Tuesday, March 26, 2019

One of Many Ways to Know You're About to Hear Something That's Completely Wrong

When someone says (or writes) "libertarians and conservatives" or "conservatism and libertarianism" as if the two were similar, you know you're about to be sucked down a rabbit hole of egregious error.

It's not that conservatives and libertarians never agree on anything.

It's that their philosophical groundings are different -- in fact, mutually exclusive -- making any such agreements mere temporary coincidence.

Even a home invasion robber and a home invasion robbery victim might happen to agree that it's better for the victim to hand over the jewelry than be killed. But they're operating from two very different desires.

The robber wants the jewelry and prefers to not have murder charges added to his tab if he's caught.

The victim doesn't want to give up the jewelry and would probably like to see the robber go down as hard as possible if caught.

But the victim wants to live, and the robber happens to have reasons to want to let him live. That's their only commonality.

They're not friends. They're not "kissing cousins." They're not aligned toward the same general goals.

Neither are libertarians and conservatives.

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