Look at the "Worlds Smallest Political Quiz" thread. Go take the quiz. See if the quiz says your a libertarian, or a republican or a Democrat.
The funny thing is, most of the people in this forum came out libertarian. Including the republicans.
But if you go do the same thing with Democrats, it will turn out the same-- most of them are libertarians.
The reality is MOST AMERICANS SUPPORT LIBERTY. They support economic liberty and they support social liberty.
Most americans oppose Authoritarianism.
The Democrats oppose economic liberty. The republicans oppose social liberty. In this, they split the vote.
As long as people think they have to choose from those two parties, their vote is split. But if they all voted their principles, the libertarians would win every time.
The demographics of this country are that %70 of the populace is anti-authoritarian. If you take the religious wackos (christian, muslim and jew), the hard core communists (CP members) and the outright fascists-- they all make up about %30 of the populace when combined.
As to someone saying Libertarianism is a fantasy, you're mistaken. Its not an unreal thing that never existed--- its the society that this country was originally meant to be, and was to a greater or lesser extent until the civil war. Libertarian principles are not pie in the sky dreaming-- they are the philosophy that fits with the pragmatic reality of how economics works.
You subsidize corruption or poverty and you will get them. If you understand economics and you're not a fascist, you have to recognize that capitalism works. Capitalism works everywhere, and consistently. Capitalism is not a fantasy that people think they can just claim will work--- you can look at the countries in the world and line them up by their degree of adopting capitalist ideals and you'll see their standard of living is consistent with how well they adopted capitalist ideals.
Capitalism is not a fantasy. Libertarianism, is really another way of saying capitalism. Capitalism lets people decie where they want to do business and what they want to buy.
The opposition to capitalism is socialism-- which wants to control what people buy and who they associate with. Both the republicans and the Democrats are fundamentally socialist parties.
The reason they are socialist parties is it gives them more control over the populace. They are able to criminalize drug ownership, gun ownership. They are able to criminalize even the act of your doctor proscribing a ligitimate medicine to you that is FDA approved for other uses.
But they have americans caught up in this false perception of a two party system to the point that they will sell out their principles REALLY CHEAP in order to avoid the possibility that they might loose the particular right that the party they are afraid of (in this forums case, Democrats) will take away.
You know, if you really believe in gun rights, you recognize them as god given, and you recognize that the Democrats (nor the republicans who also want to take them away) can ever take them away.
They can only convince you that you don't have them. But in reality they are inalienable.
There are pro-life libertarians. There are pro-choice libertarians. (I'm bringing this up not to start an abortion debate, but because someone asked why the libertarian parrty would not be destryoed by this issue, and this is the most divisive issue in the libertarian party.) With Drugs, Taxes, guns, free association, capitalism, and all that--- you can't really be a libertarian and fundamentally disagree with liberty on these points. On abortion, however, libertarian principles do not make the answer a cut and dried one. (Well, they do for me, but not for all libertarians.) But this problem, which has existed in the party since the 70s, is not realy a problem. They argue, and really don't agree on whether abortion is moral or not. But they recognize that the federal government doesn't have the right to criminalize it. In a libertarian society, there would be a state where abortion is illegal and one where it is legal. (EG: each state would pick its own outcome there, as it should be, as our founderrs intended!)
But, I was talking about the 70/30 split before. If you look at national polling, the percentage of americans who oppose federal laws banning abortions is %70. Right along with the libertarian / authoritarian split.
Most americans, if they understood the issues, and voted purely on their principles, would vote libertarian. Most americans, after all, think the consittution is a document to be upheld.
But since we the republcians and Democrats (Which are really two wings of a SINGLE SOCIALIST party, the Boot On Your Neck party) do not allow fair elections in this countr,y the populace thinks they have to choose from only the two wings of the BOYN party.
Furthermore, the BOYN party regularly lies about the posititions they take. Bush claims he passed a taxcut! An absurd lie to anyone who understands economics because he has turned up the printing machines from %7 per year inflation to %10 per year inflation. This devalues the dollars in everyone's pocket and is an effective TAX HIKE much bigger than the clinton ever passed.
This level of deception keeps mainstream republicans confused about the reality of their party-- they think they are for liberty and small government and lower taxes, when in reality, they want the opposite-- socialism. Its just that the republicans are claiming to be the opposite of what they are, and keeping you fooled. While the Democrats porclaim all the benefits of socialism and keep their constitutents fooled. Both parties are socialist. Go read Marx. Look at the planks required for a socialist party, and then look at the platforms of the two wings of BOYN. Both of them have most of the socialist ideals as goals, and the others are just too early to advocate.
But I don't think this post will cause people to go read Marx. And frankly, the vast majority of americans are eithe too stupid or too uneducated to see the blatent and absurd lies and logical fallacies broadcast every night for what they are. And I'm not talking about just the news-- with FOX and CNN duking it out for who can cram the most logical fallacies in a single hour. I'm talking about the government propaganda shows like The West Wing, ER, Law and Order, and all that. People know these shows aren't real, but they still think they are realistic. And they condition people --- the cops on Law and Order naturally assume that every gun has been registered, and that ballistic fingreprinting actually works, etc. etc.
Americans don't know Law and Order is a disgusting avocation of socialism. They haven't been educated enough or given the tools to know.
And so, despite having a majority, despite having historical proof that capitalism is superior to socialism, and despite a rapidly increasing general awareness of the libertarian party and libertarian principles (thanks to the internet) the libertarian party is not going to be able to save your bacon. Too many in this country are too ignorant of economics, history. Too many have not been equipped with good reasoning skills-- something you can learn yourself, but can be helped by decent education-- something the socialist governmetn schools know all too well.
And so, in my opinion, things are going to get worse at an increasingly fast rate. The federal government is already falling apart-- they can't even protect us, one of the few really legitimate arguments for having a federal government, and in response to their failure they've embarked on an warmongering adventurism that is only going to give millions more people a *legitimate* reason to hate the US. (Or do you not hate people who come to your country and kill thousands of innocent civilians? 9/11 was designed to do that, our wars, though we only target military, still do it anyway due to errrors, arelessness, and the nature of warfare. A father doesn't care that his daughter worked in the pentagon and that the people who killed her consider it a "legitimate military target". Neither does a father who's daughter was in an apartment near where we "suspected Saddam Hussien was.") And the really sad thing is, if we'd just gone after the terrorists, instead of this bull???? we're doing now in the name of going after them, we would have likely gotten them.
But I digress. Unless americans wake up to socialism's impact and hold on this country very quickly, the feds are going to start falling apart even more dramatically than they have recently. They are going to get very desperate, and start doing things like banning the exchange of money from one currency to another (to fight terrorism, of course!) Which, despite its goal will not shore up the US dollar. WE already went off of the gold standard, so they can't try that trick again.
And to anyone who's read this far, you have my respect. You probably continued even though I challenged your core beliefs. Even this long posting is far too short to provide quality defenses of all of my positions. But if you just give the idea a chance an do your own investigation and still disagree, I'd VERY much like to hear why. I could be wrong, after all. (
www.mises.org is a good place to start, with lots of free books by Murry Rothbard, one of the founders of libertarianism in its modern form.)
