Democrats and liberals: Why are you not more liberal?

Post Reply New Topic

which is why i'm voting libertarian. they'll get government out of the way and cut down the government by a lot. you'd actually see lower taxes. private industry wouldn't be suckled on the government teat nor would they be crushed by unfair/overly restrictive laws.

Why doesn't Libertarianism ever catch on with a significant amount of the American people?
(And you can't say because the American people are stupid. That kind of elitist BS will not fly, my friend.)

Why not call them stupid? Why won't it fly? There is research by economist Bryan Caplan on the opinions of Americans showing that Americans are stupid in a way that would prevent them from being libertarians. He put this into a book called "The Myth of the Rational Voter". The book also notes some inherent dispositions that bias our views of the world.

However, to strike upon another reason, there is also reason to believe that within our psychology, there is a deep-seated group seeking tendency. There is a paper out by Daniel Klein about this called "The People's Romance". http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_10_1_1_klein.pdf

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 17 Apr 2008, 2:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

people go "how will we do without the department of education" or "how will we get to regulate all of these things we fear if the federal government won't step in" or "how will we take care of ourselves if the federal government won't send in FEMA to help us"


it's all stuff that can easily be taken care of on the state level for the most part but rarely ever is. people are so used to dumping everything on the federal government and their agenda instead of keeping it local. same thing with a lot of those pork projects...they're special little local projects using federal money.

because the media doesn't tell them to vote libertarian