Theme: Coercion

PROGRESSIVE VS LIBERTARIAN VS CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT PROCESSES

It frustrates progressives no end, that libertarians generally provide solutions to progressive problems but without ‘consensus making’. They object to our solutions, not on the grounds that we haven’t provided a solution. But because that solution originates in cooperation by competition rather than by consensus. For progressives, how a process feels is as, or more, important than what hit achieves. Precisely the opposite of libertarians.

But it’s easy to understand why. Progressives are driven by consensus-making as a good in itself. Whereas libertarians understand that the market makes millions of parallel forms of consensus at every moment, and verbal consensus does not, and cannot, because it is a simple local phenomenon. Not that it’s bad. It isn’t. It just is incredibly ineffective at at market scale.

For conservatives, a process must be intuitively moral, or they will reject it. Not because it fails to achieve their objectives, but because it is not intuitively moral. And they value that something is intuitively moral as much more more than they value achieving a particular outcome. This is precisely the opposite of how libertarians see the world: as reason not intuition.

We have the most rational policy recommendations. But we fail to satisfy the emotional needs of conservatives and progressives in solving policy ideas. That is because they want to win the war of having people think like they do, more than they want to produce any outcome.

That is why we libertarians tend to think of the other political dimensions as either arational or absurd. ‘Cause they are. 🙂