Neal Boortz Compared To NeoLibertarian.Com
Look up Neal Boortz on Wikipedia and you'll see him described like this: "Neal Boortz has stated that he is a Libertarian, however, some feel his views are more in line with neolibertarianism philosophy (sometimes referred to as a "republitarian")."
Libertarian, NeoLibertarian, Republitarian, Where Do Neal Boortz and NeoLibertarian.Com Fit In?
This can be a tough question but, luckily, it's not something you want to lose sleep over. Even in the "About Us" page of this site, we say "The term “NeoLibertarian” itself is used by multiple groups in multiple ways, but here the definition is simple: we advocate new ways of thinking, hence the “Neo,” and we see this new thinking as building on the principle of liberty, which stretches back into the enlightenment and is, in many ways, manifested and exemplified in the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
So how does Neal compare to our definition and our thinking?
What does Neal Boortz call himself? Is he a NeoLibertarian?
In Neal's book Somebody's Gotta Say It he refers to himself as a Libertarian, and endorses a lot of Libertarian ideas, but does not align with mainstream Libertarianism on a number of topics, arguably including smoking and certainly including immigration.
This is similar in kind to NeoLibertarian.Com: a lot of our thinking derives from Libertarian thinking but we add in other ideas and ways of thinking to come up with a philosophy that is distinct from mainstream Libertarian thinking. What Neal takes from Libertarianism, and where he disagrees with it, has some big similarities to NeoLibertarian.Com's thinking but has some major differences too.
To sum up, the NeoLibertarian label is a loose fit for both Neal Boortz and NeoLibertarian.Com, but if you try to pin down an exact definition of NeoLibertarianism and then compare it to Boortz and NeoLibertarian.Com, I expect you'll find significant differences between all three so it seems reasonable for Neal to side step the whole mess, call himself a Libertarian, and then just point out when he agrees with the mainstream of Libertarian thought.
NewSpeak: There's some overlap between Boortz and NeoLibertarian.Com
Neal doesn't use the term "NewSpeak" but he certainly grasps the concept and talks about it.
The big example in Somebody's Gotta Say It is his discussion of the term "Less Fortunate" as used to describe the poor. Neal correctly points out that this is used to make it seem that:
- The poor have no role in their being poor, since they are just unlucky and conversely that
- The rich have done nothing to earn their money, they just got lucky
Politically this is dynamite: it sets up the poor as deserving of help out of fairness and sets the stage for unlimited taxation of the rich, since they don't 'deserve' their money anyway. You can extend the same thinking to 'underprivileged." Again, since privilege is granted from some external circumstance, the underprivileged are absolved of any responsibility for their fate and conversely the 'privileged' have done nothing to deserve their status (again since privilege is granted, not earned).
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