Talk:List of libertarian political parties

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the List of libertarian political parties article.
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Talk about it here, you two. The revert war is simply stupid. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 07:09, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Apparently, no one seems willing to discuss this, they just like having edit wars. I suggest removing protection and simply hoping that tempers have cooled: it's been over two weeks. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:21, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Constitution Party

Should they be listed under the "libertarians without using the name" section? Harvestdancer 17:34, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Not unless our article on them is wildly inaccurate: "…holds that American laws have origin in the Bible. … has a strict approach to moral and personal issues, especially homosexuality and abortion, and seeks to encourage the role of religion in American life." Doesn't sound at all libertarian to me. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:56, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
The reason I ask is because the article also says "...It advocates a stricter adherence to what it claims to be the original intent of the United States Constitution and the principles of the U.S. Declaration of Independence...
Members support reducing the role of the United States federal government through major reductions in taxes, regulation and spending. Its leaders are among the strongest advocates of abolishing most forms of federal taxation, especially the income tax. They view most current regular federal expenditures (such as those for healthcare, education, welfare, etc.) as unconstitutional per the Tenth Amendment.
Additionally, they favor a noninterventionist foreign policy. In such, they advocate reduction and eventual elimination of the role the United States plays in multinational and international organizations such as the United Nations and favor withdrawal of the United States from most current treaties. The party takes paleoconservative positions in supporting protectionist policies on international trade. They are steadfastly opposed to illegal immigration and governmental welfare, and they also seek a more restrictive policy on immigration.
The party also generally views the Second Amendment to the Constitution as securing broad rights to own guns."...
Many commentators say they are somewhere between the LP and the GOP in ideology. Paleoconservativism, mentioned as their ideologi, is considered by many the form of conservatism most similar to libertarianism. Harvestdancer 21:29, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
Two comments: (1) Anyone who doesn't believe in separation of church and state is no libertarian. (2) You said it yourself: they are paleoconservatives. Yes, that has some views in common with libertarianism, but it's a distinct ideology, with some traditionalist and communitarian aspects that are very alien to libertarianism. -- Jmabel | Talk 02:05, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
You convinced me. I just thought the question should be asked.Harvestdancer 17:40, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] List of parties

The parties you say are libertarian but not in name should be considered for great changes or even deletians. Most of these mentions are classic liberal parties, not libertarian. GANDALF1992 03:08, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Imperium Europa

To the best of my knowledge, neither Imperium Europa nor Viva Malta is libertarian. I have removed them. (From what I can tell, they are downright wacko.) Is there a citation on their being, in a any meaningful sense, libertarian? - Jmabel | Talk 05:30, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Exchange between Drew88 and Jmabel

The following exchange between Drew88 and Jmabel occurred on our respective user talk pages

They claim to be libertarian, and a lot of their views are libertarian in nature. Gun rights, civil rights, drug legalization etc. How exactly are they wacko and how exactly aren't they libertarian? Drew88 10:07, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

On the just wacko side:

  • You go to their web site and the splash screen looks more like a bad video game than a political party.
  • Imagining that Malta will transform Europe is pretty wacko.
  • "It is at this point that European-Americans, besieged in their redoubts in the North, will perforce ask to join Canada and form a new nation including Alaska. The new state will form part of Greater Europe."

On both "wacko" and not libertarian:

  • For starters, they are explicitly racialist, definitely not a libertarian position. (Also, it seems, implicitly anti-Semitic -- e.g. " Jews, which of their own admission form a distinct racial group, are prone to some 102 inherited diseases", "…who were those traitors in their vast majority? Well; Chambers, Hiss, the Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, the Cohens, the Sobells…" -- similarly emphatically not a libertarian position.)
  • Similarly on "insulated from the alien billions"
  • "enforced by the The Elite"???

On the whole, they (if there really is a "they", not basically one guy with a web site) seem to me to be sort of dime-store Nietzschean. This may have a point or two in common with libertarianism (mainly a focus on the individual) but it is a very different beast. - Jmabel | Talk 18:30, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

"You go to their web site and the splash screen looks more like a bad video game than a political party. "
Obviously, you haven't seen websites of other Maltese political parties, such as: Alpha Party Website. Seriously, check that out. And by the way, the real website of the political party is Viva Malta, which also includes a forum. The Imperium Europa website is basically Norman Lowell's website and not really the party's, as you probably noticed, since there is even a section with his own paintings for sale.
"Imagining that Malta will transform Europe is pretty wacko. "
That was never said. The party is Maltese so obviously they are concentrating primarily on how to change Malta first.
""It is at this point that European-Americans, besieged in their redoubts in the North, will perforce ask to join Canada and form a new nation including Alaska. The new state will form part of Greater Europe."
I don't know what so wacko about this.
"For starters, they are explicitly racialist, definitely not a libertarian position."
The idea is to unite all native Europeans, yes. But in Malta, the political ideology would be primarily libertarian:
How are the above not libertarian positions? You can't just take one aspect (the Pan-europeanism aspect, and say they're not libertarian simply because they're racialist.
Drew88 09:18, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


Sure you can. One of the premises of Libertarianism is that all people have equal rights. A racialist party is inherently not libertarian. I am by no means a libertarian, but I do share a common tradition with them in the principles of the Enlightenment. It is very obvious that this party does not.

The Alpha Liberal Party site looks perfectly normal except for some slightly unusual wallpaper.

As for Malta transforming Europe: the following is verbatim from their site: "Our aim is that Malta, this Sacred Island of Melita, this land of honey, will be the first liberated nation in the whole, White World - liberated from the enemy within and the enemy without. Malta, at the southernmost tip of Europe, could ignite a flame that would set Europe ablaze."

