Does anything?
"Civil libertarians" emphasize personal liberty but deviate from libertarians (unless they are also libertarians) on property rights and the role of government in the economic realm...They generally still believe in property rights but not to the point where government can only "take your money/property" for anything but a few specific vital necessary functions.
Now for some commentary: I think one of the things that is so attractive about libertarianism is that it seems like a nice consistent theory. I.e., libertarians can say simply "I want government off your back as much as possible whereas civil libertarians have to explain why they want to limit government in the realm of personal liberty but still allow it to play a big role in the economic realm.
However, I think there are big problems with libertarianism:
(1) It fails to recognize various problems with the market such as externalities, lack of information, ... that make the market less than ideal. [Some libertarians do recognize the need to deal with these.]
(2) It fails to recognize that government is not the only coercive power and that in fact government is the only way be which the large majority of people can regulate the coercive power that economic power brings. Libertarians seem to believe that you are still making a choice freely even if you are doing it under the duress, say, of not starving to death.
(3) It fails to recognize how collective our economic system is, i.e., that the money that each person makes is only "theirs" in an approximate sense and hence it isn't stealing if the government takes part of it to administer the collective enterprise and even to redistribute. [See last part of next point.]
(4) It is not really as much "one consistent principle" as it seems because most libertarians end up making exceptions for certain government functions they deem important so in the end they are drawing lines almost just as much as anyone else. In particular, you don't hear libertarians questioning things like corporate law and patent law and the like, so they rig the economic rules of the game a certain way, and then cry "Redistribution...you are stealing other people's money!" when any attempt is made to remedy the inequities that result.
(5) It doesn't work for shit. I do think in the end you have to check your principles against the results they produce and decide how you feel about it. [Setting up a society ain't all deductive reasoning.] I think excessively libertarian societies already lead to excesses of inequality that many of us simply find abhorrent (and probably even unstable in that they lead to high crime and even revolution).
In the end, I believe that libertarianism, like Marxism, is an idealistic theory that would work great if people were angels but does not work in the real world.
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Well there are plenty of libertarians here as well as civil libertarians. And their concerns overlap to a fair degree. I am a committe member of my local equivalent to your ACLU. Some of the general membership are libertarians, but the active membership is mostly (just) left of centre. Civil libertarians believe that in order for everyone to make real choices about their lives governments may need to limit the power of some people. Libertarians tend to be less concerned about equality of bargaining power and more concerned that government activity constrains choices.  |
I wonder if the Libertarian Party waited until Paul was knocked out of the GOP race to announce their candidate in order to offer the position to Paul first.Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson was nominated on Saturday to be the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in the upcoming 2012 election.
Raw Story
Not to mention, I don’t care what Ron Paul’s personal beliefs are when it comes to abortion, as far as I can tell, he’s supportive of states rights on domestic issues. He and I may part ways on a number of things, but as Greenwald's and this post emphasize, he is bringing up issues that have been put in the cellar by Obama's administration's alignment with the GOP on foreign affairs and civil liberties. When, in the future, it might be believed that having an abortion is "aiding and abetting the enemy," Pollitt's reproductive rights will go down the tubes (no pun intended) anyway.[Leftist Pundit Katha] Pollitt is extremely worried about the world of Ron Paul, in which “there would be no environmental protection, no Social Security, no Medicaid or Medicare, no help for the poor, no public education, no civil rights laws, no anti-discrimination law, no Americans With Disabilities Act, no laws ensuring the safety of food or drugs or consumer products, no workers’ rights.”
How does Pollitt feel about Obama’s initial support of the Tar Sands Pipeline? About helping bailing out Wall Street bankers using the millions of dollars that could have been spent to keep poor folks from losing their houses through robo-signings of foreclosure papers, or helping save the pensions of long time auto workers? About Democrats voting to spend trillions of dollars to send US men and women to war in which they lose their minds, if not also their limbs, and then come home to inadquate medical care, if any, and to perpetual unemployment? Is she really trustful of an FDA that can barely regulate pharmaceutical drugs?
[...]
The collective indifference of thousands of progressives, even in OWS, to the minute attention paid to those foreign policies that don’t take an enormous leap of imagination to see the deaths, the bodily and psychic harm, the mutations that result from chemical warfare, that have affected hundreds of thousands of PEOPLE of COLOR. Yes. And I am a “People of color” making this point. For better or worse, Ron Paul is noticing it. I don’t care what his motivations are (again, I AM NOT SUPPORTING HIS CANDIDACY. Glenn [Greenwald]: maybe you should have put your alerts in all-caps, like I did). He is raising the questions.
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I’m not surprised by Paul’s primitive and bass-ackwards views on affirmative action, race, gay rights, women. But then again, I don’t expect much of libertarians, in the same way that I expect little of conservatives or neo-liberals. And I am pleased when they raise an issue to which I am sympathetic.
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The Clinton Administration was the harbinger of some pretty serious human rights violations, as I see it: The 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, 1996 Welfare Reform Act (PRWORA), and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsiblity Act (IIRIRA), the “3 Strikes” (1994 Crime Act). All of those are crucial pieces of the road to indefinite detention and the eradication of civil liberties for US people of color. But we had the same guilt-trip in 1996 that we had in 2000, 2004, 2008, and again today: We have to do a cost-benefit analysis to see how “we” (read White Leftish Women and Men, and some segment of “People of Color”) stand to lose more personal benefits if we vote for the “worse” of 2 evils than for the “lesser” of 2 evils.
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So it’s fine to be critical of President Obama and other Democrats. But DON’T suggest that a Republican–a conservative Libertarian–might raise a substantial issue that puts the libs/progs in an awkward spot. Especially NOT during Election Year. We can forgive a Democrat who’s continued a war that has killed and maimed Arabs, Muslims, poor folks of color who are NOT citizens of this mighty White-serving country (and killed and maimed thousands of US soldiers, too), but don’t funk with Pollitt’s reproductive rights.
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Drones in Pakistan and chemical warfare in Iraq [...] and remaining in Afghanistan doesn’t exactly enhance access to reproductive rights for women. Nor does it facilitate clean air, water, or an unpolluted environment.
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Why can’t we discuss the questions that are being raised as serious and important questions, rather than referendums on voters’ or pundits’ moral character? I don’t have to like Ron Paul (and why do we need to LIKE our politicians?). I don’t have to have dinner with him. He doesn’t need to be a friend. He is raising the questions that every other liberal and progressive and feminist (yes, including you, Katha) should be raising and forcing the Democrats to address. As Greenwald as pointed out, these issues only become outrage-worthy when the Republicans are spearheading human rights violations, because it gives the libs and progs a lever by which to claim political superiority. The silence on the Democrats’ record of human rights violations is deafening.
Translation Exercises
