I have long described my politics as libertarian socialist. This tends to piss off just about everyone, especially real socialists and real libertarians. But my theory boils down to a simple principle: The government is better than the private sector at some things, and it should be in charge of those things. Otherwise, it should stay the hell out of people's business.

This sort of hair-splitting means that I didn't like the health care reform law, but the pragmatist in me always prefers half-steps to no steps at all. So I decided to be happy that it passed. I would have far preferred nationalized health care ("nationalized" medicine sounds a bit more palatable than "socialized" medicine, I suppose), but I'll take what I can get.

Libertarians, like all dogmatic types, splinter in many directions. The main distinction is between civil rights libertarians and economic libertarians. And even within each group there are differences (the Second Amendment is particularly tricky). By and large, the ideas at the extreme of each group tends to really scare the hell out of average Americans.

Most folks, for example, believe that burning the flag should be against the law. Social libertarians don't. Economic libertarians believe that something as basic as a minimum wage is unconstitutional.

And then there's Rand Paul, who gave an incoherent defense of segregation as a libertarian principle.

Paul's point, as far as it goes, is that businesses should have the right to do business however they damned well please, including refusing to do business with people of a different race or sexual orientation or religion or whathaveyou.

Legal segregation--that is, segregation enforced by law--is antithetical to libertarian principles. It takes away freedoms from people. But many economic libertarians would probably approve of Paul's position on public segregation, a point of view that seems wacky in the extreme.

Paul said he probably would have voted against the Civil Rights Act back in 1964. He expressed some distaste (though not much, in my opinion) for segregated lunch counters and the like, but he felt that protecting businessmen would have been more important that enfranchising more than 10 percent of Americans.

This is where dogma has to be flexible. And, for that matter, a law that ensures the civil rights of citizens is a libertarian measure. A social libertarian one, to be sure, but libertarian nonetheless. And so the conflict between the libertarians who usually vote Democratic and the libertarians who usually vote Republican.

The Libertarian Party is an interesting mix of folks. They use terms like personal self-governor and economic self-governor to describe the main split in their ranks, but libertarians line up neatly at both edges of the political debate. My socialist libertarian principles put me on the left ledge. My pragmatism brings me a bit back toward the middle, but I'm no economic libertarian. If there's anything we've learned in the last ten years, it's that markets need some guidance. Unfettered greed does not police itself. Unfettered greed brings everyone else down into the morass. And, as we all know, that sucks.

I like libertarians. They're often the life of the party, mostly because they can go wacky, just like Paul the lesser. I'm always a sucker for a bit of verbal sparring fueled by good beer. But we live in the real world. And in the real world we need governments and we need governments to help people. Our societies are too big to fail. Or, at least, they ought to be.

Jon Worley votes as often as he can.