Separation of church and state is a key tenet of Libertarianism, as well as the idea that every human being has a right to pursue happiness in their way. Some people even define it more broadly with no allegiance to a particular political party or political system. It is based primarily on the belief in a republic, which was the most popular political ideology during its founding.
Libertarians believe in self-defense as part of individual liberty. Many do not believe in allowing privately owned guns, even if not for profit. Moreover, they think that guns should only be allowed as long as they are restricted to those who pass rigorous background checks and training requirements. The difference is that a Conservative and a Libertarian is quite progressive. Moreover, Conservatives are opposed to change. As a result, they also hold tightly to traditional values in terms of dress and public behavior.
Such rhetoric in the Soviet Union was a precursor to the evils that followed. To quote from Gulag :. Likewise, wokes see themselves as morally superior to non-wokes. Also, they and their children often have to endure reeducation in the form of critical race theory, which is taught in corporate and government seminars and in K classrooms.
Such humiliation was common but much more severe in the Soviet Union. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the winning faction of Marxists proceeded to exile, imprison or shoot their former comrades in the losing faction for having a different interpretation of Marxism.
A similar dogmatic mindset can be seen in the way that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attack their fellow progressives for not being radical enough. Woman of color? AOC is whiter than this Italian writer and has immensely greater political power and privilege. She and others of her ilk want Americans to see themselves through their actual or imagined epidermis and then are surprised by the backlash.
As another warning to wokes, George Orwell experienced firsthand how communists turn on each other. His book, Homage to Catalonia , describes his disillusionment in fighting with the communists against fascist Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
The Communist International undermined the locals. Gulag concludes with estimates of the number of prisoners and deaths in the Soviet Union. There were an estimated 28 million prisoners between and , in a country that had a population of million in Some historians have tried to calculate how many of them died, but archival data are not reliable. The Black Book of Communism gives a figure of 20 million.
Whatever the number, communism, like fascism, is not something to be celebrated or endorsed, especially by those who espouse social justice. This book is a much easier read than Gulag but is also an indictment of communism. It is largely based on interviews with an year-old German who ended up East Berlin as a kid after his family became refugees at the end of World War II. He would go on to escape to West Berlin, where in , he would watch the construction of the Berlin Wall, which would separate him from his family in East Berlin.
Later, he would lead two efforts to dig a tunnel from West Berlin to East Berlin so that his family and friends, as well as the family and friends of the other diggers, could escape to the West. Not only was it dangerous work, but if the diggers were discovered by the East German police, they could be imprisoned, tortured, or shot. The same for their families in East Germany. There was a high probability of being discovered, because the East German Stasi had thousands of spies in both East and West Berlin, including in government agencies in West Berlin.
In fact, hundreds of East Germans were caught trying to escape over the wall, under the wall, or, using forged papers, through checkpoints between the East and West. It speaks to their desire for freedom that they were willing to risk being shot or spending years in solitary confinement in a dreadful East German prison.
Stasi files, which were opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, document the surveillance, repression and brutalities employed to keep East Germans from attempting to escape.
There was a thick file on virtually every family. A takeaway from the book is the same as the takeaway from Gulag : Communism, like fascism, is not something to be celebrated or endorsed, especially by those who espouse social justice. Many decades ago, when I was in eighth grade, the nuns at my parochial school showed a film of the Nazi death camps being liberated, complete with footage of the stacks of bodies, the piles of hair and eyeglasses, the half-burned corpses in the ovens, and the emaciated prisoners with blank stares who had somehow stayed alive.
Wondering how humans could be so cruel to other humans, I bought the page book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , when it came out in paperwork. That led me to a lifetime of reading history, literature and moral philosophy in trying to find the answer.
For the first two decades of my intellectual journey, I almost never ran across a book or movie that told the story of the evils of communism. I recognized the intellectual disconnect in the eyes of the gentleman accepting my handshake —I have many times.
From those who know me less well or not at all, the eye of suspicion and repulsion for my political association is palpable. Rather than offended, I am deeply and profoundly saddened.
I admit. For me, its reading was an empathic exercise eliciting physical pain. However, in the split second it took me to fully exhale a calculated and measured breath, my senses realigned with my mental faculties leaving me more convinced than before that I was and am in the right place. If you ask one hundred Libertarians why they are in the party, you are likely to get one hundred different answers. By definition, we are the very antithesis of a homogeneous group.
The only principle upon which we soundly agree is the exclusion of intrusive government intervention in our lives — and the lives of others. We practice the active defense of those with whom we disagree. That is the key —the key factor dissecting Libertarians from Republican, Democrat, or Green Party members with whom we would otherwise align.
If that alignment includes aggression toward another, we categorically reject it. We reject the additional trauma of government. Seen or unseen, it is the barrel of a gun or its equivalent aimed at your head. We will take your life physically or in the form of your property.
As such, Libertarian ideology falls outside the attempted utopias of our political counterparts. Despite the criticism of each toward the other in instances involving the abuse of power, when it serves their particular purpose, Republicans, Democrats, and Greens alike embrace the opportunity, falsely, to tax our country into prosperity, to ban our country into safety, or to legislate our country into morality.
