TitaniumTeddyBear

My excuse for not staying on "libertarian" infested discussion boards any more.

What is a “libertarian” anyway?

If you look up what the word means you will find that it means someone who has a passionate respect for the importance of individual rights and freedom.

This is something that damn near everyone can get behind. It’s common sense to anyone in a democracy that one’s rights and freedom are vitally important.

So then why has “libertarian” become such a dirty word?

Well you see friends it’s because many of the people who call themselves “libertarians” are actually nothing of the sort.

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Running dogs of capitalism! Why not running cats?!

A bold statement that headline is. I shall do my best to justify it.

I’ve heard that vikings believed that every weapon had a ‘spirit’, and that if you wanted to be effective with that weapon you needed to work with that spirit, not against it. It’s possible to use a bow as a club and beat people to death with it, but it isn’t very effective because you are working against the ‘spirit’ of the bow.

There is an idea here that is very important: if you want to be effective you need to work with something’s design, not against it.

This idea is obviously correct but where things get controversial is that I think the design of capitalism is such that any social good that results from capitalism is not only accidental, it is actually a market failure.

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I’ve recently been reading Penn Jillette’s lovely book ‘God No!’ It’s meant to be about atheism but he actually spends most of the book talking about show business, freedom, how much he loves his family and the joy of life. It’s a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.

I really like Penn and I agree with him on a large number of things. But where we differ is that he feels that it is wrong of the government to raise taxes to help the poor.

Well, I am sorry Penn, and I’d love to be able to discuss these issues with you some time, but the only way one can believe that is if they’ve never seen real poverty. continue reading…

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