3 Myths About Libertarianism Debunked

I'm baaack! Many apologies to anyone who reads this semi-regularly for my delay in posts. If you've read my bio, you know that my full-time job is as a yacht crew member and the end of the year is always crazy for us. Since December, I've been working 12-16 hour days almost every day, which leaves very little time, energy, or motivation to even keep up with current events nonetheless blog about them! But things have settled down a bit for now so I'll try and bang out a couple of blogs in the next week or two before things get crazy again.

Today, I want to tackle a few of the prominent misconceptions that seem to plague libertarianism that its detractors either don't fully understand or don't care to. Let's dive in.

1) Libertarians don't care about the poor, sick, or elderly
Really? I mean, really? Do you really think there is a huge, growing swath of individuals who really could care less if their own grandmothers died or that there are poor children in the U.S. and elsewhere without food to eat? Of course libertarians care about the elderly, poor, and sick. We just have a different notion of how to deal with social problems than many others.

First of all, we don't believe that using State initiated violence will ever be the way to solve any sort of complex societal problem. Problems like poverty and poor healthcare are extremely complex and have many origins. Using the state's monopoly on violence to rob individuals of their wealth to redistribute to other politically favored groups is hardly a panacea to problems that require more than just someone else's money to solve.

Contrary to popular opinion, libertarians don't want to throw granny off the cliff

Individuals, businesses, and communities need to be empowered to deal with the unique situations that each of them face that lead to lack of healthcare access or income inequality. While having access to resources, including money, is certainly part of solving any big scale problem, stealing someone's money and then handing it out to politically connected individuals and businesses does not appeal to libertarians who prefer to let people and businesses keep their money and voluntarily give their resources to charities and businesses that they believe do good work in helping to alleviate these problems.

Let's think about this for a second. If there was no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, or any other programs of those types, given the number of people who obviously care about access to healthcare and who wish to end world poverty, do you think all those millions of individuals would just sit idly by as people were dying in the streets because there was no government healthcare or safety net set in place for retirees? Or do you think that out of those millions of people in the U.S. who clearly care about the sick and elderly that maybe a few thousand of them across the nation might somehow take it upon themselves to start up organizations, charities, or businesses that address these problems and come up with any number of solutions unique to their location? Of course, we would all be much richer and have more resources with which to start such organizations, donate to them, or just to put towards aiding members of our family and friends because we wouldn't be robbed of a quarter of our money with each paycheck we take home to pay for the government-mandated solutions and the bureaucracy required to administer them.

Many libertarians much smarter and more prominent than me have dedicated many thousands of words and pages outlining a myriad of solutions to societal problems that don't require using State violence to rob citizens of their money and apply one size fits all solutions to these problems (see here, here, and a good one here for just a few examples). Perhaps the naysayers should check out some of these writings before just issuing blanket insults inferring that libertarians don't care about the sick, elderly, and poor just because we advocate addressing some of these problems using voluntary means rather than top-down, State-mandated solutions achieved through their monopoly of force and violence.

2) In a libertarian society, corporations would take over
One of the biggest myths about libertarianism comes from the majority of society being unable to distinguish between capitalism and crony capitalism. Despite tens of thousands of pages of new regulations passed and an ungodly number of pages added to our bloated and labyrinthine tax code each year, some people still operate under the misconception that we operate under some sort of "free market" system in the US. Similarly, despite over 100 regulatory agencies "overseeing" Wall Street and the banking industry, the crisis of 2008 is somehow blamed on the "unfettered free market" and "laissez-faire capitalism".  

While libertarians are certainly proponents of capitalism and free markets, what we have in the U.S. today is not anywhere close to a free market. Libertarians decry any sort of taxpayer funded corporate bailout like TARP, championed by conservatives and liberals alike, or any taxpayer funded corporate subsidy for that matter. In a libertarian society, corporations would have to earn their gargantuan status without the help of any sort of government privilege or taxpayer assistance. Despite what many liberals believe, regulations actually help many of the giant corporations and in fact are lobbied for by them because they know that their smaller competitors who operate under thinner profit margins cannot bear the cost of the added burden of compliance. 

Libertarians also differ from many conservatives in this regard in that while libertarians are pro-free markets and pro-capitalism, conservatives are more pro-business. There's a huge difference between the two because pro-business often means conferring special privileges on certain businesses or industries often under the guise of job creation or aiding the economy. Libertarians favor oil industry subsidies no more than they favor green energy subsidies; conservatives can make excuses for giving oil subsidies while denying green energy subsidies and vice versa. In other words, despite paying lip service to getting government out of people's pocketbooks, conservatives often have no problem finding some tax payer money in the coffers for their favored industries. As for liberals, despite their anti-corporation rhetoric, they certainly don't mind when their favored businesses receive taxpayer subsidies or get bailed out either. Libertarians are the only ones ideologically consistent in this position.

