I am a poli sci graduate student over in California. At the moment I'm working towards creating a 'libertarian public opinion' project. My goal is to better understand the policy preferences of self-identified libertarians and other like-minded individuals. While I think libertarian policy is unified in many policy areas, I do think there are areas where there is still much debate within the movement and I am interested in what is driving these differences. For example the LP platform has traditionally been pro-choice on the abortion issue, but you have notable figures like Ron Paul who are pro-life.
At the moment I am playing around with a pilot version of a foreign policy quiz. If you have 10-15 minutes to spare I would appreciate it if you guys would take it. It can be found
here.
Emphasis on it being a 'pilot'. I am still working on the word choice and what questions to add/remove. If you have any feedback on the survey design feel free to contact me via PM.
Thank you for your time and happy holidays everyone.
I filled out your survey. However, there is something that I think is important to place into perspective when asking "libertarians" about their views (especially if one's intention is to use feedback to measure or critique or summize or interpret libertarian opinion as a collective model) is that many, many people self-identify as "libertarian" without an accurate understanding of what libertarian actually means as a functional concept. Here's the thing.
To be libertarian, from the traditional American philosophy of self-governance, simply means to be against government-over-man. That's all that it means. It doesn't mean anything else. If someone claims otherwise, then, 1 - they don't understand what libertarian means or 2 - they do understand and just want to popularize their own ism from within the libertarian platform in order to kind of expand or alter what the illusion of libertarian should, in their personal view, be to others. Which is often contrary to the true fundamental cause and the principles of/foundation for moral code that defines libertarianism itself as a concept/philosophy. The fundamental principles of Individual Liberty must be accepted together with its primary foundation for moral code as an Indivisible whole. Which we call Liberty-Responsibility. Individual Liberty should never be mentioned without responsibility placed into relevance/context. These cannot be accepted and rejected piece-meal. To do so is to reject the legitimacy of the fundamental concept of The Individual's right of claim to the benefits of Individual Liberty fully.
As an example, libertine is not libertarian. Monarchy is not libertarian. Mercantilism is not libertarian. Anarcho-Monarchism is not libertarian. Anarchy is not libertarian (although libertarianism does permit for a socialist society...that's a deeper discussion, though. It just doesn't work because what happens there is you get the socialists taking your property and wealth by force in order to support their socialist program...so you end up with precisely what you wanted to avoid...except worse) And you have a dozen or so other varying worldviews with isms on the end of their names which kind of piggyback off of the libertarian philosophy. Again, these are most often contrary to fundamental libertarianism and do function counterintuitively to it from behind its name. And you may likely get feedback from all of these philosophies under the illusion that they are the fundamental libertarian opinion. They aren't.
So do consider these things when your target demographic is "libertarian." Many people identify as libertarian. But not all understand what it actually means to be libertarian. And others actually do, yet want to tailor it to their own ism. Respectfully. And it's why libertarian ideas are hard to get through to others. What happens is you get a dozen or so ideologies that are often fundamentally contrary to one another trying to compete with one another in a very fragmented way in order to define the "libertarian" pathway or concept as they'd personally like to have it be. Like a bunch of monkees trying to hump a loose football, really. It just doesn't work and it becomes a disorganized, ineffective, counterinuitive group of people in one big echo chamber arguing among themselves about who is more libertarian than the other guy. So consequently, the "libertarian" opinion isn't always truly libertarian, per se, even if it is offered from friends who self-identify as libertarian or congregate among libertarians.
I don't particularly enjoy saying these things. And I'm far from perfect, myself. If not, it likely won't get said at all, though. But someone has to say it like it is because it's the truth. And it must be considered if you're going to measure "libertarian" opinion as if it's wholly libertarian as a collective opinion. "libertarian" opinions aren't always fundamentally libertarian. Is what it is.
All of that said, and while I may not always agree with varying "opinion" within the libertarian...oh....group, I suppose is the word, I do respect those peers as Individuals.
End of the day, Individuals and groups of Individuals should be free to make rules for themselves so long as I'm not forced at the barrel of a government gun to do the same as them or forced to fund their indulgences . And that philosophy works across the board whether it be foreign, domestic, economic policy or just general everyday proper human relations.
