What's the difference between a libertarian and a conservative?
I had a private post or two from people asking for an answer to that question. This link goes to a New York Libertarian Party site that talks about how libertarians would reply (although others may characterize them differently). Libertarians say that normally we think of people being either liberal or conservative, and fashion a one-dimensional continuum of left-to-right. But to understand libertarianism, they tell us, you need to think in two dimensions, as this passage explains:

A breakthrough came when David Nolan, a graduate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published "Classifying and Analyzing Politico-Economic Systems" in the January 1971 Individualist. The Nolan Chart shows the highlights of the chart he introduced in that article. Nolan divided human action into two categories, economic and social, so his chart has two axes, one to measure the degree of freedom in economic affairs, the other to measure the degree of freedom in social affairs. Then he plotted the positions of various political groups to see how they related. Maddox and Lilie suggest a matrix approach with four quadrants: liberal, conservative, populist and libertarian. Their research indicates 17 percent of Americans fit in the libertarian quadrant, with baby boomers more heavily libertarian (22 percent), as are college graduates (32 percent).

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The easiest way to understand this is to take a look at the chart itself. The point is simple, though. Libertarians say that conservatives are people like Bill Bennett, who believe in a leaving the economic system relatively free from government control (high score on economic self government) but are comfortable with goverment controls on things like drug use, prostitution, abortion, and other non-economic liberties (low score on personal self government). Libertarians say that liberals are the opposite of that, because they support heavy government restrictions on economic activity (minimum wage, taxation, workplace and environmental safety laws, etc.) and a high degree of freedom from government where personal liberty is concerned. But libertarians (according to their self-definition) want both a high degree of economic self government and a high degree of personal self government. They want individuals to be free to structure their own relationships in economic an non-economic matters.

That's where HOAs come in. To most libertarians, HOAs represent freedom from coercive municipal governments and an opportunity to live under rules that represent self-government. And they believe that if you don't like the rules in one HOA you can move to another, or change the rules. This, they believe, makes HOAs a better way to provide for collective needs than municipalities.

I understand all this, but it is just theory, sometimes reality gets in the way of theory. I'll post more on this later, but what do you say about liberals who believe in free speech for themselves but not for conservatives? And what about HOAs that are mandated by local government?

Comments?