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.