Tag: Libertarians

Today’s Libertarians Are Super Annoying

Libertarians are victims of their own success, and the rest of us are victims of the few remaining libertarians, who – like CrossFitters, militant atheists, and vegans – can’t seem to shut up about their obsession. The fact is that conservatism has absorbed most of libertarianism, at least the useful parts of it. I don’t have much use for a conservative who has no libertarian tendencies, but I’ve got no use at all for the self-identified libertarians we see all too often today. They are a bunch of rigid scolds with zero conception of how the world works but no hesitation to explain it to the rest of us.

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The libertarian influence on modern American conservatism was a healthy and overdue development, and has opened conservatism to consideration by a much wider audience. Let’s look at old-school conservatism. The stereotype would be John Lithgow as the stick-up-his-Schumer minister in “Footloose,” obsessed with making sure that Kevin Bacon can’t bust a move.

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Liberty Winning?

Guest Post by John Stossel

Do I live in an alternate universe?

The media tell me my side is winning.

Salon claims, “We all live in Kochland, the Koch brothers’ libertarian utopia.”

Tucker Carlson says, “Our leadership class remains resolutely libertarian.”

What? Who? Not President Biden.

Biden already spent $1.9 trillion on COVID-19 “recovery” mostly unrelated to COVID. Now, he wants trillions more for an “infrastructure” bill, even though most of the spending would not go to infrastructure. He’s eager to regulate more, too.

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Jim Bovard: The Feds Are Coming For Libertarians

Authored by Jim Bovard via The Libertarian Institute,

On the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, former CIA chief John Brennan announced on television that federal intelligence agencies “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” various suspect groups, specifically mentioning libertarians.

Libertarians are in the federal crosshairs. Six or seven years ago, there was a lot of prattle about how “the libertarian moment has arrived.” I always knew that was hokum. Since then, there has been a huge increase in hostility to libertarians in Washington DC and elsewhere around the country.

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Doug Casey on Whether Your Vote Can Prevent a Civil War?

Guest Post by Doug Casey via International Man

Democracy is vastly overrated.

It’s not like the consensus of a bunch of friends agreeing to see the same movie. Most often, it boils down to a kinder and gentler variety of mob rule, dressed in a coat and tie. The essence of positive values like personal liberty, wealth, opportunity, fraternity, and equality lies not in democracy, but in free minds and free markets where government becomes trivial. Democracy focuses people’s thoughts on politics, not production; on the collective, not on their own lives.

Although democracy is just one way to structure a state, the concept has reached cult status; unassailable as political dogma. It is, as economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, “a surrogate faith for intellectuals deprived of religion.” Most of the founders of America were more concerned with liberty than democracy. Tocqueville saw democracy and liberty as almost polar opposites.

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Doug Casey on Anarchy and Voluntaryism

Guest Post by Doug Casey via International Man

You’re likely aware that I’m a libertarian. But I’m actually more than a libertarian. I don’t believe in the right of the State to exist. The reason is that anything that has a monopoly of force is extremely dangerous. As Mao Tse-tung, lately one of the world’s leading experts on government, said: “The power of the state comes out of a barrel of a gun.”

There are two possible ways for people to relate to each other, either voluntarily or coercively. And the State is pure institutionalized coercion. It’s not just unnecessary, but antithetical, for a civilized society. And that’s increasingly true as technology advances. It was never moral, but at least it was possible, in oxcart days, for bureaucrats to order things around. Today it’s ridiculous.

Everything that needs doing can and will be done by the market, by entrepreneurs who fill the needs of other people for a profit. The State is a dead hand that imposes itself on society. That belief makes me, of course, an anarchist.

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‘I love guns, liberty and independence — and despise high taxes. Where should I retire?’

Via Marketwatch

I’m seeking to retire to a libertarian-minded city with no (or very, very low) income tax, low property tax, low sales tax, low home and car insurance rates, no vehicle inspection and emissions tests, constitutional carry, and where I can “live and let live.” Any places you can suggest?

Thanks!

Hi U,

To answer your question, I went right to the source: the Libertarian Party itself, where I had a lively chat with Dan Fishman, the party’s executive director, who had a lot of great advice for you. He said that while the Libertarian Party doesn’t maintain a list of the most libertarian cities and towns in America, there are certain states known to be more libertarian-friendly in many ways: New Hampshire — with its motto “Life Free or Die” — being the most obvious one, but also some spots in the mountainous western U.S., as well as parts of Texas.

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On Fixing It

Guest Post by Eric Peters

I agree with Mencken, fundamentally.

Voting (as he put it) is basically an advance auction of stolen goods. Ideally – and I concede it may be impracticable given human nature – there would be no voting at all because there would be no government. Just rules stablished on the basis of individual self-ownership and the property rights which flow from that concept.

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Are Libertarians the New Neocons?

