David Bergland

This was, overall, a pretty good view of mainstream libertarian party members' ideas about government, mostly excluding the significant minority of anarcho-capitalists, prior to the major shift away from principle and toward high scores on the third-party voting game. It is, overall, a very lucid treatment that could be quite persuasive to many people at that time. In particular, I think it could have changed a few minds amongst freedom-minded Republicans who weren't especially religiously motivated or believed God wanted everyone to be free, especially in the age of Ron Paul's candidacy for Republican presidential nomination.

Democrats of any kind might have a harder time with it. While the same rough balance of policy agreement probably applied to Democrats in crossover with these libertarian political ideas as to Republicans in the same crossover, I think the points of disagreement would be considered unacceptable in more cases for more freedom-oriented Democrats, except in cases where they were basically libertarians "infiltrating" the Democratic party because they thought Democrats were properly focused on certain liberty-oriented social goals. Those were likely to have left the Democratic party for more Ron Paul colored pastures, though, unless they got the wool pulled over their eyes about some of his policy ideas.

Since the end of the "Party Of Principle" era, though, the Libertarian Party has diverged quite a bit more from the picture painted by this book, making it a little outdated. Even worse now, the radicalization and polarization of US culture has gotten so extreme that people probably wouldn't even be receptive to this book. It seems like everyone's too busy voting against someone, or against an image rather than a person, to ever consider a "third path" political policy work like this.

It is not, in my opinion, a perfect set of policies, or the most potentially influential work for changing minds, but for what it is this is very well-written, clear, and informative. The best parts are extremely good, which goes a long way toward making up for the worst parts, which aren't all that bad.… (plus d'informations)