Re:perceptions (Score 1)

Thank you, I'm glad someone said it. This point about the shift in the republican party must be made. Republicans and Libertarians were much more similar in the Barry Goldwater era. Imagine having a pro-choice republican presidential nominee. Goldwater was in '64, a time when the Republican party was actually about small government. No one could possibly confuse the Republican party and administration of today, the secrecy, the wire-taps, the Iraq invasion for that matter, is counter intuitive to the conservative mindset, at least of Goldwater's time. Then something screwy happened in the late 70s and early 80s. Reagan led the republicans into their current path of "the Christian Right," pushed further by Falwell's creation of the moral majority and by the eventual presidential campaign of Pat Robertson which led to the creation of the Christian Coalition. Libertarians are the remaining visage of that Republican party of the the 60s and 70s. Our leading conservative party definitely took a turn for the worse there. Don't get me wrong, the Libertarians are still wrong. :P I'm with you on the concept of Social Darwinism, it's idiotic. It assumes we all start on equal footing, and that our life is only determined by our own choices and merits. Easy for people like Bush or most republicans to say, born on the top of social ladder. Not hard to "pick yourself up" when you're already on the top. Clearly life is not exactly equal-opportunity. Still, at least the Libertarians are actual the conservatives they say they are, as opposed to our current republican party, which, considering their warrant-less wiretaps, secret and closed government, huge military budget, imperialism, and attempted manipulation of the justice department, more closely resemble the naz... well, Godwin has the rest of this post covered.