Lindsey on Liberaltarians

Brink Lindsey's article suggesting that liberals and libertarians may be able to join forces is provocative and interesting. I see a fundamental problem with it, though. Lindsey tries to identify areas of agreement on which libertarians and liberals can work together, and that's fine as far as it goes. The difficulty is that libertarians simply have more in common with conservatives. As a rough estimate, I would say that libertarians are with conservatives 70% of the time and with liberals 30% of the time. (That's just off the top of my head, of course -- I haven't tried to quantify it.) So, while it's certainly true that there is room to work together on the 30%, that 70% is still out there, and makes it difficult for libertarians and liberals to forge a deep and long-term alliance.