The Fonzi of freedom had a doozy of a piece on libertarians in the Washington Post a few days ago, “Five Myths About Libertarians.” You can follows that link above because it’s just a good summary from SteveM, not the Post piece itself. As is the custom with the “Five Myths” pieces, he lists five things that are true about libertarians and then claims that each is a myth. I liked this one:
1. Libertarians are a fringe band of “hippies of the right.”
Of course this is exactly what professional libertarians (i.e. Reason staff and readers, to the extent that the latter exist) are. And maybe that’s to the their credit in a way.
Neocons had a whole “we’re not like other conservatives because we’re intellectual” shtick, then they took over the foreign policy arm of the Republican party and started the Iraq War. Libertarians are too disorganized and ineffectual to accomplish anything like that.
So here’s to you, hippies of the right. You’re less dangerous than most other breeds of wingnut.
Ruckus
Isn’t that like saying full strength sulfuric acid is more harmful than full strength hydrochloric acid?
Maybe it is or isn’t but practically it matters little.
BillinGlendaleCA
I spoke to my wife’s apolitical daughter shortly after she got out of the Air Force. She said she didn’t know whether she’s a liberal or conservative. I mentioned libertarians, to which she replied: “Oh, they’re idiots”.
Spaghetti Lee
I’ll give him the first one. They aren’t hippies. They’re less peace-and-love and more “survival of the fittest” and “cheat to win.”
Redshirt
Hey, if they’re willing to consider different “conservative” “ideas” “simultaneously”, well, more power to them! We all should encourage such courage.
Jamie
More importantly, “we just report on the inevitable move of capital to the rich, it is just this thing, you know. Not me.”
Wait, where did my magazine go?
sharl
There was an interesting op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Protecting privacy hinges on reining in companies,” by Chris Hoofnagle at Berkeley Law School (computer crime law specialist) that IMO seemed to make a pretty good case for libertarian attitudes being significantly to blame for our current predicaments with Big Data – NSA, PRISM, etc.
The article is subscription only, but I got to it via Google search – for me it was the first result returned on this search. (The direct link to the SF Chron oped is here.)
Some excerpts:
mdblanche
Those “Five Myths” columns are very hit or miss. This one was a definite miss. Most of the libertarians I encounter these days are Republicans with enough good sense to be embarrassed about being Republicans but not enough to do anything about it besides trying to find a less tainted label for themselves.
@Ruckus: But if you have full strength hydrochloric acid you can mix it with nitric acid to make aqua regia and use it to dissolve gold. This has been known to come in handy.
balconesfault
Libertarians are pro-drug, pro-abortion and anti-religion.
Only the ones who don’t care about winning Republican primaries.
SRW1
Rand Paul web site:
“In addition, I support a Sanctity of Life Amendment, establishing the principle that life begins at conception. This legislation would define life at conception in law, as a scientific statement.”
Libertarian science appears to take a lot of liberties. In all possible meanings of ‘taking liberties’.
David Koch
If these clowns were really libertarians, wouldn’t they want to run a magazine/blog without welfare subsidies from billionaires like me?
And of course, there’s their priceless “consistency”:
Xenos
Anyone declaring themselves to be a libertarian deserves the same roll of the eyes and sad sigh that one will give the next fool you meet who is convinced they are going to get rich selling Amway products. It is simply pathetic.
jon
The libertarians I know are all fair-weather anti-government types: they have their businesses, usually a couple of them. So they incorporate with the government, get licensed by the licensing agencies, protect their intellectual property as strongly as they can by registering with the government agencies, and then they want to know why they get taxed for the privilege of using their freedom to make money. Never mind that they do all their griping that the government doesn’t create anything useful by complaining over the internet, but these bozos also use limited liability corporations and other tax statuses to avoid taxes and then complain about their tax burdens for their businesses being nearly half of what they earn (because they chose to get taxed at the individual rate, because FREEDUMB!.) And they just know it’s because some guy has an iPhone and he doesn’t deserve it. And Those People don’t work at all! These libertarians don’t ever think about the fact that they have personally had three or four iPhones and have no idea how aftermarket items tend to go to poorer people. Nope, these Mensa-wannabes only know for certain that poverty is caused by poor planning. And cutting off food stamps is the key to making them get it, doncha know? But they ARE NOT REPUBLICANS, because they say so. They also say everything Republicans say about economic policy, but never mind that.
