Libertarianism in One Lesson (almost)

Part of the "Critiques of Libertarianism" site.
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html

Last updated 10/25/07.

No, this isn't David Bergland's evangelistic text. This is an outsider's view of the precepts of libertarianism. I hope you can laugh at how close this is to real libertarianism!



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 2007 by Mike Huben ( mhuben@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.

Libertarianism in One Lesson; The Second Lesson

Part of the "Critiques of Libertarianism" site.
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html

Last updated 10/25/07.

Why is there a second lesson when the title says one lesson? Libertarianism is so double-plus-good that through the magic of libertarian accounting we can insist that 1+1=1. See the first bulleted entry for further explanation.

Introduction

Refresher time in libertarianism! Some of you might begin to doubt our generation-long barrage of libertarian propaganda due to the stubborn reluctance of reality to conform to libertarian ideology.

Never fear! Even if you are in the wasteheap of history, the market in its wisdom grants you a period of unemployment during which you can reinstill your dogmatic certitude. We have a fresh crop of excuses to memorize that will convince you of your own brilliance! Smite the unprepared!

Libertarian Party USA

• So what if David Bergland's "Libertarianism In One Lesson" has 99 pages in 16 numbered chapters. Why would you think that was more than one lesson?


• America's fastest declining political party!


• Harry Browne had it right in his 2000 campain. Trust to the efficacy of the market! As soon as you threaten to put a bounty on the head of a terrorist, all your terrorism problems will be solved.


• We cannot trust government to get anything right. We should look to examples of private organizations such as the Libertarian Party USA as role models; even if they cannot count their declining membership, balance their budget, or tell their members the truth about their finances.


• If markets are the best allocation mechanism, libertarians should demand that the party's positions should be sold to the highest bidders. Forget that voting crap: it's initiation of force! Surely the highest bidder will represent libertarian interests better than anyone else.


• Libertarians are to liberty as conservatives are to conservation!

Libertarianism Has The Answers!

• Libertarianism is based on natural rights; no, neutrality; no, non-aggression; no, responsibility; no, self ownership; no, property rights; no, ....


• When is it legitimate to initiate the use of force against others? Never! Unless, of course, you really need to initiate force... then it's pre-emptive protection of property rights.


• Of course libertarianism is compatible with Christianity! Just substitute "the market" for "Jesus", and ask "What would the market do?"


• It is more parsimonious and economically austere to consider only the libertarian side of the argument.


• Net funding for charitable works and public goods will increase when the taxes that currently support them are abolished. After all, don't we all donate our tax refund checks to charity?


• Trendy buzzwords like 'chaos theory' irrefutably prove that Government interferes with the 'spontaneous order' of free people.


• Criticism of libertarianism is destructive. Criticism of society by libertarians is constructive.


• Nostalgia for bygone "golden eras" will guide us better than the actual historical record of their suffering, corruption, cruelty, inequality of rights, and primitive standards of living.


• Nobody has a right to free food or medical care or other amenities. Children are thus either imaginary or property.


• Our libertarian ideas are boldly nonconformist, yet conveniently reaffirm our desire to do nothing but complain.


• Libertarians get to define who the classical liberals were. If they weren't just like libertarians, no matter how famous, they should be stricken from the rolls. Rousseau? Faugh!

Government

• Public schools are a monopoly: a staggering 80% of American children attend them in thousands of independently run school districts. Microsoft is not a monopoly: only 95% of computers use MSWindows.


• Government causes pollution, crime, discrimination, slavery, poverty, and all the other evils of the world. Businesses and individuals only produce wealth: they are not involved and not responsible for any of those problems.


• Taxation is slavery, but rent is not. Even if you pay more in rent, even if you have also chosen where you pay taxes.


• DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT the fact that the Internet came from a government project.


• Gang rape is democracy. Five people say "Yes," one person says "No," and the majority rules. Which is why gang rape is legal in every state.


• America was much more libertarian 150 years ago, before Big Government, when women, children, and slaves were the property of white males, and killing indians for their land was Manifest Destiny.


• A practice common in business is insufferable by government. Pay for government services? Insufferable!


• Four legs gooooood, two legs baaaaaad. Private gooooood, government baaaaaad.


• All government activity is use of force, and thus volence. Yes, this includes public libraries: don't you see the violence inherent in the creation of public libraries?

Markets

• Only markets, promoted by those wise liberals of the 18th century, can solve coordination problems. Democratic representative governments, which were foisted upon us by those same deluded liberals of the 18th century, result in chaos and difficulty finding good servants.


• When government provides a service, it is a crutch. When private enterprise provides the same service, you are a manly man to purchase it.


• Big media have a virulent anti-business bias because they report on harmful business practices. Truth is no defense against our accusations of bias, nor is the observation that big media ARE big business.


• There are no market failures, only government failures. Which is why we should abolish corporations, patents, copyright and other intellectual property; they are established by government interference with free markets.

Copyright 2007 by Mike Huben ( mhuben@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.

Bonus Track ;

Saturday, March 07, 2009

The Libertarian From Nazareth?

The Libertarian From Nazareth?

Thanks to Paul Trombley for pointing this one out. A perfect illustration of "Spiritually baptize the deceased as libertarians because they cannot protest the anachronism" from my Libertarianism in One Lesson.

The simplest reason that Jesus was obviously not a libertarian is because he does not condemn slavery: instead he tells slaves to be like their masters. A five-second google search for "jesus" and "slavery" turned up SLAVERY and the BIBLE, which details all the missed opportunities Jesus had to condemn slavery.

If I wanted to be as stupid and anachronistic as the author, Butler, I'd also point out that Jesus doesn't preach for a right to keep and bear firearms. Or any more temporally-correct form of weapons.

It's been added to my Make Or Break Views Of Libertarianism as an example of amazingly awful reasoning crossing the line into self-parody. Not to mention Libertarian Revisionist History. The idea that Jesus was a libertarian is one of the most amazingly stupid anachronisms I've ever heard.

(Posted) by Mike Huben