This from a huge libertarian?
Being a libertarian doesn't conflict with wanting to be forward looking, or with wanting to do ambitious projects. And a "small 'l' libertarian" might even be OK with the State managing the construction of something like the Interstate highway system. A "Big 'L' Libertarian" would oppose funding such a project through coercive, involuntary taxation, but wouldn't necessarily oppose the idea in itself. They would just argue that a means of funding should be found that doesn't involve coercion.
That said, I don't know Peter Thiel and I don't know how deeply his libertarian roots run, or how much of an ideologue he is. There are a lot of people who call themselves libertarians that I wouldn't necessarily call libertarians myself. <shrug />
These days, if you go by majority vote, it generally means "doctrinaire conservative who decided deficits were really important on January 20th, 2009".
http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp87.pdf
But I'm talking about the totality -- check out Fox News and the Tea Party if you want the beating heart of the conservative movement. These are the exact same people, not figuratively, literally, who defended the Bush admin for 8 straight years. And CATO? How many pieces did they put out as cover for the Bush admin during that same time period? They're basically part of the republican messaging system.
Here is the Cato archive, form your own opinion: http://www.cato.org/pubarchives/index.php?type=opeds#year=20...
For the one month I bothered to look at, most of it seemed pretty anti-bush (with the exception of one article advocating for looser immigration rules).
Anyways my original point was that if you add up all of the people calling themselves libertarian these days, you generally get the guy saying "keep the government out of medicare" who had no idea he was a libertarian until about 5 minutes after Obama was inaugurated. It's not about government, it's about Obama and all that he represents (liberals, anti-americanism, illegal immigrants, manchurian candidates, radical islam, etc etc etc crazy talk).
Sorry that your movement's been hijacked.
(notes that someone went down this thread blindly modding you up and me down -- this is what I'm talking about when I say sorry about your movement -- it's not about reasoned opinions on how government should work, it's about "us vs them" cultural warfare).
Which opinions? I doubt you comprehend the first thing about any of them. Let's see if you can even restate them correctly.
P.S. You can disagree with someone without mudslinging. I disagree with Paul on a number of things as well, but all his ideas have a large amount of thought and scholarship behind them (a hell of a lot more than anything the establishment parties come up with). Dismissing them out of hand with no backup is definitely below the standard HN tries to reach.
I'm not falling into that "restate them correctly" trap where you interpret some phrase differently than me so I'm an idiot. Gold standard is crazy without even needing an explanation.
Seriously, the goal here is to have mature discussions. If you aren't even willing to back up your assertions, just don't post.
The gold standard is a position of "I don't care what's been proven to work in the real world or what's possible to actually accomplish, I care about what I find emotionally satisfying".
EDIT: Regarding civil discussions, you might consider chilling out on the ad hom attacks yourself. You've called me uninformed multiple times while misinterpreting my comments to mean something that I don't see any possible way to construe from what I said. Bringing Chinese actions from the 1950s and 60s into a discussion of "modern china's" propensity for militarism above, as if anyone would consider maoist China the same thing as the current regime, and implying that I had no idea such events happened.
International food prices recently hit an all time high. Americans really need to wake up from their fantasies quick. Their incredible ignorance of how their leaders operate is costing the world a nearly unimaginable toll of suffering and death, and it's getting worse every day.
Most of the libertarians I know would argue that the government has no business being involved in creating innovation - regardless of how it is funded. They would argue that government can't innovate and the private sector is where the market can decide what innovations will succeed.
And yes, Peter Thiel is a huge libertarian. I find it comical that he would then list off an entire list of government projects as examples of driving innovation.