| Part-Time Libertarians |
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| Saturday, 31 December 2011 06:27 | |||
ESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Dear Subscriber, I just had to quickly put a rant together about a pet peeve of mine: people who say they are libertarian on SOME (but not all) issues. The good news is, it has becoming more fashionable and cool to be libertarian, after a few zillion years of being ridiculed and demonized for having principles. The bad news is, a lot of statists are trying to hijack the term, in the hopes of making themselves sound learned and principled. When anyone says, "I'm libertarian on certain issues," he's either demonstrating his ignorance, or intentionally lying. Libertarianism is a philosophy, based on the non-aggression principle, which says that it's wrong to initiate violence against someone. To say that someone is fiscally libertarian but socially conservative, or socially libertarian but fiscally liberal, doesn't mean anything. Adhering to a "sometimes-aggression" principle, which ALL statists do, doesn't make someone a libertarian. Claiming to be a part-time libertarian is equivalent to saying, "I'm a vegetarian, except when I eat meat," or "I'm a pacifist, except when I beat people up." Anyway, I just posted a short rant about this on YouTube, and here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQgA8IfhJ9M Larken Rose larken@larkenrose.com (P.S. By the way, I totally used to do this myself, trying to mix the label of libertarianism with condoning a giant, coercively- funded state military. I'm just as annoyed that I was ever stupid enough to do that, as I am that so many others still are.)
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