Guest Post by Daniel McAdams

There is a disturbing trend in some libertarian circles and among some libertarian organizations to be increasingly enamored with foreign interventionism and US government backed regime change overseas. For those focused on foreign affairs, this is particularly troubling as it is abandoning a key tenet of libertarianism: non-interventionism.

Not “your government 6,000 miles away must be changed… but I don’t support the US military doing it.” That is not non-interventionism.

Non-interventionism is accepting that others may wish to live in a way you may not approve of.

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Conservatives Against Liberty

Guest Post by Ron Paul

Recently several prominent social and populist conservatives have attacked libertarianism. These conservatives, some of whom are allies in the fight against our hyper-interventionist foreign policy, blame libertarianism for a variety of social and economic ills. The conservative attack on libertarianism — like the attack on the freedom philosophy launched by leftists — is rooted in factual, economic, and philosophical errors.

Libertarianism’s right-wing critics claim libertarianism is the dominant ideology of the Republican establishment. This is an odd claim since the Republican leadership embraces anti-libertarian policies like endless wars, restrictions on civil liberties, government interference in our personal lives, and massive spending increases on welfare as well as warfare.

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The First Libertarian?

Guest Post by Jeff Thomas

Most libertarians count Murray Rothbard as one of their mentors. They will know that Rothbard’s primary mentors were Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. But Rothbard dug deeper in his search for libertarian thinking. Here is a little-seen paper that he wrote in 1967:

The first libertarian intellectual was Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism. Little is known about his life, but apparently he was a personal acquaintance of Confucius in the late sixth century BC and like the latter came from the state of Sung and was descended from the lower aristocracy of the Yin dynasty.

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The Egalitarian Pill

Guest Post by The Zman

There are many reasons to hate libertarians, all of them valid, but the most compelling reason is their totally misplaced self-assurance. Libertarians walk around sure they have gained access to the book of secret knowledge, while everyone else is staggering around in primitive darkness. In reality, modern libertarianism is mostly just window dressing for the oogily-boogily that comes from the Left. Libertarians start from the same misplaced beliefs about the human condition, but seek a different end.

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Mo’ Money, Mo’ Invasion

Guest Post by Tom Luongo

Immigration is a tricky subject for a lot of libertarians. If there is one issue that has caused more fights in libertarian circles it is the question of restricting a person’s right to movement.

But in a world of private property where does that right end? We know where it is in a world of public property. It doesn’t. I’m very Hoppean in my views on private property and the private production of defense. So, I have zero problem going toe to toe with the left-libertarians who refuse to divorce themselves from their principled hobby horses and push for open borders uber alles.

It’s stupid, counter-productive and, frankly, one of the main reasons why libertarians are thoroughly corrupted as a political force in the U.S., having been neutered by the Koch brothers fighting about irrelevancies.

Immigration issues are on the ballot today. The Soros-funded ~~invasion~~ caravan is a thinly-veiled political stunt which is being used to fuel the unquenchable greed of globalists using Marxist arguments of envy to sow sympathy for those marching to take back what was supposedly stolen by evil white American Imperialists.

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Wildly Popular Libertarian Candidate Surges Into Single Digits

Via The Babylon Bee

U.S.—In the midst of dozens of key races to watch in the current election, one libertarian candidate is making waves, breaking into the single digits for the first time in the race in a surprise upset.

The candidate is surpassing all expectations, with early exit polls giving him just over 1% of the vote. Many projections had him getting not one percent of the vote, but closer to just one single vote.

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Libertarians and Tesla?

Guest Post by Eric Peters

I received a letter (below) from a reader who took issue with my taking issue with electric cars generally and Tesla specifically. This reader claimed to be a Libertarian – which staggered me like a punch from Ali in his prime.

I figured it was worth an at-length reply since there are actually a lot of people out there who think Elon Musk is a Libertarian.

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Are Republicans Libertarians?

Guest Post by Laurence M. Vance

Our two-party system makes it almost impossible for libertarians to get elected to office, especially on the national level. In order for libertarians to get elected to Congress, their best bet is to run as a Republican. Ron Paul is a perfect example of this. But libertarians should have no illusions about the Republican Party. And they shouldn’t make the Republican Party out to be something it is not.

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How To Sell Soap

Guest Post by The Zman

Exactly no one is excited about cleaning their clothes or scrubbing a stain from the carpet. If you own a pet, you never look forward to their accidents on the rug or their decision to put their dirty paws on your best trousers. Cleaning up messes, figuring out how to get that stain off the couch cushion, getting the carpets cleaned, these are chores we all do, but we don’t look forward to them. It’s just a part of life, like cutting the grass or cleaning the gutters. No one goes on lawn care vacations or stain removal holidays.

If you are in the business of selling soap, you have to get over the fact that the mere mention of your product makes people think about a boring task or the dog leaving a pyramid on the rug. No matter how good your product is at doing its thing, if it brings negative images to the mind of the customer, they will associate you and your product with unpleasant thoughts. It why portable toilet vendors pick cheeky names for their companies. They want you laughing when you think of them.

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