Here in the rural South, I’m often asked “Why are you a libertarian?” or “What makes you a libertarian?” when I mention to others what political persuasion I hold.  Living in a State that went McCain by seven points, I am often surrounded by Republicans who seem to think that libertarians are just another face in the “Big Tent”, like we’re their slightly dopey little brother, and that given time, we’ll eventually mature into full blown GOPer’s.  But I think they are mistaken when they make that assumption.  In my opinion, there are very serious discrepancies between a true libertarian and a Republican Party statist!

Over the course of the next few posts, I’m going to try to hit the highlights and explain exactly what kind of libertarian I am.

Note as you read: If there is one thing I’ve learned through many different discussions with many different individuals, it is that there are as many different libertarian philosophies as there are libertarians espousing them.  As such, I would like to spell out explicitly that my beliefs are not part of any official platform for the Libertarian Party, they’re just my beliefs, which is why I spell ‘libertarian’ with a small ‘l’ when referring to myself.  But I digress.  Let us mount up, adopt an appropriate stance, one full of martial zeal, and get back to grips with the topic!

As with any discussion on a topic where there is so much variability, I feel the need to define the terms I use when describing my personal philosophy.  Literally, as a libertarian I am for liberty, and I hold a firm belief in the supremacy of the underlying system in which people are allowed to pursue their own rational self interest, but are still bounded by a governing authority. I do not support anarchy , and I am repulsed by the idea of giving uncontrolled power to one human being over another.

Often, liberty is described in some really vague rhetoric.  A simple Google search for the meaning of liberty will provide you with the standard, short, flowery definitions like “autonomy” or “freedom of choice”, both of which hint at a working definition of liberty, but which so fail to grasp the truth of the idea that they are almost a form of obloquy.  Personally, I prefer to think of liberty as ‘The ability to pursue life and happiness as you wish, provided that your actions do not prevent another from accomplishing the same.’  Liberty comes with a responsibility and a duty, not just freedom.

As Ayn Rand (via John Galt) so marvelously put it in Atlas Shrugged: “There are no conflicts of interest among rational men.”  We should each be able to pursue our own rational self interest with the expectations that others will generally do the same.  In a perfect world, a rational mind will always find some manner of achieving a greater end for itself through cooperation and reason with another like mind than it would working on its own, or working counter to the actions of another rational mind.  Granted, this is not always the situation, with real life often having the effect of making this paragraph just so much balderdash, but you must have a main objective, a goal, if you’re to ever get anywhere, so this is as good a place as any from which to start.

Would I be more clear if I attempted to put it in a real world setting?  E.g. “I don’t care if a business partner lives an alternative lifestyle as long as we’re both making money.” or “Over time, reasonable individuals discovered that if we broke big chores up into lots of small chores, we could do something, build something, faster and more efficiently than if we didn’t divide_the_labor.”

Of course, the typical Marxist will pop off at this point with something along the lines of “Well, why don’t you just go for broke and promote anarchy, or the “withering away of the state”?  If government is the restriction of liberty, why not advocate for no government and total liberty?  <usually sneering at this point, like they’ve just skewered you with their verbal riposte> Or don’t you trust the in the power of the reasoning individuals to hold together society’s order?”  I find it’s typically easiest to pat these people on the head, give them an understanding look, and immediately try to flag down the nearest nurse you see in the hallway outside so they can get their scheduled dose of medication.

Much of this confusion on the part of the Marxists when dealing with this issue (aside from the fact that they are actually capable of believing in Marxism) is that they, like others in the general population, hold the wrong idea of what the political spectrum really is, if they hold one at all!  Usually, as I discuss this with people, when they talk about the political spectrum they refer to some vague “left vs. right” political turf war amongst statists like Limbaugh and Obama, not the reality of what we are faced with. 

I understand this.  If you listen to the politicians, the Mainstream Media, and pop culture, it can be very difficult to gather a solid view of what the terms “left” and “right” really mean.  A “conservative” President who nationalizes the banks, and a “liberal” Democrat getting ready to start another troop surge?  What is going on???

The political spectrum can, and in my opinion should be, viewed as a sliding scale of government.  On the far right, you have 0% government, on the far left, you have 100% government.  Using this model of a political spectrum, you understand why small government conservatives are called “right wingers”, and why it is erroneous to lump fascists in as a conservative phenomena (Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal_Fascism ).  It also explains why so many other types of dictators, tyrants, and AM talk radio hosts should be typically considered “men of the left”; they believe in 100% government, with themselves at the helm!

The other thing many people fail to realize is that the political spectrum is not linear, but circular.  If you lean too far to either side of the statist end of the spectrum, you begin to resemble the other side’s extreme.  McVeigh was a far right wing statist, and his actions were exactly the same as those of a far left leaning statist like Bill Ayers.

What separates a libertarian from an anarchist is the realization that some form of government is required for the existence of freedom.  As Napoleon so famously stated: “Without an army, authority, and discipline there is no political independence or civil liberty.” (Baker, Daniel B. Power Quotes).

Under an anarchist system, 0% government, there exists no freedom. The birth pangs of an anarchistic period are the wholesale abandonment of the freedoms of the people to own their lives and their property, the physical storehouse of their life’s value. Lawlessness, which always begets rioting, leaves a person singularly un-free, as they are forced to defend their property and lives from essentially an uncontrolled democracy, the epitome not of freedom, as some would suggest, but the idea of majority rule, a system as surely oppressive as a monarchy, where in the minority, the powerless, have simply traded a single king for a multitude of them.

A quick visual tour of the aftermath of the 1992 LA Riots demonstrates quite clearly the freedom, the liberty, to be had under anarchy.  I realize that this is a long post, so I am going to restrain myself to one picture:

A store front burning in the background, as a looter pushes his cart of stolen goods off to whatever bolt hole he is going to stash it in.  Where was the freedom for the owner of the burning store to own his property and to do with it as he wished?  What about the liberty of the individual who was robbed for those goods in that cart, why wasn’t she free to keep that to which she was entitled by virtue of her hard work and effort?  In the absence of law, what freedoms did they have that weren’t overwhelmed by the requirement that they stay with their property and protect it, with their lives if need be?  When the mob with the torches and pitchforks comes to set fire to your home, you’d better not be out making a beer run if you want to keep your stuff!

Eventually, with the situation left unchecked, the old axiom that “power abhors a vacuum” reveals itself to be true again, and the most powerful groups of thugs establish territories and we wind up under a monarchy when they finally get done slugging it out.  Anarchy is a short lived state, a quick transition from one form of government to a monarchy or oligarchy.

No, a certain amount of government makes everyone more free and increases the amount of liberty available to each of us.  Under the jurisdiction of a body of laws, I can reasonably expect to go to the store, or a movie, and not have an unruly mob destroy my livelihood.  The same cannot be said of a state ruled by anarchy.

What separates a libertarian from a “Progressive” is the realization that too much government crushes the human spirit and destroys all progress.  One look at how the Pharaohs, wwaayy back in the day, used their absolute governmental authority (had slaves stack up big piles of rocks to honor them), and you realize that we’ve got thousands of years worth of experience with which to discover the evils of total government control.  You don’t even have to look at the millions of bodies piled up last century in the name of “progress” by the 100% government “men of the left” like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao…

So, a quick recap: I am for the freedom of an individual to pursue happiness and life as they see fit, as long as they harm no one else, and I realize that this is only made possible through the existence of some level of government and law enforcement.  Now the next question becomes obvious: What type of government, and how much power should it wield? 

More to come.  =)

 

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