By denying the government the power to pick winners and losers in the market through subsidies, burdensome regulation, and costly new taxes, a libertarian society creates an environment where competition thrives and it's much harder to become a mega corporation without providing desired goods and services and treating employees fairly. In short, we would see fewer corporations, not more, and those corporations would achieve their status through fair means of competition, not cronyism, benefiting consumers and employees alike.

3) Libertarians are isolationists
If I had a nickel for every time I saw "libertarian" and "isolationist" in the same sentence, I could probably retire happily. This erroneous term is often used deliberately in neoconservative circles when they wish to smear libertarians for wanting to not spend another several hundred billion dollars fighting another war we have no business entering into.

Let's get this straight, North Korea is isolationist. They don't allow people to enter or leave their country, they engage in trade with virtually no one, reporters are rarely allowed to enter their country, and almost nothing is known about their culture and way of life except what information they allow to be disseminated.

Libertarians, by contrast, do not wish for the US to be like North Korea. We advocate free trade with everyone, including supposed enemies like Cuba and Iran, in the belief that trade between nations often fosters goodwill and friendship and reduces the likelihood that the parties will want to engage in a conflict with one another. We do not want to shut down our borders to outsiders and we encourage legal immigrants to enter our country and make a living. I fail to see how any of these beliefs make libertarians "isolationists".

Nonetheless, neoconservatives, and nowadays even liberals, like to invoke the term "isolationist" when they're trying to fearmonger us into another conflict or intervention. Libertarians prefer the term "non-interventionist" instead which more accurately depicts our views on foreign policy. We prefer the Constitutional approach to foreign policy in which we are authorized to defend our nation's borders and provide for a strong national defense, but not police the world and try and circumnavigate the globe wasting lives and resources trying to eradicate every baddy that ever lived and who's ever uttered a negative word against America.

John Quincy Adams instructed us that "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence for all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." As we enter a second decade of conflict in Afghanistan at an almost incalculable cost in lives, money, and resources, our views are everyday becoming more vindicated.

Even today, headlines are screaming out about a resurgence of al-Qaida in Iraq despite the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis already killed in a conflict we entered into based upon lies and propaganda and a war chest comprised of more money than every other country in the world combined. What does it say when the country with the largest, most expensive, and most powerful military in the world can't even keep one small country free from terrorists for more than a year? Maybe it says that we aren't being told the full story as to why these people hate us, which is why we can't win a conflict with them. Maybe it says that unless we commit to full occupation of the Middle East for the next 100 years as John McCain proposed, that we're fighting in a war we can't win and will only spawn ever more terrorists. Perhaps al-Qaida's resilience in Iraq has more to do with our decades long occupation and intervention in their land and affairs than the laughable notion that they hate us because we can eat Big Macs and they can't.

And yet the big government champions in both parties, including today's leadership of the supposed anti-war left, would have us enter into even more conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and now they are even sending troops into the depths of Africa. It will never end so long as we keep believing the myth spoon fed to us by our politicians that all this death and destruction is somehow good for the economy and job creation and keeps us safe from harm.

Libertarians certainly don't argue that there aren't bad people who have done bad things overseas, but our argument is that our intervention into their affairs has not made things better for their citizens and have actually made us less safe, not more, within our own borders. Our money and the lives of our men and women who have bravely chosen to serve our country are better served by actually defending our borders, not by meddling in the affairs of nations that never have and never will pose a direct threat to us.

Ron Paul continues his legacy as the champion of non-interventionism through his new think-tank, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. There, you can find loads of articles cutting through the warmongerer's BS as he continues his advocacy for a peaceful foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties at home.

While there are certainly many more myths about libertarianism out there that make me facepalm myself on a daily basis, I would say that these three are certainly some of the most common. Most of these misconceptions could be cleared up easily if people would take the time to actually read and educate themselves about libertarian philosophy rather than just foolishly believe that we advocate for something we haven't fully thought through. Hopefully this article or any of my others might inspire you to find out more about libertarianism. Given that it's not something we're ever taught in school nor will you find any fair treatment in it in the mainstream (or even alternative) media, you must seek out the information yourself, something I do every day of my life in order to become better informed.