Since Norman Lowell's name is all over the Viva Malta site, the other's being his personally would still reflect heavily on the party. And there is nothing on their site that is inconsistent with the Imperium Europa site: just toned down.

It is obvious that I am not going to convince you, and you are not going to convince me, so I have no interest in discussing this further. - Jmabel | Talk 16:25, 10 July 2006 (UTC)


"A racialist party is inherently not libertarian"

That's like saying that a racist is inherently a Nazi. To be fair, you're kinda right, racialism and libertarianism are somewhat contrasting ideas, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a party cannot advocate ideologies from both. Let's end this here. Drew88 19:34, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Italian Radicals

I changed the description of Italian Radicals from left-libertarian to moderate-libertarian. Another user correctly added that presently they are members of the centre-left coalition and reverted the label to left-libertarian. I added that, while being presently allied with Romano Prodi, until recently they were allied with Silvio Berlusconi. This fact alone seems to me enough to support the view that they are not left-libertarian, it would be quite difficult to imagine how a left-libertarian party could ever ally with a coalition of Christian right-wing parties, among which a preminent role is given to the former Neo-Fascist party AN.

The stance of this little party in the last few years has been:

  • Strongly in favour of the USA and especially George W. Bush.
  • Strongly in favour of privatization and laissez-faire policies.
  • Strongly against leftist social demands and virtuallly always on the opposite side than the unions and Social Democrat or Communist parties.

They even published on important daily papers an appeal, specifically aimed at entrepreneurs, for financial support.

I know that Marco Pannella and his followers have been for a long time considered a weird fringe of the left wing, but it's quite obvious to everybody in Italy that the situation changed. They are a moderate party with a liberal flavour on issues like drug consumption, Church-state relationship etc. This hardly make them leftists, though I'm conscious that there's no clear definition about what the so-called "left wing" is. --MauroVan 11:24, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I changed the Italian Radicals to left-libertarian for three reasons:
  1. to distinguish them from other classical libertarian parties, which espouse Nozickean, minarchist ideals. I think we can all agree that the Italian Radicals are different from these parties.
  2. to distinguish them from the other party listed as 'moderate libertarian', I think we can all agree that they differ from the Independence Party of Minnesota.
  3. because they are left-libertarian. For several reasons: they are currently a member of the leftwing alliance l' Unione; they are closely allied to the Italian Democratic Socialists in Rosa nel Pugno, which mentioned ; they opposed the War in Iraq (I don't understand how they can be called supportive of Bush' policies); Emma Bonino one of the party's faces has led campaigns against nuclear energy and for the eradication of world hunger; their current page on wikipedia calls the party "left-libertarian", "anarchist" and "social-liberal" amongst other things.
Note that they were allied with Berlusconi between 1994 and 1996 only, but in both elections they campaigned separately. Their application to the House of Liberties was rejected in 2005
Enough reasons to class it as left-libertarian here.
C mon 13:51, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
I like to talk like this. Not all users here are rabid flamers when somebody disagrees with them! Fine.
  1. They are extreme laissez-faire libertarian. I dare tell that they are the most laissez-faire party in Italy. I don't know how I can find a proof of this in English, if you can read Italian just go to their site. In the front page today you can find a proposal to abolish compulsory retirement (!), a proposal to allow a new business to be started in 7 days almost without any state control, a proposal for more privatization in the telecommunication services industry, an appeal to the center-left government not to accept any pressure from the trade unions etc.
  2. I don't know much of the Independence Party of Minnesota, what I read on the WP article makes it look very similar to the Italian Radicals, especially this definition fits very well with them too: "fiscally conservative and socially liberal" (Jesse Ventura). I'm afraid you got confused between the Italian Radicals and the Italian Left-Wing Radicals, the latter being a split from the former: the reason of the split was exactly the departure of the mainstream Radicals from the previous sort-of-leftist attitude they had.
  3. The center-left alliance is made of many different groups, among them a lot of centrist parties and many former center-right politicians. In Italy it's quite usual for politicians in the middle of the political spectrum to be very opportunist and change their uniform very often (yesterday Berlusconi declared that 20 MPs are about to defect to the opposition, and simultaneously the opposite is happening to other MPs). The Italian Socialists the Radicals are merging with are very different from other Socialists, since the Eighties they gradually turned into secular laissez-faire centrists, you can hardly define them a part of the Italian left wing. They did not oppose the war in Iraq and they are pro-Israel hardliners (once more, check their website, you can notice that even if you don't read Italian! Israeli flags are everywhere, they even propose that Israel become a member of the European Union etc.). They talk about the need for "the United States of Europe and America" and they demand "an American reform of Italy".
Therefore, I think we should call them "moderate-libertarian". --MauroVan 15:15, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Could you settle for "moderate left-libertarian"? C mon 22:30, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
BTW: In response to your points, I'll grant you their libertarian and liberalista (in favour of free trade); according to the current wikipedia article they opposed the war in Iraq; as I understand the English version of their statement, they favour peace in the middle east (who wouldn't?) and also support the inclusion of Turkey in the EU; Rosa nel Pugno claims to be inspired by Blair, Zapatero and Fortuna, all (moderately) leftwing politicians.

Can I just say that as an American (and a leftist) that MauroVan's examples of "extreme laissez-faire libertarian" are pretty amusing from this side of the Atlantic? We don't have compulsory retirement, you can pretty much start a new business in about 30 seconds without bothering to tell the government (although it's different when you start actually hiring) and if our telecommunication services industry were much more privatized or our trade unions any weaker, the former wouldn't need licenses and the latter wouldn't exist. - Jmabel | Talk 20:08, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

 :-) That's exactly what I meant. Demanding American-like policies in Europe is considered rightist. --MauroVan 11:08, 12 September 2006 (UTC)