any appeals to the likes of Yoko Ono for salvation moves you into a SNL parody scenario; Nader has reached an utter dead end in terms of his critique; some of his criticisms may be valid, but he literally has no real answer vis a via populist management of the Coporate State, which is his ideal.

And just to point out, while LCT is a powerful critique of the corporate State, it doesn't inform you really what to replace such with. I was watching a recent NH Liberty forum discussion where a libertarian anarchist recounted how a female audience member started crying after one his recent public forums. She said, you have destroyed my worldview, but you have given me nothing to replace it with. He sighed, i can't...i'm not going to replace mythology with ideology. i can't tell you how a free society will be structured. If I could, then i would be a dictator...

I'm not exactly sure libertarianism should be sold as a sort of a "Matrix paradigm," that is, take the 'red pill" and all you are promised is the truth, and nothing more. I don't think it is equivalent to staring into the abyss...

1. This site is not a Rand fan club
2. Hayek over Rawls--definitely. You may have a mistaken impression of Hayek (I used to): he wasn't nearly as conservative (or Randish) as some people present him. Personally, I like to use Rawl's sense of Justice as a way of prioritizing reforms and deciding among equally "libertarian" alternatives.
3. LCT: Kaligula will have to answer this, but you may find some insight here.
4. As for partisan identification, we don't have a consensus on why we identify with Democrats. Personally, I view parties as a mechanism within the electoral system that we use to narrow the field down to two candidates. With that in mind, I have to choose one party over the other and I find that I'm much more likely to identify reasonable candidates among Democrats than Republicans. Also, my disagreements with Democrats tend to be relatively superficial compared to my disagreements with Republicans.

One way of looking at it is that we try to use libertarian means to accomplish Democratic ends.

No one who posts on this site ascribes to objectivism. Rather, the site expresses more or less a "left libertarian" viewpoint, and most who post here actually have Georgist views. So we're Georgists actually, not Objectivists.

With respect to LCT, this has been discussed many times before, but it originates from the radical laissez-faire French tradition, beginning with Jean-Baptiste Say's publication of "Treatise on Political Economy" and then later extended by the likes of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. Here's a good link that has a rather comprehensive introduction to this line of radical liberalism. Comte and Dunoyer's use of "class" as a social analytical tool is the precursor to all modern day class theories, which, in the end, all boil down to the role of the State vis a vis the "productive class" vs the "looting class." Marx, for example, borrowed heavily from Comte and Charles Dunoyer to formulate a class theory, pitting the Bourgeoisie vs the Proletariat. The Proletariat, that is, those who sell their labor, are the productive class. The Bourgeoisie, that is, those who own the means of production, are the exploiting class. From a labor theory of value standard(that is, "objective value"), capital is but "labor surplus value," and in a truly competitive scenario, this should tend toward zero. Therefore, capital itself is but the extraction of unproductive rents from laborers, and the State itself is the enforcement mechanism that the capitalist class uses to extract these rents. Marxism ultimately is anarchism, but the typical marxist position is that the Proletariat lacks the sufficient "class consciousness" to implement a bottom-up revolt," and thusly you must have a top down transitional period, the co-called 'dictatorship of the proletariat."

Rand, on the other hand, had a class theory largely defined more or less in terms of those who lack objectivist ethics will invariably turn to the State to extract unproductive rents. This, in turn, leads to a type of romantic promethean individualism, but it also means, and it is played out in her two main popular novels, that "objectivist heroes" can't function in society; they end up intentionally sabotaging their own works/creations.

A libertarian social theory should reject those two expropriations of class theory, noting that both marx and rand didn't have particularly high opinion of "libertarianism" either. Left-Libertarian academic theorist Roderick Long published a paper back in the late 1990s, Towards a libertarian Theory of Class, that covers class theory from a "left libertarian" perspective. It's available, here.

Of course, liberalism, historically, has stood for both liberty and equality. Are these complimentary ideals or are they mutually exclusive? The French tradition actually is actually more or less responsible for introducing the radical elements of each side, both laissez-faire liberalism and modern socialism. "American libertarianism" originally was a movement borne from the synthesis of these two. I don't feel like regurgitating this point, but review my recent post Libertarianism and Socialism.

