To balance the federal budget we must first not make permanent the tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003. Second, we must end the practice of unbridled earmarks in the federal budget. Third, Congress must make the federal budget process more transparent and open to public scrutiny. Finally, we must restore the pay-as-you-go or PAY/GO rules that worked so effectively during the 1990s to replace budget deficits with budget surpluses.

Is against gay marriage, supports looking into alternative voting methods (he says IRV, but I’m sure we can get Clay on him), says of Kyoto:

I support the entry of the U.S. into the Kyoto process to secure an agreement to limit global warning without imposing burdens which place the U.S at a competitive disadvantaged to nations subject to less stringent requirements.

Supports an outright ban on all “torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of prisoners in U.S. custody”, provide a legal reassertion of the Geneva conventions, and end extraordinary rendition.

You can find his votes on everything here.

Brad, to be a Libertarian of any kind, one must support individual freedom in the social AND economic spheres.

And to be a Democrat of any kind, one must nominally support individual freedom in the social sphere and to some degree be a statist in the economic sphere.

To be a Libertarian Democrat, then, one must exist in that pretty huge space between the two. In any case, I don’t use the phrase to distinguish between Libertarians and Libertarian Democrats, I use it to distinguish between Libertarian Democrats and other Democrats.

Actually, more than that, I’ve argued for awhile that there are two directions that the Democratic party can go. More towards Western-styled tough Libertarian Democrats (here I’d put guys like Jon Tester, Russ Feingold, Brian Schweitzer, Jim Webb), or pugnacious grassroots “progressive” Democrats (of the Howard Dean, Paul Hackett, Ned Lamont, Al Gore 2.0 stripe).

To me, Tom Allen decidedly falls towards the former. But he is still, before anything, a Democrat. There’s no Libertarian orthodoxy that he has to adhere to, and he wouldn’t get his foot in the door at a Libertarians Anonymous meeting. But, as a Democrat, he represents a far more civil liberty minded, fiscally responsible, open trade and diplomacy (albeit with lots of health care and environmental crap tacked on), measured foreign policy, even more socially liberal than the party norm, area of the Democratic party.

He certainly has a lot of issues on which he is NOT in any way Libertarian (you’ve laundry listed most of them), but so does everybody who is not…well, a Libertarian.

One item you pick out doesn’t make sense to highlight, to my mind. If you wish to run for the Federal government, you have to represent your district and I don’t think that unilateral declarations to keep your district’s nose completely out of the federal trough are the solution to the problem of Federal largesse (something I, myself, favour). The absence of a platform to try to get a multilateral resolution (through legislation) is a bigger problem, libertarian-wise, than is a commitment to attempting to safeguard current federal largesse for his own district.

That all said, I don’t think that he’s much of a Libertarian Democrat, either.

I get all those stances from a three-minute perusal of his site.

Brad, to be a Libertarian of any kind, one must support individual freedom in the social AND economic spheres. This guy, like Kos, is a dedicated statist on economic matters. To use the term “libertarian democrats” to describe these people is an absolute hijacking of the term. They are traditional 1970s liberals. There may be nothing wrong with that, but let’s call them what they are.