Reply #182: Actually, the correct nomenclature is 'kook', not idiot

[Tactical Progressive]

They don't believe in government, which essentially means they don't believe in America. Or humanity, really. They try very hard to 'reason' using 'principles' as to why they shouldn't have to pay taxes and should be able to do whatever they want. Of course, that's insane.

Ayn Rand is the archetype for the modern Libertarian, so if you want to see what their adolescent philosophy is all about all you have to do is read one of her masterworks. I've tried. They love to spout their 'reasoned' philosophy which is, not surprisingly, as unreasonable as anything political you're likely to ever hear, and it doesn't take long before their entire tangled edifice of contrived reasoning collapses in on itself in the most surreal of ways.

The latest tactic is to talk about how there are so many different Libertarian-this and that-Libertarian and pseudo-anarchical-protoliberal-Libertarians, but it's just their way of trying to evade being tarred with the fundamental, unsupportable 'reasoning' that makes libertarianism, big L or small, the absurdity that it is.

Right now they are useful against Bush because:

1) They are against war. (In a broken-clock kind of way - today's libertarians would have been against our involvement in World War II as well.)

2) They are pissed that Bush is spending three times as much as any Democrat ever did.

3) They don't like the Patriot Act and the Drug war.

Which is to say that some of their ideological rigidity occasionally aligns with the right thing to do, but overall, the core of their 'philosophy' is as anti-Progressive as anything that normal Republicans would spew.