore, let alone minting coins of precious metals. It’s flipping bits now. And it’s still such a precious and scarce commodity, that it’s got to be hoarded and controlled so that 99% of people are compelled to struggle for “just barely enough” of it every day of their lives, and the other 1%. . . ban Cuban cigars to punish “those commies”, then enjoy a puff with their evening whiskey, because, rules are for everyone else.

Since governments issue currency, and corporate charters in the first place, I often wonder what was the point of pretending there ever was such a thing as a free market? Other than the cognitive dissonance, of course.

On paper, a lot of the libertarian agenda sounds great; opposition to the military-industrial complex, agribusiness subsidies, corporate capture of regulators, excessive incarceration, ect. But in practice most libertarian organizations seem to focus on issue that matter to upper-class elites- lower taxes, legal hookers and pot, and no limitations on what you can do with your business (never mind externalities).

That’s not what your average libertarian believes, of course; most are thoughtful, engaged, well-meaning people. Even if we don’t agree about the dangers of private power and private wealth there would be a lot of common ground on which to cooperate. But all of the big libertarian players are heavily, heavily influenced by conservative interests who only care about their personal freedom, not freedom for society as a whole. That’s not to say that libertarian organizations distort their positions–rather, as described above, they primarily vocalize the half of their agenda that suits their conservative backers.

The upshot is that the fact that so many libertarian organizations let themselves be used as intellectual fig-leaves for what is basically an anti-liberty, parochial right-wing makes it hard to want to work with them on any issue.

For instance, if a gay couple wants to stay in a small bed and breakfast, and the owner wants to refuse them a room, then libertarians side with conservatives in recognizing the primacy of property rights, rather than with liberals in recognizing the rights of people to be treated without regard to sexual practices.

A liberaltarian think-tank would quickly break down, even if it was limited to a few social issues.

So, I would suggest that any productive ideological engagements must not avoid the points of disagreement, but must find away to carve a functional path through the whole kit and kaboodle. If not, the alliance will dissipate after a while.