Hugh Downs on libertarianism
An interesting interview with former 20/20 co-host, Hugh Downs:
An Interview with Hugh Downs
BW: If you were the president right now, what would you do about our presence in Iraq?
HD: I'll tell you why I would bring the troops home. There are several options -- all of them bad. And when you look at the option of bringing the troops home right away, you got to admit it's a terrible option -- there would be an awful, immediate increase in bloodshed. But I examined the other options, one by one, and they are all worse. And if we insist on staying there, that's the worse thing we can do. So, I think, yeah, it's going to be awful, but I'd like to bring them home.
posted by Mike Laursen @ 10:18 AM
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I was just wondering, is there any example of a Libertarian-style government in another country or some town in the U.S.? Is there any government actually practicing the philosophy of Libertarians?
All the real world governments I know of reflect a mixture of different philosophies and interests. That's not a bad thing, in my opinion -- any philosophically-pure governments I can think of have been scary: think Taliban, or New-Conservative.
A lot of philosophically-pure Libertarians (capital L, meaning member of the LIbertarian Party) scare me a bit, too.
The United States, of course, used to be the model of a libertarian country, but only if you were a white Protestant male.
There's exactly one guy in the United States Congress, Ron Paul, who is consistently libertarian. They call him "Dr. No" because he votes No on so many bills.
New Zealand had a few years recently where they made a major effort to reduce the size and complication of their government in an attempt to jumpstart their economy. I don't know if they are still on that course.
Costa Rica, I hear, has an influential group of libertarian legislators (Movimiento Libertario). I also hear Lithuania is a fairly free place. Václav Havel, the former Czech president, is essentially a libertarian.
There is also something called the "Free State Project" where a bunch of libertarians moved to New Hampshire. That just happened like a year or two ago. I'm not sure that they got enough people to move there to really influence the government there.
By the way, there can be some confusion for Americans when reading about other political groups in other countries: in Europe and other places what we call "libertarians" are called "liberals". What we call "liberals" go by names such as "social democrats".
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