How To Really Piss Off A Libertarian

There are a lot of things that piss off libertarians. Most of it involves wasteful government spending, income taxes, starting wars, and generally just stepping over people's personal rights. However, there are two things that libertarians like myself take personal offense to. I'd like to take this time to set the record straight on a few things.

One thing that really pisses me off is libertarian posers. These are usually people associated with the Republican Party that "claim" to be libertarian, while not actually practicing anything libertarian. There are a few liberals who are libertarian posers, like Bill Maher, who only seem to identify libertarianism with free speech and legalizing drugs, but for the most part, it's the Republicans who seem to be doing this. About the only thing they seem to have in common with libertarians is their belief that taxes are bad. While I agree taxes are bad, if you're for big spending, like the kind you have to support a certain war we're fighting right now, you have no reason to open your yapper on the matter. If you're going to increase spending, at least have the guts to raise taxes to support your stupid plan so we don't borrow money and go into debt. The reason they don't do this is because they know their plans are stupid, will never work, and Americans won't support them because they would feel the pain in their pockets and would wake up to the fact they're being swindled.

Also, if you supported bailouts for big corporations, you have no reason to talk against taxes. Just because you read a few Ayn Rand novels, that does not make you a libertarian. Just because you hate Democrats, that does not make you a libertarian. If you support bans on firearms, the continuation of the War on Drugs (even for pot), the use of torture on prisoners, the Patriot Act, all these wasteful spending programs, are against gays, think there needs to be more religion in government, and have any other anti-freedom positions, YOU ARE NOT A LIBERTARIAN! I know you want to be cool like us, but you just aren't. You are nothing more than a big government loving groupie that's in the closet. If you want wars, bailouts for your corporate friends, and all of this stuff, just come out and say it already, "I'm for big government and am not a libertarian."

Now the other thing that raises my blood pressure, and I've heard it a lot lately, especially on the news, is the use of the term "free market" in a way it wasn't intended to be used. Perhaps libertarians need to get another term for free market, like laissez-faire economics, but free market sounds much better and is easier to spell. I think "open market" might be better, but I think I heard a Republican use that term the other day, so there goes that idea. However, it still seems like our term has been hijacked. This has happened a lot here recently as bad politicians have tried to improve their image by using terms to describe their policies that really have nothing to do with the original meanings of those words. I really wouldn't consider Democrats to be liberal, and I really wouldn't consider Republicans to be conservative. Democrats want government to control everything and that's not a new, or "liberal" idea, and Republicans aren't conserving freedom.

As it is right now, lots of people believe that we have had a free market for a long time now where companies have ran loose and our government hasn't done anything to regulate them. This is not the case since there was, is, and will continue to be more government regulation. Lots of people think regulation is only stuff that holds back companies, but I think it can work both ways and harm and help companies. America has never had a free market, or anything close to one, especially here recently.

What exactly is a free market then? By libertarian standards, a free market is where you have no government intervention into the markets. The government does not give businesses money to support them and they don't pass overbearing laws to hurt them. Companies live and die based on how they treat their customers and their workers. If a company makes an inferior product that is harming people, they change their ways and survive, or nobody will buy from them and they'll go under. If a company is harming their workers, or not giving them enough pay for the job, they should have a hard time finding workers and if nobody is working for them, or they have cheap, unskilled workers, they aren't producing a good product, or a product in enough quantity to survive.

As of right now we basically have something close to a fascist economic system, where the government allows people to run their businesses, but the government is really the one who can call the shots and is there to help them out if they get in trouble. Now when I say fascism, I'm not talking about the racist, social positions that the Nazis took, but right now I'm just talking about the economic beliefs, which are still bad and do harm. Some people think what we have now is socialism, but that would be where everything would be ran by the government and you wouldn't have private property and so forth. Of course fascism is basically socialism with this false sense that people actually own property and control their own lives. In this system, some bad businesses aren't allowed to fail, while overbearing regulations hurt good businesses. This has become more apparent in the recent economic collapse and bailouts and both Democrats and Republicans are supporting this fascist system of economics. They have shown no problem in spending trillions of of our tax dollars in bailing out big corporations like AIG, CitiBank, Bank of America, GM, and other failures. The ones that do show disgust at this spending, tend to be the ones that still support other bailouts on smaller scales, or for the War in Iraq, War on Drugs, etc.

If you look at some of the economic regulations, some are introduced, or supported by big corporations. Why? It's because regulations can help them get rid of their smaller rivals. Back in 2005, Wal-Mart's CEO supported higher minimum wage laws (I'll post more on minimum wage laws sometime soon). Some people would think this would be a generous thing on his part, until you realize that this would cause a lot of smaller mom and pop stores to go out of business while Wal-Mart could easily survive. A lot of Wal-Mart's business is done in other countries and they have the resources to fund an increase while smaller stores can't.

You CAN NOT and DO NOT have free markets when you have governments bailing out companies and industries, handing out big government contracts, passing legislation that hurts small businesses, and basically requiring that government choose a side between a company, or their customers. It creates an unbalance in a natural economic system where good ideas should be allowed to flourish and bad ideas die out. Just like cane toads in Australia, or kudzu vines in the southern United States, whenever humans try to control nature, or use it to our advantage, we usually end up messing up the natural balance. A free market is just like natural selection with evolution, but considering that most Republicans now don't even believe in evolution, I don't know why they keep going around saying their practicing free market capitalism.

I can understand why the Republicans and Democrats wouldn't want to tell the truth and call what we have a fascist economic system. However, they don't have to take the libertarians' term. They should just make up a totally new term. Better yet, I'll just make one up for them. How about cane toad economics?