I recently had an interesting debate with someone about religion in public life.  I should no better than to have these debates, because... well... they hardly are productive.  He was lamenting the fact that its harder to have religious displays in government owned areas, and how it's not right, and we have to do something to counter this.  This is a hard argument for me to have actually, because I don't think that people should be afraid to be religious, or to express those religious beliefs.  But I do strongly believe that religion and government should be separate.

We went back and forth for a while, until finally I said... "Look... you regret that its harder to have religious displays in the public sphere.  The solution to the problem is to decrease the size of the public sphere, not to increase the amount of religion in an already increasing public sphere."  His response was, "Well of course, but..."

It doesn't even matter what came after the "but".  The "but" is what separates Conservatives from Libertarians.  Hell, the "but" is even what separates Conservatives from Republicans.  Republicans talk about that solution, but don't like it because that means that the size of government will decrease, and therefore so will their control.  Conservatives know this is the solution, but aren't sure it's possible to actually get there, and are hesitant about actually letting people not be religious in private.  Libertarians know this is the solution, and actually do something to make it happen.  It's really that simple.

Which brings me to this article from the Weekly Standard.  It's trying to convince people that McCain really isn't that bad, and that Libertarianism is poisonous:

Conservatives need to defend free markets not as an ideology but as an aspect of policy that serves the purpose of allowing individual excellence to flourish. A defense of free markets as a means to a good society, rather than as an end in itself, has served us well in the past. The struggle against communism, for example, was not only, or even primarily, about free markets. It was about human dignity and the worth of a political order that allows individuals to live decent and virtuous lives. Freedom of enterprise is a part--but only a part--of that decent political order. The problem with absolute faith in any ideology, including that of the free market, becomes evident with a glance at the flagship publication of the libertarians, Reason magazine. It is no coincidence that Reason publishes hagiographies of Milton Freedman as well as pleas for drug legalization and appreciations of cartoon pornography: economic libertarianism, elevated to the status of inviolable first principle, leads to moral libertarianism.

The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life. By teaching that 'greed is good,' strict free-market ideology holds out the promise that private vices can be public virtues. Recent congressional history has laid bare the fallacy of this argument. Republicans who proclaimed from the stump that greed was good turned out to believe it when they got into office, amassing earmarks and bridges to nowhere by means of their newfound powers. Why should we be surprised? To expect them to do otherwise would be to expect that men sometimes risk their self-interest for the sake of the public good, which our economist friends tell us is impossible. Conservatives who forget that the free market is properly a piece of policy rather than an ideological end-in-itself not only obscure the importance of individual virtue, they undermine it.

There are so many things wrong with these two paragraphs, that I don't even know where to begin.  The first assumption here is that Libertarianism is all about greed, and greed being virtuous.  What's ironic here is that the author goes on to disprove his own assumption.  If government power is the antithesis of Libertarianism, he demonstrates how large government leads to greed when he says "Republicans who proclaimed from the stump that greed was good turned out to believe it when they got into office, amassing earmarks and bridges to nowhere by means of their newfound powers."  The myth here is that Democrats did any better when they were in office.  They may proclaim the evils of large corporations and corporate greed, but it doesn't take public espousal of greed to make you greedy... it only takes power and the ability to wield it without reprisal.  And they've wielded that power to show their own greed just like Republicans did.

The fact of the matter is that the pendulum has simply swung too far towards large government.  The size of the Federal Government is growing at an increasing pace, and legislatures are moving to steal away our rights in more and more troubling ways.  In order to get the pendulum back anywhere near center, a gentle nudge simply isn't enough, which is what is advocated in that article.  John McCain is simply a gentle nudge towards the center.  We need a strong pull hard in the opposite direction, like Ron Paul.  The resulting tug won't pull us towards this poisonous result predicted above, but rather to somewhere in the middle where we hopefully can remain happy together for at least a short time.

Dogmatic libertarianism isn't poisonous to public life... it is only poisonous to large government... which is exactly what we want to kill.  You can find more deconstruction of this at Reason.