Be Optimistic, Libertarians!
If you are a conservative of the modern stripe, like men such as Gingrich, Romney, Perry, Santorum, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Coulter, or a million other political talking heads, you are a progressive. The 12 reasons why:
- One must rabidly advocate “small government,” but blindly embrace a huge military as a part of the same government.
- On a similar note, one must lionize the Founding Fathers’ vision of a decentralized federal government, but wholly ignore the impulse amongst those same great men against a large standing military.
- One must assert the right of a sovereign nation to self-determination, unless one doesn’t agree with what is eventually determined.
- One must never cede to the state even an angstrom of the civil liberties guaranteed in our founding documents, unless the state assures one that it for one’s own safety.
- One must advocate the right to bear arms, but must clamor for the confiscation of weapons from people in other countries.
- One must rage against any attempt by those bastards in the federal government, in their haughty disdain for the common man and his “uneducated choices,” to mold society via authoritarian fiat, unless they are acting as “our bastards” and exporting authoritarian government overseas.
- One must believe in the sanctity of life and that life begins at conception, but must also be totally okay with the eventuality of pregnant women as “collateral damage.”
- One must advance the ideal of government frugality, but one must never deny any expense request the military-industrial complex may make, no matter how extravagant.
- One must sit atop his Hayekian high horse and decry government intervention in domestic economic processes, but must embrace the involuntary imposition of American-style consumerism upon those in foreign lands.
- Never trust “big government,” unless the same leviathan tells us whom we must see as our enemies, i.e. who we must all fear, and yet ideate about killing.
- One must defend against the onslaught of the secularist rabble on thoroughgoing theists, unless one finds secularism as currently expedient in another country.
- Last but not least, one must live by the truism that one ought “do unto others that which you would have them do unto you,” unless you don’t feel like it and the “others” live in a different country.
Add another: One must unwaveringly support NeoKeynesian economic policy and constantly disregard the Broken Window Fallacy.
Today, you have no choice, despite being able to vote between two parties. Freedom is the only answer, and that which the Right once was is now called Libertarianism. Abandon the title Republican. If you understand the past and where we need to be headed, you are a Libertarian…
