Stop Calling Me a Liberal!


"No his mind is not for rent,
to any god or government."
--Rush, "Tom Sawyer", Moving Pictures

Sorry to so thoroughly disappoint, but I do not fit the mold. I am not a communist, nor a socialist, nor a green. I certainly am not a liberal.

I acknowledge the historical union of atheism and all sorts of leftist tripe, especially communism. But in most of those examples, the atheism was derived from the politics, not the other way around (e.g. Communist government suppresses religion because of its strong philosophical and organizational potential, which would threaten the totalitarian state). I did not arrive at my politics first, and I definitely didn't supplant one religion (Christianity) with another (government).

For a brief period of time I considered myself a conservative, but that was not to last. Fundamental differences were glossed over, but I was never entirely uncomfortable within the right wing. In fact I am still somewhat sympathetic to that side, in a nostalgic sense. Eventually though, it became blatantly obvious that Republicans were the same bed-wetting statists as the Democrats. Besides, Republicans aren't actually against big government; they are against big Democratic government. And they love big Republican government. Any conservative who would deny this might consider removing his head from either the sand or his own ass, whichever it is stuck in.

I am a libertarian. I believe that no person has the right to initiate force or fraud against another person for any reason, nor to delegate its initiation. This dogma, the Non-Aggression Principle, dictates my day-to-day morality and every aspect of my politics. All of my personal behavior and my solution to every political issue flows from it.

(Side note: I hope I don't have to place the dictionary definition of "initiate" to emphasize that I am not advocating pacifism. We're all clear on that word, right?)

I used to have a link to my own description of libertarianism, but that just looked lame in retrospect. Instead, I'm going to offer this link to The Libertarian Enterprise, a weekly online magazine. It is sometime bad, sometimes good, but always extreme--and extreme in defense of freedom.

Here are just a few samples of the delightful (and somewhat nihilist) ranting:



"Has President Bush done anything different than a President Gore would have done? All he has done as president is expand the federal government. Every department and agency in Washington, D.C. has grown larger, costlier, more powerful, and more intrusive. The post 9-11 agenda has been a full frontal assault on the Bill of Rights. Jackboot Johnny has replaced Jackboot Janet."
--Douglas F. Newman, 10-28-02



[On Public Education]
"Funded by theft and populated by kidnapping and slavery, it is rooted in a moral inversion, so that the more resources that are sacrificed to it, the worse it gets.

"Considering the 100% negative contribution they make to it, public school teachers are the most obscenely overpaid individuals in our civilization [and] someday history will recognize the public school system as an atrocity comparable to the Soviet system of gulags, or, more appropriately, to the Soviet system of psychiatric hospitals that were used to medicalize and eradicate dissent.

"The public school system must be abolished, its buildings razed to the ground so that not one stone is left standing on another, and salt sown on the ruins."
--L. Neil Smith, 10-21-02



"I don't know whether you've noticed it or not, but everybody who was pretending to be in charge of America the day before September 11, 2001, is still pretending to be in charge. The difference is that they have more money to play with, and a hell of a lot more power over our lives.

"If this were a decent civilization, of course, the President, the Vice President, the entire Cabinet, and every military officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel (or its bureaucratic equivalent) would have cut their bellies, hanged themselves, or taken a single cartridge and their Webley revolvers into an adjacent room and done the decent thing. We Americans would have had an entirely new government to kick around."
--L. Neil Smith, 07-01-02



"For decades, the security system at America's airports has served to deter only law-abiding citizens. It is as if someone insane enough to fly a jumbo jet into a skyscraper would give a rip about such pantywaist measures. Evil abhors a vacuum. When you disarm innocent people, as night follows day, bad things happen. Gun-free schools left the students and faculty of Columbine High School defenseless against Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Gun-free planes made the passengers of four airplanes easy pickings for the September 11 terrorists. Had America been a free country, had the Second Amendment still sported a few teeth, and had we not required people to surrender their constitutional rights when they walked through the airplane door, these passengers would have been able to retaliate. Indeed, the terrorists probably would have written off hijacking airplanes as futile."
--Douglas F. Newman, 06-10-02



"Totalitarianism would be bad enough even if it worked ... but it never does. Go ahead -- outlaw candy and potato chips. I'll promptly invest in the biggest damned Snickers factory ever seen, deep in the jungles of Colombia. I'll hire the best smugglers, and a whole generation of 12-year-old "flaggers" to help me sell them on every ghetto streetcorner in America, at $10 apiece. I'll die rich; you'll die broke; and you'll still be eating them...

"Find me a statist control freak who will ever say, 'You know what? We've solved most of the problems. Everybody seems pretty happy and healthy now, all things considered. No sense being a burden on the taxpayers any longer. Let's disband our agency, turn off the lights, and go home.'

"No, no! Instead there's ... Global warming! Yeah, that's the ticket! Or if not that, maybe ... Global cooling! That'll do! Juvenile onset obesity! The epidemic of juvenile firearms deaths! Menacing asteroids from outer space! The deadly ozone hole! Alar on the apples! The nefarious Asian Hydrogen Dioxide plume! Gin up the greenback presses, boys, the National Health, Security, and Colon Defense Administration needs more funding!"
--Vin Suprynowicz, 05-13-02



"Another thing they love to whimper about (the left-wing socialist bedwetters, not the right-wing variety like Our Little Fuehrer) is pollution. The more fuel it uses, it says here, the more pollution it creates. That sounds logical. The trouble is, today's vehicles are virtually pollution-free compared to those of the past. What they mostly generate is water and carbon dioxide -- good for plants and other living things. The only real pollutants modern vehicles create are carcinogens, a product of the catalytic converters and lead-free gas forced on Detroit by -- you guessed it -- left-wing socialist bedwetters.

"But forget all that. The truth is that these stunted creatures simply hate to see anybody enjoying any aspect of his life -- usually because they have no lives themselves, or what lives they do have are a misery and they want company. And too, they understand too well that an individual who enjoys his life is far more difficult to control, something they just can't abide. As the late Alan Sherman pointed out in his masterpiece, The Rape of the Ape, that's why religions made sex a no-no. Anybody who's getting laid regularly is impossible to control. "
--L. Neil Smith, 06-24-02


In case you were curious, "El Neil", as he is sometimes called, is an atheist, as are many of the contributors. Perhaps this philosophy also leads to atheism, as a mind freed from a maternal state will not be enslaved by make-believe paternal figures.

So this concludes our little journey through the fringes of Libertaria. These articles (in full) and literally years of back issues can be found on this site (same link as above): http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/.

P.S. See why I might get offended by charges of "liberal"?
P.P.S. I hereby predict, in the month of November, 2002, that by November of 2004, after two solid years of firm Republican control of the Executive and Legislative branches, the federal government will be no smaller in either dollar or deed. The budget will not be one cent smaller, and the register of federal regulations will not be one page shorter.

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