Through my friend @Markjakubik, I became aware of Professor Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA Law School. I'm enjoying and benefiting from reading his blog. He has a particularly good excerpt that distinguishes a conservative from a libertarian.
Indeed, the irony is that left-liberals who use terms like "wingnuts" and the Objectivists who want to "Go Galt" both want to free the individual from the alleged shackles imposed by those platoons. The latter prefer a society in which the autonomous individual stands naked in the market. The former prefer a nanny state in which the individual is dependent upon the state (except when it comes to abortion and sex, oddly enough). Because the little platoons--family, church, workplaces, and civic organizations--provide alternate centers of power within society that insulate the individual from the raw power of both Leviathan and the market, they don't fit into either camp's vision of the ideal society. In my view, however, they are essential if we are to resist the crushing of civil society beneath the mission-creep of the state and the raw force of the market.This is the kind of writing we need to help provide the intellectual firepower to counter the ascendancy of what I consider a libertarianism on steroids.
