Liberal bloger Matthew Yglesias offers some reasons why liberals should not align themselves with libertarians. Yglesias’ argument boils down to two main points: 1. Libertarians do not represent a sizable electoral force 2. The difference between liberals and libertarians on the use of the state to promote “positive” liberty is to great a divide to bridge:

“For one thing, a lot of the views liberals tend to think of us libertarian-ish liberal positions aren’t actually especially libertarian at the end of the day. For example, liberals, like libertarians, don’t think the coercive authority of the state should be deployed to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Unlike libertarians, however, liberals generally think the coercive authority of the state should be deployed to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. We think that landlords shouldn’t be allowed to refuse to rent houses to gay men, that bartenders shouldn’t be allowed to refuse to serve them, that employers shouldn’t be allowed to fire them, etc. Liberals believe in a certain notion of human liberation from entrenched dogma, prejudice, and tradition, but this isn’t the same as hostility to state action, even in the sex-and-gender sphere. . .

Our best shot at it, however, isn’t to become “more libertarian” but to simply run with the somewhat tired positive freedom agenda. There’s a long tradition, dating all the way back to John Stuart Mill’s personal trajectory, of seeing modern — i.e., egalitarian — liberalism as the appropriate successor-ideology to what was valuable in classical liberalism’s ideology of negative liberty. The Morality of Freedom, on this view, requires people to not merely by free of formal constraint but to have the actual capacity to practice autonomy and self-creation which, under contemporary circumstances, requires some level of state provision of public goods and social insurance.

The pioneering German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, to whom “liberal” meant “libertarian,” wrote “with respect to liberalism as. a great historical movement, socialism is its legitimate heir, not only in chronological sequence, but also in its spiritual qualities, as is shown moreover in every question of principle in which social democracy has had to take up an attitude” and that “The aim of all socialist measures, even of those which appear outwardly as coercive measures, is the development and the securing of a free personality.”

I agree with Yglesias that the fundamental philosophical differences between today’s liberals and libertarians is to great to make any alliance feasible. Those libertarians who support a left liberal-libertarian alliance centered on opposition to war should remember that the liberals’ support for the use of state power to promote “positive liberty” extends to the international arena. Thus, liberals are the major proponents of wasting American blood and treasure to advance human rights and democracy around the world. For example, it is the left that is leading the call for intervention in Darfur