Ben Cisco
Looks like/walks like/quacks like a duck, it’s most likely a duck. Even if it calls itself an eagle.
NickT
@SRW1:
You can see why Baby Doc had to certify his own scientific/medical credentials.
Dennis G.
Just perfect. A leather jacket and flowers in his hair.
Just One More Canuck
@mdblanche: thanks for the link – cool story
Elizabelle
Glibertarians.
Gex
Libertarians are just Rockefeller Republicans who don’t realize that they NEED the culture wars to win elections to advance their policies.
They’d like very much to pretend that they are different, but there’s a reason why they always vote Republican. In fact, they usually pretend they are neither right nor left but are something different, so this post is in effect an admission that they are conservatives first and foremost. They just like to have sex, smoke pot, and don’t hate their gay friends.
That they care most about tax cuts and deregulation is why they keep voting for presidents whose Supreme Court justice nominations gut the 4th and 5th Amendments, who start global wars on terror, pass Patriot Acts. They support candidates that restrict abortion and birth control and a party that ban marriage equality. And why any differences they may have with conservatives utterly meaningless.
The Moar You Know
Libertarians are selfish lying assholes who would charge you twenty bucks for a ride to the hospital after accidentally running you over while high on their drug of choice that they have no problem forbidding to everyone else.
They are the very worst of what our society and humanity in general are. I prefer Republicans, myself. They are honest about wanting to take the country back to the eighteenth century, and honest about wanting to murder anyone not like them.
Another Holocene Human
@Gex:
Disagree. Rockefeller Republicans are moving to the D side after a short stop in I-ville. Because they believe in righting the wrongs of racial inequality, and have a sense of noblesse oblige (always feel like this phrase is a grammatical error somehow) towards the poor, eg we should be providing education and some sort of path out of poverty, that makes them “liberals” in the classic US sense and in a completely untenable position in today’s GOP.
Libertarians think their shit doesn’t stink because their parents have money. They are violently opposed to WIC, SNAP, Section-8 (unless they are a Sec8 landlord themselves, then they just oppose HUD inspectors and tenement regulations), etc. Even need based scholarship. It might allow those people to compete against them and then they’d be screwed because they’re, you know, lazy and incurious.
I know some lovely libertarians who used their student loans to buy iPhones and then shamelessly applied for food stamps. I learned about this from an outraged friend who is an Embarrassed Republican. She probably thinks she might be libertarian but a) she pays her own way, putting herself through school and so on and b) she’s not enough of an asshole.
Like many people I know who are born into GOP families she’s actually pretty ignorant about politics although I think Mitt Romney did manage to piss her off enough in the last election to vote against him.
Elie
@sharl:
Perfect excerpt particularly the last one. Remember this everyone as GG and the snowflakes rail against the administrations failure to protect us from NSA
Ruckus
@mdblanche:
I was more considering it as a household chemical. Some thing you might pour on a stain for example. Or that a child might sallow.
IOW how is one better politically than the other. And of course they aren’t.
Villago Delenda Est
Libertarians imagine that in the post statist society, they’ll be the Lannisters.
sharl
test
ETA: twice attempted comments (with two links) being eaten. Gotta roll, will try again later.
ThresherK
Has anyone ever talked to a libertarian whose needle was moved by all the transvaginal stuff, or Virginia’s, em, “no longer being for lovers”? Just amazing how big gummint overreach is never solved by voting against the people who brought it to you.
I swear, trying to interact with one is like listening to an eight year old X* fan’s first foray in talking to someone wearing a “Team Z” ballcap.
(*Substitute your own sports rivalry here.)
Matt McIrvin
Capital-L Libertarians are fringe characters, but the genteel version, “I’m fiscally conservative and socially liberal” with a side order of “I consider myself an independent”, is the default ideology of well-off white Americans in the East, especially if they’re between the ages of 35 and 70.
