Your political views....

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there is not "libertarian" option

i believe the majority who voted "liberal" claim to have asperger but actually don't have it

i don't see how an logically-driven asperger can really believe the State should run everything

liberalism/socialism/leftism is about emotional knee-jerk reaction,not logic

Last edited by LibertarianAS on 20 Jan 2011, 4:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As if all liberals want that. I'm not even a liberal and thats obvious to me. Sigh

If we take the broadest definitions of these three ideologies, then I fall in all of them.

I am certainly liberal in the sense that I, along with almost the entire civilized world, follow in the tradition of Enlightenment liberalism- that is, broad support for civil liberties, a secular state, and the rule of law through a clearly-defined political system (generally a republic) described, ideally, in a codified written constitution.

I am conservative in the sense that my default answer is to avoid change and innovation in any established system unless it can be clearly demonstrated that the current system has serious flaws that cannot adequately be addressed within the current system. Change for the sake of change is needlessly disruptive and should thus be avoided.

I am "middle of the road" in that I tend to think extremist options will usually turn out badly, and think that on most issues effective compromises could probably be reached.

Of course, those definitions are extremely broad, and not quite what is meant by "liberal" and "conservative" in the modern context. Today, the word "liberal" apparently means "Supports the planks of the Democratic Party platform" and "conservative" means "Supports the planks of the GOP platform," without any really consistent unifying ideology behind either label.

Ah, the continued projection stemming from a disfunctional theory of mind. Not everyone who shares your neurology must also share your politics. Certainly they must not share your ridiculous misunderstandings of what political labels actually mean.

Classical Liberal or Modern Liberal (which is not liberal at all).

ruveyn

Even if that was what all "liberals" (I can't stand the American use of that word) wanted, it makes sense. A bureaucratically and strictly run government is very.. ordered and organized, which from what I have seen is something many aspies appreciate.

Broadly I am a center leftist on economic issues (I support unions, centralized health care, gun control, High Minimum Wages, collective bargaining). I am conservative on most social issues (pro-life, I favor family values, religious values in government). I don't think that makes me middle of the road.

Also, where I am from, the liberals are the economic right wingers and social conservatives.

What if the government mandated minimum wage is greater than the market value of the labor? That will lead to less hiring and more automation.

ruveyn

Balance within the economy is important but a long term support for the development of the minimum wage is also valuable. There are some things however that are just not viable in high wage, high value currency economies. Attempting to sustain some of these enterprises by keeping incomes low has a negative impact on the body politic.

I voted middle of the road, but I think quasi-libertarian ex-democrat centrist is what best describes me. I never liked modern conservatives because I view them as too greedy. I was a Democrat (modern-day liberal) until they pissed me off by caving in to the GOP in the healthcare debate. I don't see eye-to-eye with the Libertarians on economic issues. The government should at least keep you alive, and if it means spending a little money on social programs, so be it. Also, while many respectable people, such as Penn Jillette and Dennis Miller, that identify as Libertarians, you have whack jobs such as Alex Jones that do the same. There are also people such as Glenn Beck that identify as Libertarians when they are actually Republicians incognito.
My question to the Libertarians, do you consider Alex Jones and Glenn Beck as Libertarians?

I think ruveyn is only just referring to a supply-demand model of the labor market.

If one increases the minimum wage above what the market will accept for certain bits of labor, then we might see some amount of unemployment due to this minimum wage policy. All that being said, getting past the issues with the labor economics(some argue that moderate increases aren't bad, demand for labor is relatively inelastic, etc), from what I understand, the minimum wage is irrelevant and doesn't really help poverty, a finding made from US economic studies. There are a number of reasons, but a major reason is that the vast majority of minimum earners in the US, aren't from poor households, with, I think 70% at 1.5 times the poverty line according to CBO statistics on the matter in the US.

From what I understand, the policies that are more directed are redistribution policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit, as it is less likely to have negative impacts on everything else.

As for your point on "keeping incomes low has a negative impact", the problem is that minimum wage is not anywhere close to the typical wage for a large number of wage earners in the US, and as I stated, a lot of minimum wage earners are not poor. This undermines that position. As does the earlier point that minimum wage does not impact poverty much. This link from the Joint Economic Committee surveys a lot of research: http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/ ... 0years.htm .

That being said, valuing the minimum wage above other price floors seems kind of odd. Especially since minimum wages are very often not received by the poor, making this odd. The only real value is if one really buys into the Card-Krueger model, which as a model, does not make a lot of sense to me as it tries to justify the paradoxical claim that as expenses go up, so does the demand for a product, which is not generally believable unless you really really really want it to be true.

Quite so. Labor is a commodity. It is bought and sold in a market place. In that respect it is no different than cans of beens or sacks of flour.

ruveyn

The minimum wage in Australia is around $570 per week (approx $30,000 per year), which is at or just below the poverty line. In the United States it is around half that per week. Wages in the bottom of the US economy are just fundamentally too low. The Aussie min wage is obviously a part of a wider workplace relations policy. I would hazard a guess that the reason that the minimum wage has not made much of an impact on poverty in the US is that it has never been high enough to allow a worker to have any chance of escaping it. If one wants to make the case that the Aussie economy is worse off than the US for its wage laws... one need look no further than the US economy itself.

Social Democrat

I'm a right libertarian for small government socially and fiscally. I'm pro-life, for loose gun control, against high minimum wages, for stricter welfare eligibility, for legalizing marijuana and easing up on both enforcing and punishing hard drug use, for strict anti-trust laws, etc... etc...

You're not a centrist, you're a liberal not a libertarian, cause quite frankly Beck fits the Libertarian definition far better than you do. Also you make no sense when you're calling Dennis Miller respectable and Glenn Beck a whack job, they both actually have similar political views (one may be a better comedian than the other but from an ideology standpoint they are pretty similar).


I am a Conservative, I still favor the Republican Party and feel the Republicans need to do some house cleaning in Primaries and make sure to beat the Democrats in 2012. Obamacare needs to be thrown in the garbage. The last thing we need is to split the opposition vote, we need to take care of our infighting in the primaries, then we need to support the primary winner to make sure we don't let Pelosi or Reid lead us into financial ruin.

Did I say I was a Libertarian? I said quasi-Libertarian because I agree with them sometimes, and sometimes I don't. What definition of Liberal are you using, classic or modern? I called Glenn Beck a Republician Incognito, it was Alex Jones that I called a whack job. I agree Obamacare went too far, but I refer you to my "The government should at least keep you alive" statement for my views on social programs. I should have added to the aforementioned statement "only if you want it to". I left the Democrats for several reasons:

Reason 1: If they caved in on the healthcare debate, they would cave on anything.

Reason 2: Saying they are pro free speech, but then instituting political correctness and speech codes on colllege campuses. Sounds kinda hypocritical, does it not? People don't have a right to not be offended.

Reason 3: The whole "guns are bad" rhetoric did not fly with me.

Reason 4: The Democrats buy votes from the poor with promises of (flawed) social programs just like the Republicans buy votes from the rich with promises of tax cuts.

So after I decided the Democrats were not for me, I started identifying as a centrist because I thought both parties had strayed to far in their respective idelogical directions.

But in the words of Dennis Miller, "Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong".