No, I don’t think that Gary Johnson and Bill Weld are communists, but after the Republicans have allowed their party to be hijacked by a left-liberal progressive ignoramus Donald Trump, now the Libertarian Party is copying that in its allowing left-liberal-progressives to hijack the Libertarian Party.
And Walter Block expresses his concern over losing the word “libertarian” over to statists disguising themselves as the freedom advocates they are not, in the same way the progressive-socialists had stolen the word “liberal” a century ago to push their entirely anti-liberal agenda. Dr. Block believes that the Libertarian Party is helping that by its most recent idiocy in nominating statists Gary Johnson and Bill Weld as the party’s Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates respectively.
As part of its continuing self-destruction, the last debate among the Libertarian Party candidates for President consisted of questions mostly irrelevant to the discussion of actual libertarianism and its principles, and Brian Doherty noted that he tried but was unable to learn who wrote the questions. However, the debate moderator was talk radio host Larry Elder, so maybe he wrote the questions or in partnership with other conservatives. Supposedly it seemed that the questions were designed to intentionally embarrass the candidates and make them look like eccentric freaks.
There were many boos throughout the debate, particularly aimed at Gary Johnson’s lack of understanding of issues from a libertarian perspective.
Gary Johnson just does not have an understanding of the moral principles which underlie libertarianism. For instance, Johnson defended the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Now, I know a lot of people are indoctrinated to rationalize the intentional murder of innocent human life, such as with the “We’re at War!” mentality.
But there is no excuse for deliberately targeting, harming or murdering an innocent human being. I heard some of these talk radio personalities such as Kuhner and Medved, just briefly, last week criticizing Obama on his trip to Hiroshima, and their loathsome rationalizations of the mass murder that war criminal Harry Truman inflicted on innocents. It was the usual propaganda, such as “We had to do it to prevent deaths of thousands more U.S. soldiers,” “We had to do it to finally end the war,” and so on. On the radio, Steve Deace, while he also reiterated the propagandish defense of mass murder, attempted to get his three cohorts to agree that we should at least “feel bad” about it. Gosh, it is the killing of innocent human life, after all. But it’s okay because we can justify mass murder as a strategy. (And these people preach about abortion and that there’s no rationalization for murdering innocent human life!)
No, it’s immoral to kill any innocent human being. But if you are a collectivist then I guess it’s easier to dehumanize others collectively, by putting groups against one another. “Us vs. Them.” And anyway, “We” didn’t fight in that war or drop the bomb, government employees were engaged in the war-crimes. But, if you’re a collectivist I suppose you’ll think that way.
Collectivism tends to dehumanize the individual. And that way of thinking is contrary to the libertarian way of thinking. Libertarianism is about promoting “liberty,” and individuals have liberty and “rights,” not groups. Groups only have power. Libertarianism is about the non-initiation of aggression, the idea of self-ownership and free will. Libertarianism further is about private property and voluntary association and freedom of non-association. Either the society will have laws against murder, assault, theft, fraud, trespass, or it will not. No one may be exempt from those moral laws of civilization.
You see, libertarianism is based on moral principles, particularly the non-initiation of aggression. Regarding the use of aggression, the only acceptable use of aggression is in actual self-defense. The collectivists see wars and sending militaries abroad to kill innocents and destroy homes and lives as “defense.” Such a rationalization has been used to excuse collectively-inflicted violence against innocents especially in the age of democracies. But please tell me how murdering a 5-year-old child sitting in his room in Hiroshima, minding his own business, is an act of “defense.” The collectivists such as all these radio talk show people defend those actions with such moral contortions as to make their other arguments on other issues seem extremely hypocritical.
Sadly, generations of people have been thoroughly indoctrinated to comfortably rationalize immorality, crimes and atrocities without a second thought. Millions of people are brainwashed to defend the crimes of the State and its agents and enforcers against them, and to defend their government’s starting wars of aggression thus provoking foreigners to retaliate. Millions are ignorant of history which led to their own government’s taking the country into war for no good reason, such as the history of U.S. economic embargo against Japan, itself an act of war, leading up to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Millions of indoctrinated sheeple believe their government’s propaganda which is generally repeated word for word by the mainstream media stenographers and the kids’ State-endorsed school books which promote the government’s version of events, but not the truth.
And Gary Johnson and Bill Weld are clueless when it comes to private property rights and voluntary association. They are both on the “Social Justice Warrior” side of things. If a baker doesn’t want to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding — for whatever reason — he must be forced to do that, is the SJW’s view.
In contrast, the libertarian view is, based on freedom of association and non-association, freedom of contract and private property rights, if I am a baker but I don’t want to bake you a cake, then I don’t bake you a cake. Your forcing me to bake you a cake when I don’t want to, with you getting the government and its enforcers to make me do it, is a criminal act on your part. Your taking me to court to sue me because I won’t do extra labor to serve you is an act of criminal extortion.
In contrast, the libertarian answer is, I don’t want to bake you a cake, and so you go find a different baker who will do it. The statist-criminal answer to that is for a thug to force someone to do something he doesn’t want to do. The libertarian way is the peaceful way, the voluntary way.
Now, regarding what some people find as relevant to the discussion, the reasons that a baker might have for refusal of service: those reasons don’t matter. The baker could be a Jew who hates Christians, a Christian who hates Jews, an atheist who hates Christians, a Christian who disapproves of homosexuality or other lifestyles, even a racist black person who doesn’t want to do business with whites. None of those reasons matter, because all human beings have the right to freedom of thought and freedom of conscience. If you are going to punish someone legally because of one’s views, then you are talking about thought crimes. If someone doesn’t want to do business with you for reasons of being a “racist” or a “homophobe,” it still doesn’t matter, because he still has a right to think in particular ways which others might find repugnant.
The bottom line is: the individual’s right to not associate with certain other people for ANY reason is his right. You don’t have a right to force someone to do labor to serve you involuntarily, for any reason. You do not have a right to force someone to associate with you, period.
But these collectivists and statists such as Gary Johnson and Bill Weld come from the state of mind that the individual must comply with the will of the majority. The individual must serve others, including involuntarily, based on the views of what the majority view as acceptable, or based on what the agents of the State view as mandatory that all must accept. These statist-thinking people don’t believe in freedom of association, which includes freedom of non-association as well. They don’t believe in the principles of self-ownership and private property rights, in which I own my life and I will work with those others I want to work with, and I will not work with those others I don’t want to work with. When you force me to work with certain others against my will and better judgment, then you are claiming ownership of my life and claiming some sort of authority to order me to do this or that in my own private life. Or you are claiming ownership of my business in the case of the baker which is now commonly cited.
One matter in which libertarians have not been effective has been communicating the true criminal nature of government taxation. Gary Johnson and other politicians’ idea of “tax reform” is rearranging the deck chairs on an immoral scheme, with “flat tax,” “fair tax,” consumption tax, but Ron Paul had the right idea when he was running for President. Dr. Paul stated that taxation is really theft.
The reason that government taxation of income or wealth is theft is because it is involuntary and coercive. If your neighbors came to you demanding that you fork over a certain portion of your income or wealth involuntarily or they’ll detain you and throw you in a cage, you’d call them criminals. Just because there exists this group with artificial authority over your life (that not everybody voluntarily agrees to or has voluntarily signed a contract with) called the State, it still doesn’t make its agents’ acts of robbery, extortion, racketeering, and threats of endangerment and death morally acceptable. There should be one set of laws the entire society must follow, no exceptions. The basic rules being no stealing, no fraud, no initiation of aggression, no assaults, no murders, etc.
It isn’t just the criminality of the taxation racket, which has enabled even further absurdities of government expansion and criminality perpetrated by government officials and their enforcers. But the act of the government demanding that you must report to it your private and personal activities, your employment and other economic matters, talk about invasion of privacy and being forced to “testify against oneself” based on a guilty-until-proven-innocent immoral scheme, as Ron Paul noted. And also you are involuntarily being made to do extra labor to serve the needs of bureaucrats. And most of what they do are things you don’t approve of and wouldn’t consider funding voluntarily!
But now, libertarians via the so-called “Libertarian” Party want to show themselves to be just as much schmucks and suckers as the general population.
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