Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
This has been a tough spring for Libertarian politicos. Ron Paul’s campaign has collapsed,
and Rand Paul – after reportedly telling his father only 30 minutes beforehand, has
endorsed the power-hungry neocon poster boy, Mitt Romney.
Romney’s politics reach a level of banal corruption only possible in the “small government
big market” Republican party. After appeasing his home-state voters with Obamacare Massachusetts’s
style, he then campaigns against the real thing, claiming that his only moral beef with
fascist medicine is geography. “State’s rights” is a yawn-inducing moral horror,
the brain-twisting claim that it is perfectly moral for governments to drive you out of
your State if you hate their laws, but to drive you out of the country is just plain
wrong.
Bashing the Fed – Government or Reserve – is a time-honored tradition among conservative
politicians – it’s typically political and tragically believable among libertarians.
Everyone who wants to be the boss claims to hate the boss; governors do their nasty business
in their own states, and then defend their actions with the ridiculous appeal to “State’s
rights.” States are not people, they don’t have rights; the immorality of violence is
not zip code specific – the objections are all too obvious to bother pointing out. Also,
States both need and drive the power of the Federal government – State A bribes its
population with some goodie, thus making it less attractive to businesses, and so bribes
business to set up shop with tax holidays and regulatory exemptions – and if these
don’t work, it pushes the Federal government to mirror its own corruption across the country,
so it does not lose out to other states.
Theories flourish as to why Rand Paul endorsed Romney. Some say he was threatened, which
is perfectly believable (remember Ross Perot dropping out of the presidential race in 1992
after threats against his family?) some say he is angling for a VP spot. Some say he is
laying the groundwork for a 2016 presidential bid (which really means that some people still
can’t give up their fantasy of a political solution).
A VP spot would be the perfect banishment to obscurity. VPs rarely become presidents,
and are perfect whipping boys for any fact or truth, as Dan Quayle found when he dared
to mention the social problems caused by single motherhood. Those in the crosshairs are made
VPs, in the age old commandment to keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
Threats are the very essence of politics – and with a vicious and hysterical media always
ready to stroke and provoke the Christ-taunting mob, nothing factual need get in the way of
the modern print lynching. Libertarians know this most of all – the moment that Ron Paul
started to really gain in the polls, and the media was chided by Jon Stewart for ignoring
him, they just started calling him a racist, and were done with him. All Ron Paul’s education
and eloquence and obvious passion for libertarian solutions meant nothing. Floating reason and
evidence in mainstream society is like trying to teach Latin to a sugar-crashing toddler.
All you do is insult teaching.
Read any mainstream article on Ayn Rand – do you see any actual criticisms of her arguments?
Hell no, you just read a steady pee-stream of bitter invective and cowardly insults.
She’s had tens of millions of readers, sixty years of accumulating evidence – governments
grow, the West collapses, Europe goes first – and you still cannot read two sensible
words written about her. Look at your own life. When you make sensible arguments against
the State, do you get any kind of semi-intelligent rebuttal? Of course not. You’re just a hater,
man, you hate the poor and the sick, yer unpatriotic – and prolly a racist too!
Politicians in the past used schools to breed fools, knaves and scoundrels, to easier rule
and bribe them. We are all left with the legacy of these hollow-headed indoctrinations. People
who cannot think join mobs, in the fantasy that an aggregate of vacuity can produce gravity.
They surge back and forth across the cultural wasteland like the zombies they are, sniffing
for and feeding on any stray brains that cross their path. The broken attack the whole for
exposing their brokenness; the rational strive to reason with the mob, the bored Borg, the
haters who fear the only knowledge that really counts: self knowledge.
The goal of political action has been to try to appeal to self-interest of the mob. But
the mob has no self-interest, for its members have no self – if they did, they would have
fled the zombie army when it came to eat them. Libertarians say: “Freedom brings benefits
to the collective” – as if there is any such thing as a collective. The moment a libertarian
says that we should judge an idea by its value to individuals, he only feeds the State, since
the State provides so many heady benefits to those seeking power. What kind of power
would Obama have in a free, rational – but I repeat myself – society? None, because
his empty rhetoric would be about as appealing as a gas station serving sugar water. His
slogans would be laughed at – “the audacity of hope” makes about as much sense as mechanically
repeating “the ricochet of profits” during a business meeting, or “the mobility of
empiricism” at a physics conference. Zen headlines without reason and evidence would
be such an obvious con that people like Obama would end up slithering through the underworld
of petty confidence schemes, i.e. the Constitution.
So Obama loves the State. George Bush, Romney, Stalin, Pol Pot – they all love politics
and power, because it gives their empty words violent form; from syllables to subjugation
in the tick of a ballot box, how heady and addictive! Humanity has long been fascinated
by magic spells, by the manipulation of physical reality through language alone – usually
to ill effect – this is just an unconscious metaphor for political rhetoric, which starts
fires and mobs and wars by stoking the emptiness it both breeds and feeds on.
So when Libertarians say: “we will all be better off when we are free” – this is
a case that can only be made to each individual, and particular individuals – political individuals
– are far better off with state power. Corrupt and lazy businessmen; charismatic and useless
sophists; torpid and offensive artists; priests – the ultimate magicians in many ways – and
those teachers whose heavy self-hatred gives them nimble fingers to disassemble the minds
of the young – all worship the State. All benefit from the State, and all will oppose
political solutions.