← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · PENN
Thread ID: 3625 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2002-11-21
2002-11-21 19:06 | User Profile
[img]http://www.thismodernworld.com/media/arc/american%20prospect/01-libertarian.jpg[/img]
[url=http://www.euroknowledge.net/articles_view.phtml?title=A+Libertarian+Nationalism&author=Guy+de+Maertelaere]http://www.euroknowledge.net/articles_view...+de+Maertelaere[/url]
2002-11-21 22:03 | User Profile
A lot of critiques of libertarianism are written by leftists, so you have to take what they say with a grain of salt. I don't agree that vouchers are a bad idea, and the autthor of this piece doesn't seem to realize that many libertarians don't support vouchers either (most in my opinion). They view payments to parents as equally evil as payments to the state. Many other conservative virtues liberals ascribe to libertarians unworthily.
With those caveats, I always think of this piece whenever the mood turns to libertarian bashing.
[url=http://world.std.com/~mhuben/onelesson.html]Libertarianism In One Lesson[/url]
Introduction
One of the most attractive features of libertarianism is that it is basically a very simple ideology. Maybe even simpler than Marxism, since you don't have to learn foreign words like "proletariat".
This brief outline will give you most of the tools you need to hit the ground running as a freshly indoctrinated libertarian ideologue. Go forth and proselytize!
Philosophy
In the beginning, man dwelt in a state of Nature, until the serpent Government tempted man into Initial Coercion.
Government is the Great Satan. All Evil comes from Government, and all Good from the Market, according to the Ayatollah Rand.
We must worship the Horatio Alger fantasy that the meritorious few will just happen to have the lucky breaks that make them rich. Libertarians happen to be the meritorious few by ideological correctness. The rest can go hang.
Government cannot own things because only individuals can own things. Except for corporations, partnerships, joint ownership, marriage, and anything else we except but government.
Parrot these arguments, and you too will be a singular, creative, reasoning individualist.
Parents cannot choose a government for their children any more than they can choose language, residence, school, or religion.
Taxation is theft because we have a right to squat in the US and benefit from defense, infrastructure, police, courts, etc. without obligation.
Magic incantations can overturn society and bring about libertopia. Sovereign citizenry! The 16th Amendment is invalid! States rights!
Objectivist/Neo-Tech Advantage #69i : The true measure of fully integrated honesty is whether the sucker has opened his wallet. Thus sayeth the Profit Wallace. Zonpower Rules Nerdspace!
The great Zen riddle of libertarianism: minimal government is necessary and unnecessary. The answer is only to be found by individuals.
Government
Libertarians invented outrage over government waste, bureaucracy, injustice, etc. Nobody else thinks they are bad, knows they exist, or works to stop them.
Enlightenment comes only through repetition of the sacred mantra "Government does not work" according to Guru Browne.
Only government is force, no matter how many Indians were killed by settlers to acquire their property, no matter how many blacks were enslaved and sold by private companies, no matter how many heads of union members are broken by private police.
Money that government touches spontaneously combusts, destroying the economy. Money retained by individuals grows the economy, even if literally burnt. Private education works, public education doesn't. The publicly educated masses that have grown the modern economies of the past 150 years are an illusion.
Market failures, trusts, and oligopolies are lies spread by the evil economists serving the government as described in the "Protocols of the Elders of Statism". Central planning cannot work. Which is why all businesses internally are run like little markets, with no centralized leadership.
Paternalism is the worst thing that can be inflicted upon people, as everyone knows that fathers are the most hated and reviled figures in the world.
Government is like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearsome master. Therefore, we should avoid it entirely, as we do all forms of combustion.
Regulation
The FDA is solely responsible for any death or sickness where it might have prevented treatment by the latest unproven fad.
Children, criminals, death cultists, and you all have the same inalienable right to own any weaponry: conventional, chemical, biological, or nuclear.
All food, drugs, and medical treatments should be entirely unregulated: every industry should be able to kill 300,000 per year in the US like the tobacco industry.
If you don't have a gun, you are not a libertarian. If you do have a gun, why don't you have even more powerful armament?
Better to abolish all regulations, consider everything as property, and solve all controversy by civil lawsuit over damages. The US doesn't have enough lawyers, and people who can't afford to invest many thousands of dollars in lawsuits should shut up.
