A nerd and a geek, trapped in a car...

[Wayne]

Yesterday, a friend (Jennifer Sears) and I went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. It's kind of a yearly tradition so far, even if I didn't kilt it this year..

On the way home, the 1.5 hour drive back to her house since we were both bored and exhausted (defenses were down), we spent a lot of the time discussing politics and the problems facing this country... I am finding that the older I get, the more "Libertarian" I tend to lean in my beliefs. She, on the other hand, tends to lean more towards the Socialistic ideals...

I don't know that I agree with her on a lot of things. It's not as though we totally disagree, but at the very root of things we come at it from a completely different viewpoint. Mine is very "stop the government overreach", hers appears to be "the only way we can ever fix anything is to share the burden equally and people won't do that on their own"...

As you can imagine, that's a hell of a chasm between the two starting points.

Don't get me wrong. there are a lot of things we do agree on (like the need to bring back apprenticeships to train young people in a trade craft), but it was really nice and informative to be able to hear, and to calmly discuss another person's perspective. I really appreciated hearing, and I respect her viewpoint, even if I didn't totally agree.

I guess that's what I had originally hoped for here (after I stopped calling it the Amiga.org refugee camp anyway)...

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

There is a large amount of compatibility between libertarian and socialist - if we are speaking about the social axis. On the economic axis there is a divergence because libertarians don't seem to be able to acknowledge that the market tends to monopolies and exploitation.

If you were just to consider the basics, that people should have the freedom to do as they wish up to the point at which their behaviour hurts others most people would be in general agreement. The "screw the weak - look out for number one" position is largely viewed as inhumane in many circles. The discussion mostly revolves around where you should draw the lines. For example, if there are a hundred people and a hundred homes but one person owns all the homes and gouges everyone else for rent is he harming others or providing a service? A libertarian might argue that paying most of your income in rent is better than living outside - a socialist might argue that the idea of paying almost all your income for rent (on a house you probably helped build, since the 99% are the actual labour force) is perhaps less of a social good than being able to live in the house you built for the cost of maintaining it and using your productive effort to further improve your own life and the lives of those in your community.
The role of government in libertarianism is restricted to enforcing property rights and contracts. In a socialist view the government is also involved in enforcing property rights (e.g. perhaps no-one is allowed to own the water rights which will be managed instead communally), and organizing the people to produce for themselves those things that they need rather than producing those things but letting someone else own them after you have made them. What should be driven by markets and what should be driven by social policy is a matter of opinion. In most countries around the world the idea that medical and health care is a social good too important to be trusted to the market has dominated everywhere except in the US. The US health industries are currently working to dismantle, with the help of foreign governments, the systems that the populations of those countries value (mostly by cutting in the name of fiscal responsibility so that higher priced services can be introduced by the cartels) and this is largely because people have been cut out of the political process. Socialist believe in the idea that government should be by the people, for the people, with "one man: one vote". Libertarians are more ambivalent on the matter because they don't see that government should have such a wide mandate and for some reason they seem to trust that so long as you keep the job of government simple and the government small then you don't have to worry about who runs the government. However, I think that some libertarians see the problem of monopolies but how do you solve the problem (break up the monopolies) if you don't believe the government should interfere with such things?

If we could all stop using labels like "liberal" or "conservative" or "socialist" or "libertarian" then we would have to talk about what things we actually think are important rather than argue about what we think our labels mean and why other people are wrong about what THEY think their labels mean.

 

[Simply Sara]

That's the mark of true friendship. To be able to discuss things, basic to the controversial stuff, agree to disagree on some points, and still feel blessed that you know the other person. I know my views are respected in here, even though a lot of the times I soon discover that I was misinformed in the first place. Such are the ways of life I suppose.

 

[Wayne]

even though a lot of the times I soon discover that I was misinformed in the first place

Part of the reason for the existence of sites such as this is to (hopefully) provoke introspection and to broaden your perspectives to other viewpoints.

For example, I consider @redrumloa (Jim Farley) a good friend and would literally let his family crash my house if he needed a place to stay, but he and I have completely diametrically opposed viewpoints on abortion and Planned Parenthood. I'm sure that we each consider the other fairly insane and completely unreasonable on the subject, but still, we talk, and I'm sure that it's in the hope that we might eventually meet in the middle, at least on the understanding level. Not so much the agreement level, but understanding another viewpoint is always a good thing.

Wayne