Top Obot's Eyes Beginning to Open

A week ago Andrew Sullivan apparently clicked the wrong link or something and wound up reading some Tom Woods. Like a moth to the flame of common sense, Sullivan began to realize that our country's monetary policy is the underlying issue of the financial mess.

Now today, Sullivan's eyes seem to be fluttering open and adjusting to just how bright the flame of common sense burns.

But like many, I remain nervous about heavy government intervention in the economy in anything but a short-term sense. The Republicans have zero, yes zero, credibility on fiscal matters and their inability to formulate a pragmatic critique of the stimulus, rather than have an ideological hissy-fit, is a symptom of their profound intellectual decline. But there is something lingering around this immediate crisis, and Obama's straddling of the leftward-moving center, that worries me for the long-term.

I fear the depression that we are in will lead to more and more decisions that, while pragmatic and defensible by themselves, can add up to a huge shift in government's role in ways that will not help and we may not recognize till it is too late; I worry that throwing a lifeline to some in a tail-spin might unwittingly lead to a deeper sense that deadbeats and gamblers will always be rewarded by government while hrifty and ethical people get the shaft; I worry that Keynesianism is not a panacea and may prevent a necessary long-term reckoning with debt and deadwood; I worry that the consequence-free, debt-fueled capitalism we let grow this past decade requires a nastier payback than we think we deserve.

Of course, even as he makes one of the most poignant observations I think I've ever seen him make, as usual with Sullivan, he misses the point. Well, he doesn't miss it, but he steamrolls his way right over it.

If you can look at the situation this country is in right now, at this very moment in time, and recognize that there could be ways in which the government will act with its newly usurped financial power over its people, then you have to understand that the government is, 100% of the time, going to act in those ways.

Sullivan no doubt fancies himself a pragmatic person by saying he worries about it, but overall figures it will be ok. The problem with this line of thinking, however, is that this is the line of thinking that has put big-government, authoritarian-minded progressives in charge of a people that never wanted it that way.

It is time that Sullivan, and other left-of-center liberals like him, begin to let their eyes focus in the light of common sense in which those of us who consider ourselves Libertarian bask every day.

If Sullivan and others that consider themselves to be on the left for the major reason of their social politics are worried that their Democrat Socialist President and Congress are juuuust a little bit too far left, let us remind them that nothing ever required them to be on the Left in the first place.

We believe in common sense. Small government that does not intrude in peoples lives in any manner, including in social values and most importantly, in the way that our taxes are used, meaning not to take our money to give it to people who don't and won't work for it, are what we stand for.

Libertarianism has the common sense you crave.

We are here for you, Andrew.