Danielle Smith's win - where will she go?

Hi:

It may seem like I'm nit picking the words, but then if politicians were to stay with the words there would be far less problems. It was published - on the page opposite an editorial claiming that the rise of the libertarian idea was a victory for conservatism. You can lead a horse to water: but you cannot make them drink.

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I'm disappointed the National Post, with several libertarians on staff, got the well deserved congratulations to Danielle Smith so wrong in the analysis portion. A "combination of fiscal conservatism and libertarian social policies" is redundant and confusing. The libertarian idea is a fully integrated concept of limited government. The opening comment implying she is to the "right" of the current government is similarly confusing, there being no relationship between on the right and small governments. There are a lot of people in Alberta that are real upset at the results of conservative fiscal policies and that rejection is the basis of this new party. I really hope and believe that it is the libertarian idea she plans to move towards.

The libertarian idea requires rigid adherence to only providing government programs that benefit all people equally. This is very different than the practice of the "small c conservatism roots" which the editorial yearns nostalgically for. Fiscal conservatism is a system where smaller government is a nice to have concept with no firm rules to apply. A system that allows funding any program that seems like a good idea to get elected as has been the problem with the "small c" conservative governments of Alberta and now federally. It will take time, but hopefully she will not repeat the mistakes of previous governments that went the "small c" route, since once smaller government is only a nice to have you will always get bigger government.

George Jonas Leaves me Scratching my Head

George Jonas made a brave attempt to define political terms yesterday. While he gets the base terms right, now the big sigh, he ends up confusing his own partisanship with the base philosophies correct definitions. This of course is constant in the press, so I put in my $0.02 to try to correct it. The result was edited to a fair degree, but I was surprised how much the post left in of my comments on Harper's position on the political spectrum.

Here is the original text as well as 'as published' this morning.

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I like what George Jonas sets out to do in "I'm a liberal. Ignatieff is not". He correctly points out Iggy is no liberal, but then sadly makes the baffling pronouncement that Harper is more liberal than Iggy. Given the term liberal was classically defined by "the government that governs least governs best" and Harper has done more to increase the role of the state than any prime minister in the last 40+ years this would have to imply Ignatieff is an extremist.

In fact Iggy is still a bit of an unknown in what his actions will be, but given he has shown some recent signs of respect for what Jean Chrétien did economically and has shown none of Harper's enthusiasm for social engineering (C-15 being the most recent) he is almost certainly more liberal than Harper.

Harper is a conservative and even more to the point he is also a statist. He has proven both in consistent actions over 4 years in power. I often read George and I know he is not a statist, so when he wrote he would vote for Harper he wrote that as a Conservative. No liberal would ever vote for Harper, he is not even the lesser of the evils to a liberal.

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