[tvtimeout]

You'll count on one hand future Independent converts. Consider this, almost all of the practical issues/goals of your platform could conceivably be reallized within the conservative Teaparty movement of our time. The social planks of the Libertarian platform are "off the wall". John Lennon's song "Imagine" really does roll up the Libertarian view in a nice little navel lint ball. No right or wrong, nothing to live and die for and no religion too, etc.

The founding fathers gave us a constitutional government framed with moral principal. Honoring the Almighty put us in a position to be blessed by Him over the years in peacetime and war. Supporting open drug use and a host of other rediculous, destructive and deviant acts isn't going to endear most folks around the midwest. Sidestepping personal responsibility and supposing a nation could live in a sublimely sterile, amoral, social landscape are the musings of fiction. Best example of the society (you all say world) evisioned by the Libertarian I can think of are the Eloi in HG Wells' "Time Machine". Sublimely indiffernt to everything, and everybody doing whatever they want until those old nasty Morlocks came to eat them. Man is fallen, sin will always cause war and strife, mendacity will always be his defining characteristic. There will always be a price to pay for choosing to ignore our Creator, and in case you haven't noticed the payments are getting too big to manage.

I do agree with some of the teaparty, but they have to be stronger on the military issues, but over the idea of fiscially conservative, I would tend to agree with you.