One of the most robust findings in political psychology is that liberals tend to explain both poverty and wealth in terms of luck and the influence of social forces while conservatives tend to explain poverty and wealth in terms of effort and individual initiative. Here's a useful summary of the sort of thing I have in mind:

Harmon (2010a) built on these works by testing their conclusions against six U.S. public opinion polls. Secondary analysis found consistent and strong relationships. Conservatives and Republicans overwhelmingly attributed poverty to the personal failings of the poor themselves (lazy, drunk, etc.) while Democrats and liberals consistently offered social explanations like poor schools and lousy jobs for poverty. Later he looked at the inverse question, the reasons respondents give for others obtaining wealth (2010b). Generally he found that Democrats and liberals attributed wealth to connections or being born into a wealthy family, while Republicans and conservatives declared wealth comes from hard work.

What about libertarians? According to Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, their patterns of moral sentiment and judgment make libertarians look a lot like liberals who care a great deal about liberty and not very much for suffering. Like liberals, libertarians don't put very much emphasis on what Haidt calls the "binding foundations" of the moral sense--obedience to authority, in-group loyalty, and a sensitivity to moralized purity and disgust--which play a large role in conservative moral sentiment and judgment. This makes libertarians look like a lot like especially freedom-loving liberals with slightly hard hearts.

But, having lived most of my adult life among them, experience tells me that when it comes to the explanation of poverty and wealth libertarians are close cousins to conservatives. It's my view that this shared sense of robust agency and individual responsibility for success and failure is the psychological linchpin of "fusionism"--that this commonality in disposition has made the long-time alliance between conservatives and libertarians possible, despite the fact that libertarians are almost identical to liberals in their unconcern for the conservative binding foundations. That's why controversial "social issues" like abortion and gay marriage are generally pushed to the side when libertarians and conservatives get together. As long as they stick to complaining about handouts for poor people sitting on their asses and praising rich people working hard to make civilization possible, libertarians and conservatives get along fine.

The critical response of Reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch to Salon's "New Declaration of Independence" is nicely illustrative of the libertarian's conservative-like attachment to individual responsibility. And this, I think, helps explain why self-described libertarians are more likely to identify with the Tea Party movement, which was launched by Rick Santelli's indignant rant about subsidizing "losers'" mortgages, than with the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is founded on something like the assumption that individuals are caught in a web of socio-economic forces upon which only the collective action of organized class interests have any influence.

So, Salon's staff has cobbled together a statement they're calling "The New Declaration of Independence," but which is, to no one's surprise, a sort of progressive wish-list. I strongly agree with about half of it, and strongly disagree with about half. It says stuff like this, by way of arguing for broad debt relief:

It is not in the national interest to force the impoverished to become wage slaves to pay off insurmountable debts owned to payday lenders and hugely profitable bankers.

Which really hacks off Welch:

One of the best perks about being a grown-up is that you get to make your own choices, and to own the results, good and ill.

Which is why phrases like "wage slaves," "inescapable debt," and "force" "force" "force" leave me feeling like a brother from another planet. Adult human beings have agency, the ability (even responsibility!) to run their own cost/benefit analyses and choose accordingly. You could go to a state school (or community college) instead of an over-inflated prestige mill. You could pay for a 10-year-old car in cash, instead of a new one on installments. You could try to make it in Minneapolis before living the dream in Williamsburg. You could stare into the face of a no-money-down, adjustable rate 30-year mortgage at the tail end of a housing-price run-up and conclude "Maybe that one's not for me." You could even choose to turn down a bad if high-paying job when you're living below the poverty line. If we indeed live in a "candid world," let us state bluntly that offloading 100% of the blame for your own mountain of debt on a group of Greedy McBanksters who "forced" you to "play by the rules" is more than a little pathetic.

Welch's kicker: