Memo To Senator Jim DeMint and The Heritage Foundation:
Conservatives and libertarians DO NOT share the same understanding of limited government.
Libertarians believe in limited government in order to be free to do anything they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody.
Conservatives believe in limited government as the larger, necessary and inevitable political expression of the moral limitations they place on themselves as individuals who respect the laws of Nature and of Nature's God, transgressions against which hurt others and especially the individual whether he recognizes it or not.
Limited government can only exist where there is self-limitation pre-existing. It cannot be voted into existence.
It begins with the personal moral experience of a conversion taught variously in human experience, but well-expressed by the ancient Greek maxim "Nothing too much". We know it more vaguely in our time, for example, as conservation and good stewardship of resources as opposed to relentless consumption and production, or as savings and thrift in economics as opposed to repeatedly rehypothicated credit and debt, or as abstinence outside of marriage and fidelity within it, or in law as a scale of punishment of infractions against these appropriate to their severity.
Libertarians can know these things only because conservatives have told them, otherwise they do not have it in them, deluded as they are that the possibilities in life are infinite. Libertarianism is thus an infantile idea from which one should grow up.
