I'm switching parties!

What I have told people when I have petitioned or worked at an outreach booth at a fair, festival, etc. is that what we believe is that the government's duty is to protect your life, liberty and property and otherwise leave you alone so long as your actions don't harm another. Kandahar's entry below is probably very well stated. Again, also check out www.lp.org

In addition, while we believe in a free market, we don't believe in corporate welfare. A business enterprise should be able to survive on its own, not from government subsidies.

That was your choice. I could not in decent conscience have voted for either Bush or Kerry, and make no apologies casting my vote for Michael Badnarik. I feel it to be important to 'feed the resistance' as much as possible.

 

To me the problem with Libertarianism is that it is one of those attractive ideologies that seem to be so brilliant and simple on paper. The problem comes when trying to translate the ideas from the page to the real world. It then doesn’t take much thought to realise that they would be so corrupted by being practice in real conditions that they would turn out nothing like the dream, in fact a bit like Communism or Anarchy.
It is a utopian ideology where reality has to be suspended for it to work in the way they envision.

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This all becomes abundantly clear once you get beyond the slogans and examine the way the system is supposed to operate.

First up it is the kind of system that is impossible to bring in gradually without the underpinning philosophy being corrupted and changed beyond recognition. So it would have to be installed by some revolutionary process that would be incredibly disruptive and very violent, but rather than this happening just once it would need to occur at generation intervals for the system to remain true to its ideas.

Since revolutions tend to be messy and hard to direct it is also not clear how libertarians would direct the upheaval in such a way that the liberation ideal would be the system that would emerge.

However since so far I have known few librarians that advocate such revolutionary action their ideology premise is already fatally compromised.

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But let us look at some of the doctrines of the ideology that would be in place once the revolution had happened, (with thanks to Kandahar).

"We generally believe in as small of a government as possible."

People like to talk about ‘government’ it is the basis of political thought, just how do we organise our society? There are two major strands in these arguments whether governments are forces for good or evil.

But governments are just tools and it depends on who controls them, governments aren’t bad just the people who weld them. Absolute monarchy or Dictatorships don’t have to be ‘evil’, and a Democracy is not necessarily ‘good’. In the same way a large government it not necessarily a liability or a bad thing and a small government is not due solely to that fact an asset and a good thing.

What libertarians usually mean by small government is a deregulated system with few laws or restrictions on the gaining and accumulation of wealth. The problem is that not only are many of such regulations in place to protect the safely of the public but also are in fact needed to allow the libertarian model to function as they envision.

Which leads to -

"We generally believe in a free-market capitalist economy."

The thing about a free-market is that to work in the way that he libertarians envision it would need to be regulated but libertarians claim that regulations restrict the working of the free market. For example all libertarians I’ve talked to believe that monopolies and cartels should be regulated against and that laws should be in place so people have redress in court.

"We generally believe that everyone should be able to live their lives as they please, without interference from the government, as long as they aren't hurting others."

But you have to ask yourselves, in a democracy who is the government? If the government is an expression of the peoples will, is freedom from government interference a rejection of the very community a person lives in?

As to the hurting of others just how far do you take that? For many people around the world the wasteful consumerist society typified by the US economy is hurting and will hurt many people around the globe but it is that very system that a unregulated free market is most likely to produce. It also does not address the difficulty of unequal justice within an unequal society, so that people with wealth, power and influence are more likely to be able to be able to hurt people and get away with it.

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As you can see the contradictions between what is envisioned and the reality soon become clear and mean that libertarianism should only really be seen as a theoretical and utopian ideal and not a serious political movement.