As has been pointed out many times on this site, the original American libertarian movement died out with WW I. It was reborn a generation later, resurrected as part of a conservative critique of the New Deal State. The work of Friedrich Hayek was instrumental in this, but he nonetheless was no "conservative;" he considered himself a liberal. Hayek has proven to be one of the great scholars of the 20th century. In many ways he was ahead of his time, and his work has more than held up with the test of time. But what he is perhaps best known for, "The Road to Serfdom," he merely recast the same arguments made by American Libertarians(i.e., Benjamin Tucker), two generations earlier. Nonetheless, George Orwell, who perhaps best singularly captured the essence of authoritarianism in the 20th century, was highly influenced by "The Road to Serfdom" in composing "Animal Farm."

But Hayek's lasting contribution was the formulation of the Knowledge Problem, which he eventually won the Nobel Prize for, and which was the effective refutation of central planning in terms of the Socialist Calculation debate. The Knowledge Problem is the effective underlying of basis of "spontaneous order,' which is really the lasting contribution of Adam smith Scottish enlightenment tradition.

Contrastly, Rawl's contributions are merely academic, and have no empirical basis in actual reality. The State is not enforcement mechanism for "Rawlsian Justice." This was discussed in this previous post. The fact is, the State is not an enforcement mechanism for any conception of justice, including libertarian. If you want an academic treatment of this, refer to Gordon Tullock's classic Public Choice paper, "The Welfare Costs Of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft."

By that term you're referring to the types that have been influenced by right-wing appropriation of libertarian rhetoric. They think the problem with the State w/r/t economics is largely intervention for social welfare reasons & deviation from capitalism. To summarize left-libertarianism (and by extension the gist of argument shared on this site), we think the typical libertarian has it ass-backwards, the real problem being intervention for the benefit of concentrated wealth & adherence to capitalism (which is more accurately described as a political construct than the result of spontaneous market order).

For example, take unions: The typical libertarian thinks unions are pointless or somehow an usurpation of the market. I personally not only support unions but would prefer a re-radicalization of organized labor.

We even have a nickname for those "typical libertarians": vulgar libertarians.

the obsession libertarians have of describing every point of view, that falls under the general heading of libertarianism, with a different label. Geo-libertarians. Neo-libertarians. Vulgar libertarians. Rand libertarians. Hayek libertarians. Rothbard libertarians. To a naive outsider, like myself, it all seems somewhat self defeating to having any kind of cohesive libertarian movement.

I don't understand where you are getting the impression that I (or anyone else here) am an Objectivist. When Kaligula compared Nader's fiction to Rand's, I actually interpreted that as a slight against Nader. I believe that he was comparing the way that they both use fiction as blatant ideological propaganda. That's something I hate about Rand's writing.

 Hayek was no Randroid. Based on what little of his writing that I've read, I've seen him explicitly state that he had no serious problem with a liberal welfare state (including income security and pollution regulations)--his objection was to the ideal of monopoly socialism, which was quite influential when he wrote in the 1920's and 30's. I don't recall ever hearing of him promoting a social/ethical theory that denied that people should help others.

Just to clarify something personally, while I'm no Objectivist, it was Rand's fictional work that originally spurred my interest in libertarianism. Obviously, i have a bit higher opinion of her fictional work than perhaps others here do, but then, again, I was like 15 when i read it. My earlier post on Atlas Shrugged. And, I believe, noted left libertarians Roderick Long and Chris Sciabarra sit on the board of The Journal of Ayn rand studies.

The thing is, I think this goes back to my earlier post, Liberty and Exit that discusses the Praxeology vs Non-rationalist Emergent Order dual approaches to libertarianism. While Long is no Objectivist, he nevertheless does take a Praxeology view; so I can see why he would perhaps find more value in the work of rand than i do(ascribing to the "emergent order" approach).

One of the interesting things about Atlas Shrugged is that Galt's Gultch was run as a type of Georgist government; all "community services" were funded through ground rents. The other thing, and i pointed this out in an earlier comment, but as it relates to an absolute Praxeological view, is that rand's objectivist heroes couldn't morally function in a society that did not conform to their objectivist ideal; they would end up sabotaging their own work/creations.

in that you think people who work for the state (like myself, an it guy for a school) are looters.

I don't know where you got that impression. The link I provided listed "capitalists" as the bad guys...being an IT guy does not make you a capitalist. Even most capitalists are not bad guys since they are just playing within the rules that other people have set up. Most government workers would fall into that same category.

Unless you call up a Congressmen everytime you need more work or want your stock prices to rise, you are not a looter in our book.

i apply LCT as an institutional analysis, and try not to get down to personal finger pointing. Of course, that type of "hayekian" approach is an anathema to Rand.

Some selected quotes from Rand on Hayek:

"an example of our most pernicious enemy . . . real poison"

"God damn fool, an abysmal fool, an ass, and a total, complete, vicious bastard"