The Judicial Watch debates were great. Hagelin was a little tooty fruity.
But most of the time Browne and Phillips's arguments were complementary. Phillips even agreed to ending the drug war and releasing all non violent drug offenders!
Of all of the candidates only Browne and Phillips pledged they would never accept matching funds or tax money. Browne refered to an inability to come to voters while having his hands in their pockets. Phillips said taking tax money would be receiving stolen money and therefore be theft. Hagelin seemed to call for abolitioning almost all campaign funds except "public funding". Both Browne and Phillips rebutted Hagelin's support of tax money with other arguments.
The anti government/pro freedom arguments were usually: government action was immoral, government action was unconstitutional, government action was impractical, or government action itself was the problem.
For most questions Browne would take one of the above approaches and Phillips would take one of the other approaches. Which one they would take seem to rotate depending on the question.
For most of the questions, a libertarian could go with either the arguments of Browne or Phillips.
The biggest divergence was that Browne thought we only needed 50 billion for the military and Phillips thought we needed a "two ocean navy" and 300 billion; and Phillips would order the federal government to protect the constitutional right to life of any fetus unless that fetus had been tried and convicted of a capital crime by a jury of the fetus's peers.
Phillips did agree with Browne that we should quit making ourselves a terrorist target by butting out of other people's business and quit being the cause of problems in other countries.
Both Browne and Phillips said "defense" should only be defense of this country, but Phillips thought the "world is more dangerous" than Browne recognizes.
bob hunt