Jewish Steel
HOTRs
Another Holocene Human
@Matt McIrvin: It’s economic self-interest in the most self-interested sense (give me all the services I want but don’t make me pay for it), but please hold the god-bothering.
It does astound me that people think they can get good government for free. When I spent a year in Western Mass, which is pretty damn rural, some of the locals bitched about Eastern Mass transplants who moved there because lotaxes, cheap land and then throw fits because all that city stuff they’re accustomed to wasn’t available.
It just seems like there’s this cadre of boomers? gen X? who think they can have their cake and eat it too. My whole life they’ve been at this crap. People who think “tax and spend” is a devastating argument. Hmmm, so you want to spend without getting tax income to pay for it? That makes sense… Cheap, and either cheats or stupid. (The Joey Malone defense–I’m not a crook, I’m just too stupid to know my buddy was stealing out of the unpaid check fund right under my nose!)
Another Holocene Human
@ThresherK: Has anyone ever talked to a libertarian whose needle was moved by all the transvaginal stuff, or Virginia’s, em, “no longer being for lovers”?
Embarrassed Republicans, and only the women.
I don’t know any female Libertarians except from the internets.
amy c
@jon: Where I live, the libertarian-who-works-for-a-defense-contractor is a quite common breed. All government spending is bad, according to these guys – except of course the contracts that result in their inflated salaries. That spending is very very good.
In fact, I can think of a handful of acquaintances who owe everything they have in their really, really nice lives to government spending, and they call themselves libertarians. They’ve been in the military or are married to someone who was in the military, so they have their free college educations and houses they bought with no money down and now paychecks padded with the premium you get for carrying a government security clearance. Their kids go to some of the best public schools in the country due to the sick amount of money the area has, in general, thanks to defense contracting. They have access to top-notch everything living here, because of government programs and government spending.
And still they claim to be libertarians and lean “small government” Republican. Ugh. Because of course, defense-anything is a big old blind spot for the “don’t spend!” crowd. A big huge fat enormous exception. The relative pennies we toss at PBS is an outrage, but defense is fine at any price! The cognitive dissonance is astounding.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t deny a service member his no-money-down VA loan – you should get something in return when you’re putting up your life like that. But own it. Admit that you have suckled on this teat and the result has been good. Don’t take your benefits and try to pull up the ladder behind you like a fucking coward.
McJulie
@amy c: The government-employed libertarian is so common in my experience that I sometimes wonder if their thinking is something like “well, I know the government is all fracked up, because I work for it!” and then they imagine that private corporations must be better, somehow.
News flash: they are not. And even if they were, the fact that private companies can, and routinely do, go out of business seems to argue against any view that the government should be more like private corporations.
But I think libertarians are also a bit like die-hard communists, you see, the real libertarianism has never been tried and would undoubtedly work out in ponies for all! So you can never be proven wrong.
And don’t forget just world fallacy. Libertarianism is basically just world fallacy, plus sociopathy, codified into a semi-coherent political philosophy.
LolaDelGato(formerly bcinaz)
What a Libertarian will tell you they believe is – don’t hurt anybody and don’t take their stuff. Wow that sounds really cool, until, you know, terrorists fly into buildings, financialization transfers trillions of dollars of wealth out of the hands of ‘people’ and into the accounts of ‘institutions’ for the benefit of a very few. Oil rigs blow up, killing human beings and poisoning the environment. Libertarianism might be a great ideology in places where civilization no longer exists, i.e. Somalia, it’s just no way for a civil society to conduct it’s affairs.
amyc
@McJulie:
Logically, you’re surely right – but it just breaks my brain to think of it. Bureaucracies in general can be slow and stupid and inefficient, but they certainly come in all flavors of private industry and are not exclusive to government. Haven’t these people ever dealt with a health insurance company, the cable company, a bank? How can any semi-functioning human being have a simple, doctor-ordered procedure denied by Blue Cross (an experience the ENTIRE POPULATION has endured at one time or another) and think, “boy, at least it’s not socialism!!!!”