After reading some stuff about Gary Johnson I started thinking the line everyone was using that Libertarians are Fiscally Liberal and Socially Conservative makes no sense. Libertarians generally use the Nolan Chart/political compass approach to defining political ideologies:
Conservatives: small government of fiscal matter, big government on social ones
Liberals: Big government on fiscal matters, small government of social ones.
Libertarians: small government for both.
That's nonsense. Liberals DON'T want a small government on social issues. They want a big government that enforces anti-discrimination laws, punishes companies that allow sexual harassment, makes abortions readily available via socialized medicine, enacts affirmative action, maybe even criminalizes hate speech. Libertarians are against all that.
So I've been brain farting all week about what I see as a more accurate replacement for the Nolan Chart approach:
Liberal Stance: The status quo sucks, we need a bigger government to make it better.
Conservative Stance: The status quo is/was good, we need a medium sized government to protect/restore it.
Libertarian Stance: We shouldn't fear change but we shouldn't force it, so we need a small government that won't act either way.
That seems a more accurate description of Liberals, conservatives and libertarians too me then the nolan chart. Liberals want a government that intervenes in society to reduce poverty and reduce bigotry. Libertarians don't want the government to enforce bigoted laws, but they want to stop at removing such laws from the books and no more. This also gets into economics, political scientists have found that republican voters actually disagree with their leaders on economic matters, they strongly support keeping social security and medicare, tougher business regulations, and trade protectionism, big government stances all. But I'd counter that's not fiscally liberal, what they want is for the government to protect the social order via Welfare Chauvinism. They support cutting government programs out of a belief that liberals were undercutting the social order with welfare programs that were putting black people on equal footing with white people (and that's terrible) not because they don't want government involvement in the economy.