Why I'm a Liberal and Not a Libertarian

In the 2003 gubernatorial recall election, I was a bit surprised at the libertarians (like Ned Roscoe)....they seemed unusually ready to throw in the towel: for example, their willingness not to participate in elections (kind-of rational in one sense, since any one vote has almost no impact, but totally stupid in another sense, since it's the combined impact of many votes that make the difference). Libertarians seemed almost too rational for their own good - like the Jacobins of Revolutionary France (but without the guillotine, of course).

Myself, I'm an unreconstructed liberal. Give me the dead hand of the regulatory state any day! (At least, when it can do any good). Growing up in NM, which, economically speaking, is basically a colony of Texas, and which receives $2 in federal funds for every $1 exacted in federal taxes (2-to-1 being the highest proportion of any state, according to the Wall Street Journal), being a liberal was, for me, the only reasonable ideology to hold. Conservative ideology, with its emphasis on standing on your own two feet, applied to the fragile communities on the bleak highland mesas of the SW, means, more often than not, annihilation.