Like remedies that merely suppress symptoms rather than seek a cure, the result is an ill and dysfunctional society. Individuals are inherently free to make choices for themselves and must accept responsibility for the consequences of the choices they make.
No individual, group, or government may rightly initiate force against any other individual, group, or government. Libertarians reject the notion that groups have inherent rights. We support the rights of the smallest minority, the individual. Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.
Recognizing that the education of children is a parental responsibility, we would restore authority to parents to determine the education of their children, without interference from government. We favor a free market health care system. We recognize the freedom of individuals to determine the level of health insurance they want if any , the level of health care they want, the care providers they want, the medicines and treatments they will use, and all other aspects of their medical care, including end-of-life decisions.
People should be free to purchase health insurance across state lines. Retirement planning is the responsibility of the individual, not the government. Libertarians would phase out the current government-sponsored Social Security system and transition to a private voluntary system.
The proper and most effective source of help for the poor is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals. We believe members of society will become even more charitable and civil society will be strengthened as government reduces its activity in this realm. The protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of government. Government is constitutionally limited so as to prevent the infringement of individual rights by the government itself.
The principle of non-initiation of force should guide the relationships between governments. We support the maintenance of a sufficient military to defend the United States against aggression. The United States should both avoid entangling alliances and abandon its attempts to act as policeman for the world. We oppose any form of compulsory national service. The defense of the country requires that we have adequate intelligence to detect and to counter threats to domestic security.
This requirement must not take priority over maintaining the civil liberties of our citizens. The Constitution and Bill of Rights shall not be suspended even during time of war. Intelligence agencies that legitimately seek to preserve the security of the nation must be subject to oversight and transparency. We oppose the use of torture and other cruel and unusual punishments, without exception. American foreign policy should seek an America at peace with the world.
Our foreign policy should emphasize defense against attack from abroad and enhance the likelihood of peace by avoiding foreign entanglements. We would end the current U. We recognize the right of all people to resist tyranny and defend themselves and their rights. We condemn the use of force, and especially the use of terrorism, against the innocent, regardless of whether such acts are committed by governments or by political or revolutionary groups.
We support the removal of governmental impediments to free trade. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders. Libertarians embrace the concept that all people are born with certain inherent rights. Members of private organizations retain their rights to set whatever standards of association they deem appropriate, and individuals are free to respond with ostracism, boycotts, and other free market solutions.
We support election systems that are more representative of the electorate at the federal, state, and local levels. As private voluntary groups, political parties should be free to establish their own rules for nomination procedures, primaries and conventions.
Their ideas, even the ones others may consider as political, are rearranged to fit within the economic. Since the focus is on the individual, human agency is assumed to be at its peak. Such a man has self- esteem; rarely runs for power. In short, the individualism that this theory desires for human beings is one where freedom is maximised. By coupling this freedom with responsibility, individuals look for ways by which their freedom do not interfere with those of others.
Free individuals amalgamate within a society by setting up rules that ascertain maximum liberty for each and every individual while minimising interference from other individuals. Historically, governments have had the role of implementing such rules. However, over time, as a Libertarian would argue, governments have taken more roles; and alongside those lines have turned into a centralised powerhouse.
Most political and government slurs are vividly ways of the government for decreasing individual liberty. With decreased liberty, governments step in to give back what they should not have had taken in the first place. However, since this is their only miserable way of gaining legitimacy, they hold on to these legacy forms of the political.
Any attempt at savouring 20th century political systems is a reactionary act. New times call for new structures, or the absence thereof. The internet makes most political structures obsolete. Technocracy escalates freedom by increasing transparency.
Proliferation of transparent structures make oppression by sources of power less likely. Concentration of power comes hand in hand with withholding information from the public. The greatest of these truths withheld from the public is how economics truly works.
Libertarians educate themselves the liberating rules of economics to increase their opportunities in life. They understand class as a structure, but do not consider it limiting. They understand the main fight is not of class struggles, and that giving money to the poor is a temporary fix.
For them, the collective good is to increase prosperity: that is, to increase living conditions for everyone. In a healthy market, as the rich get richer, the poor get richer too.
What causes poverty? It's the original state, the default and starting point. The real question is what causes prosperity? In spite of its personal nature, Libertarianism seems to be defending a set of values mutual amongst most advocates.
Individualism, individual rights, spontaneous order, the rule of law, limited government, free markets, the virtue of production, natural harmony of interests, and peace Boaz, are the resounding concepts found spread over most Libertarian articles. More accessible critiques amongst Libertarian concepts, usually by Marxists, are to target individualism, support for free markets, and the minimal state.
These accusations have little basis in either their definitions or assumptions given to build a theory. Libertarians, as self-educated or autodidacts who have educated themselves to be differentiated from Liberals, are sharp at spotting the falsehood of these statements. David Boaz was clear in his pen and aware of the dangers of partial definitions when he clarified the main concepts of Libertarianism.
Figure 1 The scope of Libertarianism emphases where it starts and where it ends; and where it does not venture. Note that Marxists usually accuse Liberals to dwell in the left no go zone. A radical change within a society may force a society to adapt and change lifestyle sooner than a natural one. Dominance of a ruler or economic regulations might have the same effect for that matter. In all three cases, the system dominates its constituent elements.
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