Posts in "moderates"

By Elliot Engstrom at 11:55AM

Mar 24, 2010

So now you're mad at the government?

My column this week at the Daily Caller is a challenge to moderates and moderate conservatives to see that the recent government actions on healthcare are really just one more action in a pattern of government being far too involved in our economy and our lives.

...It seems to me that such (anti-healthcare) protests are fueled by anger at the government for getting involved where they do not belong and passing legislation that could have dire consequences for both our freedom and our economy.
Not to be smug, but I have to ask the obvious question—is this anything new? Firstly, government-led destruction of our health care system has been going on for decades. Obamacare is simply the latest in a pattern of government claiming to solve problems while merely creating new ones and exacerbating old ones. However, health care is far from the only arena where this takes place.

The Center is the Fringe

Every libertarian on this site has at one point or another had the experience of being called "fringe" or "extremist" by those who consider themselves "moderates." Such people often feel that libertarians,with their ideas like "End the Fed" and "stop preemptive war," are really just paranoid conspiracy theorists who think the government is out to get them, and must just be a little loony.

As Kevin Carson points out in a recent article at the Center for a Stateless Society, it's often in fact the "moderate center" that displays far more conspiratorial/paranoid tendencies than libertarians. He writes:

I remember Keith Olbermann once ridiculing the “nutjob” belief that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments might impose objective limits of some kind on the subject matter of federal legislation. A constitutional lawyer friendly to his side had to gently remind him that it wasn’t really a “lunatic fringe” idea that there might be objective constraints on federal power.