Libertarian Party
The Libertarian Party is well on its way to dominating the political landscape, judging from its power base of 100+ elected dogcatchers and other important officials after 25 years of effort.
The "Party of Oxymoron": "Individualists unite!"
Flip answers are more powerful than the best reasoned arguments, which is why so many libertarians are in important government positions.
It's time the new pro-freedom libertarian platform was implemented; child labor, orphanages, sweatshops, poorhouses, company towns, monopolies, trusts, cartels, blacklists, private goons, slumlords, etc.
Libertarianism "rules" Internet political debate the same way US Communism "ruled" pamphleteering.
No compromise from the "Party of Principle". Justice, happiness, liberty, guns, and other good stuff come only from rigidly adhering to inflexible dogmas.
Minimal government is whatever we say it is, and we don't agree.
Government is "moving steadily in a libertarian direction" with every change libertarians approve of; no matter if it takes one step forward and two steps backwards.
Yes, the symbol of the Libertarian Party is a Big Government Statue. It's not supposed to be funny or ironic!
Political Debate Strategy
Count only the benefits of libertarianism, count only the costs of government.
Five of a factoid beats a full argument.
All historical examples are tainted by statism, except when they favor libertarian claims.
Spiritually baptize the deceased as libertarians because they cannot protest the anachronism: Locke, Smith, Paine, Jefferson, Spooner, etc.
The most heavily armed libertarian has the biggest dick and thus the best argument.
The best multi-party democratic republics should be equated to the worst dictatorships for the purposes of denouncing statism. It's only a matter of degree.
Inviolate private property is the only true measure of freedom. Those without property have the freedom to try to acquire it. If they can't, let them find somebody else's property to complain on.
Private ownership is the cure for all problems, despite the historical record of privately owned states such as Nazi Germany, Czarist and Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China.
Require perfection as the only applicable standard to judge government: libertarianism, being imaginary, cannot be fairly judged to have flaws.
Only libertarian economists' Nobel Prizes count: the other economists and Nobel Prize Committee are mistaken.
Any exceptional case of private production proves that government ought not to be involved.
Copyright 2002 by Mike Huben (huben@world.std.com ).This document may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes if it is reproduced in its textual entirety, with this notice intact.
2002-11-23 14:10 | User Profile
I was wondering how someone would spoof liberians. I see not that it's not so easy.
1) Privatizing social security. The SS tax is by far the most regressive tax in America. If the working class weren't so ignorant they'd rebel against the SS tax. Even in a downturn the stock market pays far better than SS! There are other investments besides stocks. Besides, some people could much better use that money now for things like buying a home or starting a business than for giving it to the Feds.
2) School vouchers. America has some of the most expensive schools in the world yet American students get creamed by most of the civilized world. To say the public school system is a success is a joke. Besides, separation of school and state is every bit as important as separation of church and state, for freedom's sake. Yeah, I'd prefer the govrenment to get out of the education business but that's not going to happen, vouchers can happen.
3) Roads as socialism. Do you have a clue how much it costs to lay a little pavement? If anyone is talking about privatization here, it's not private ownership of roads but turning over road construction to private companies where the taxpayer is certain to get a better deal.
4) Pay for sunshine. No libertarian has suggested it nor would ever suggest it.
BTW, the cheif concerns of the so-called Libertarian party are not privatizing social security or school vouchers. It's opening the boarders to floods of immigrants so they can enter and get lots of free government services while voting for socialists and destroying our culture. It's legalization of drugs and prostitution (to H3ll with state's rights to prohibit such things). It's abortion of white babies.
2002-11-30 10:51 | User Profile
I was wondering how someone would spoof liberians. I see not that it's not so easy.**
Making jokes of jokes is hard to do. Good satire relies on transparency: allowing the object to be experienced as directly as possible, avoiding the dullness inherent to reproductions. Sometimes theatrical distortions are used for emphasis (eg, selling sunshine, etc).
Of all Amerikans, Libertarians, at the very least realize:
1) "Our" government has alienated itself 2) "Our" government is illegitimate
But their disaffectedness becomes counterproductive when they condemn the idea of "government" itself! Surely this is going too far. What "private individuals" do, affect other "individuals" - from Murry Rothstein to Milton Freedman. In this regard, Libertarians always position themselves with those calling for more "arbitrary" and less representative control of our socio-political institutions....
For these, and other reasons, I say:
Long live the spoofers of Libertarians!
:lol: