Why am I a libertarian and not a conservative in the present sense of the term

Libertarians such as me, do not believe that whatever people choose is always right and that human behavior is virtually flawless as alluded to by a prominent conservative in one of his books. In fact far from it. The reality however is that we believe in the principle of individual accountability and individual responsibility and associating the costs and benefits of every single action of the individual to that individual and that individual alone so that there are no externalities, either positive or negative. Thus let's say that both a conservative and a libertarian, agree on the fact that children are best raised in a home where both mother and father are present and the children from such stable homes tend to earn the most and contribute the most to the national exchequer in the form of greater tax revenue. (I am trying to confine it to as objective measures as possible because a statement such as "become the most well contributing members of society" is something on which reasonable people will disagree and uses a value judgment of some over others.) Having said that I would not use any arm of the state to coerce people into marriages between heterosexualcouples other than by having our leaders set a personal example through their own lives (resting on the lofty belief that their lives can actually serve as examples) and possibly, by using, thepresidential bully pulpit (and I am quite hesitant about the use of the latter because the bully pulpit can be used for good and for evil and to expect that it will only be used for good is expecting too much). Beyond that, if I am in the position of a lawmaker, I would make people free to raise kids on their own or raise kids in homosexual marriages (or whatever we want to call them) or not raise kids at all as long as (and this is important), the costs and benefits of doing so accrue to the individual(s) who is (are) making that choice. If it turns out that kids who are raised in single familyhomes end up being less successful (we could, as before, simply lookat objective measures of earning power to judge and evaluate success), which I suspect they will, then over time, through Darwinian evolution (albeit in a somewhatdifferent setting), people would gravitate towards raising kids inhomes where both parents are physically and emotionally present. That move will come about not because people are virtually flawless but people can, and do act, in their own self-interest. Hence while I mayhave personal beliefs on matters related to the family or more generally in the domain of what we would call culture, I would hesitate to impose those set of beliefs on other folks for the same reason that I wouldresent being forced to subsidize the enjoyment of Papua New Guinean music of some at the expense of others.

Having covered the philosophical arguments of why I consider myself as a libertarian, let me get to the pragmatic issues of why it behooves the Republican Party to see a reascendance of the libertarian faction of the party. Here let me also draw on the results of a survey that was sponsored bythe Cato Institute. Let me quote from their site, http://www.cato.org/ accessed on 05/19/2008: "We also asked a new question. We asked half the sample, "Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?" We asked the other half of the respondents, "Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian?"The results surprised us. Fully 59 percent of the respondents said"yes" to the first question. That is, by 59 to 27 percent, poll respondents said they would describe themselves as "fiscallyconservative and socially liberal." The addition of the word"libertarian" clearly made the question more challenging. What surprised us was how low the drop-off was. A robust 44 percent of respondents answered "yes" to that question, accepting a self-description as "libertarian."The reason I offer these set of statistics is that because the Republican Party has recently seen a crowding out of the economic conservatives by social conservatives, especially during the first Bush Presidency. The Republican Party is no longer the natural choice of the libertarians, whether they self-identity themselves in that manner or not. The first Bush (II) veto came about for a bill on stem cell research, an issue on which libertarians suchas myself would have a different position than the Bush conservatives. It took him 6 years to veto his first bill while he signed into law disastrous bills such as the Farm Bill of 2002 and the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 which marked the largest expansion of the federal government since the days of FDR. It is precisely on such issues where I break from the presidency of George W. Bush and believe that his actions have harmed the cause of the conservative movement.

Why don't Asian Americans vote for the Republicans

It has always been a surprise to me as to why Asian Americans don'tvote en masse for the Republicans. Like several Indians of my age group and background, the people that I go out with are either graduate students at some of the best universities in the U.S. or engineers and scientists at some of the largest companies in the world such as IBM,Intel or Google and a significant fraction of them appear to share leftist sympathies. However some thought on this particular question yielded possible hypotheses:

1) The Asian Americans in question, tend to come from countries withsocialistic tendencies and in the absence of reflection and introspection on the topic of which "system" works best, the simple laws of inertia dictate that they continue down the path that was advocated to them by the political leaders of the countries where they spent their formative years. Think about India, the country I come from. For the longest time, it was bad to be an entrepreneur and great to be a bureaucrat. (My father served with the Government for over 35 years with great dedication and I can personally attest that there is something such as a honest and comptetent bureaucrat.) For people who have been raised in such a setting, they are likely to vote for the Democrat party which thinks highly of the bureaucrat and in many ways, despises the entrepreneur (if not inwords, then certainly in action)Besides there is the usual problem we conservatives face, which is to convince the masses that the invisible hands of the government work infinitely better than the visible hands of the government. This is not an entirely satisfactory explanation because this problem, if I may so say, is true for whites and for Asian Americans, yet the latter group votes for Republican candidates less frequently than whites ofsimilar socio-economic characteristics.

2) The Republican Party has also done little to reach out to Asian Americans as compared to theDemocrats. There is nothing that stops the party from doing it. And frankly there is no reason for us to be defensive about this or to not reach out actively. One of the most senior Republicans, Mitch McConnell is married to an AsianAmerican, Elaine Chao so we have examples of where Republican leadershave family ties with Asian Americans.

3) Republicans like Tom Tancredo and (maybe) Duncan Hunter who are occasionally seen as racist whackos are a big liability on this front.Frequently the extension is made (and even I would confess, not altogether unreasonably) that these folks who rail against illegal immigrants are too politically correct to say that we are against all immigration and while they couch their opposition to illegal immigration, they are in their hearts, racists who just do not like'persons of color' including the pale-skinned Vietnamese and the brown-skinned Indians. There is little that the Republican Party does as an institution to dispel that notion and again the Democrats are only too happy to step in. After all the brown-skinned Indian might think that if the Democrat party is for the blacks, they might also be speaking for my interests, little realizing that the concerns of theblacks and Asian Americans are diametrically opposite and what ends up benefiting the blacks almost always ends up hurting Asian Americans.Higher taxes and affirmative action in college admissions are only two of those issues that readily come to mind.

4) Finally, a significant fraction of the Asian American population inthe U.S. such as the Pakistanis, the Indonesians come from Muslim countries and rightly or wrongly, the US is often portrayed it as being at war with Islam. While this is not true, and it needs to be pointed out that the battle lines are between the US, its allies andordinary law-abiding Muslims on one hand. and terrorists who happen to be followers of Islam, on the other, again there needs to be outreach to get that message across. Indeed the Republican Party does too little to contradict that charge that it is against Islam and in fact, some of its words and actions could be seen as espousing the opposite view.

The above are the reasons I submit why the Asian Americans don't vote in large measures for the Republican Party with about 2/3rds of them voting (when they do in fact vote) for the Democrats. Obviously as a Republican I would like to see that change and hope and wish that the Republican Party machinery gear up for a protracted effort of out reach. As an Asian American myself I would like to strenuously point out that this is not an argument for government handouts in any way, shape or form. I do not call for this in the hope that Asian Americans will be awarded more government contracts from the DOD in the name of diversity and affirmative action and all the bull crap that goes on along with that. It is simply to argue that the interests of Asian Americans and the Republican Party converge, both at the level of the tactical day-to-day issues as well as at the level of the more permanent values which eventually underlie any strong relationship. By breaking away from our motherlands and moving to America, we have demonstrated with what we hold most precious, namely our lives, that we believe in individualism and self-reliance and not scraps of handouts from the government. It is precisely to these same emotions I appeal to when I urge my fellow Asian Americans to vote for the Republican Party in larger numbers than ever before and for the Republican Party to reach out to this group, like it has never done before.