I Am a Libertarian Fundamentalist

Okay, you got me, I admit it. All this time you've called us Libertarians "fundamentalists," associating us with people who want to kill gays and Jews and people who draw pictures of some guy who lived 14 centuries ago.

Well, you know what? I am a Libertarian fundamentalist. I absolutely believe, at a fundamental level, that it is wrong to initiate force. And I can and have defended that position logically from first principles. I'll never understand why you statists think that not using force to get what you want is a bad thing.

See, that's the thing: you're fundamentalists, too! You just don't want to admit it, unlike me. You fundamentally believe that you—or actually, some armed gang of thugs that you like—gets to initiate force against the rest of us, telling us whom we can marry, whom we can do business with, what we can build on our own property, and who the bad guys are in a foreign land that we get to slaughter en masse. You even think that it's right to use force to tell us what we can do with our own bodies. Now I ask you: which of us sounds more like the religious fundamentalists?

The difference between your fundamentalism and ours is, you have nothing to fear from us. If you don't like the free market, don't participate in it! Get together with like-minded people and form a commune. Start a business and give your employees shares in the company. Form all the labor unions and central banks and Commerce Departments that you want. Just don't force anyone else to go along with it if they don't want to. That's all we ask.

You try and lump us in with fundamentalists who are completely intolerant of people who aren't like them, to the point where they oppress and even kill them. But which of us really fits that mold? In our system, we'll let you do things your way with like-minded people. But your system does not grant the same consideration to us—or, for that matter, to anyone else who might have ideas contrary to your holy writ, the laws your state passes that all of us are forced to obey.

You lump us in with people who are intolerant of other viewpoints, but we're not the one stifling the free expression of people who express ideas that are politically incorrect. You say we're antisocial, but we're not the ones advocating the use of force to stop people engaging in voluntary transactions. You say we hate the poor, but we're not the ones stifling the poor and small businesses with everything from regulations written by corporate lobbyists to the Minimum Wage to the Inflation Tax, the most regressive tax there is.

Sorry, we're just not that impressed when we hear that from people who support a state that drone-bombs children; who gives whistleblowers the choice between exile, and incarceration after an unfair trial where they won't get to put on a defense; who thinks that they should get to look in on each and every aspect of their lives—when we can't even videotape your armed thugs that you call "police," not even in public while they're on the job. Especially when you claim that we all agreed to it because we can vote, or didn't move away or whatever.

We're not the ones who believe in Original Sin, unlike you who insist that people are greedy and evil and malicious and claim that's why we need a government to keep people in line. We are absolutely baffled that you somehow want a government that, following your claim to its logical conclusion, will be comprised of these very same greedy, evil, and malicious people—and in fact, the worst of them, who are motivated to seek power and control over others—the Divine Rights you claim government gets.

We're not the ones engaging in the Argument from Morality. "Oh, without government, what would stop you from going around and killing a bunch of people?" Look, you might need babysitters to keep you in line, but don't project your psychopathic tendencies on the rest of us! (Really, you probably should seek professional help.)

You say we're extremists. You say we're going too far. You say we want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Well, yeah, we do! Because it's Rosemary's Baby we're talking about. From the moment states came into this world, naked, ugly, and screaming, they created division, slavery, and war. The earliest legal code we know of, the Code of Ur-Nammu, divided the population into free people and slaves. Their "justice" consisted of Ordeal by Water. The Code of Hammurabi even had a fugitive slave clause. From the start, it was government that invented bigotry, slavery, and war.

And religion. Yes, it was the state that invented organized religion as a way of controlling the masses. For most of history, it was the religious leaders in power, and church members in the military, swearing oaths to whichever official god or gods the state claimed was the real one this time, trust us. Separation of church and state only came about in the last few centuries. Before then, they were inextricably intertwined, and always had been.

You say your Holy Government is to thank for ending slavery. You say your Holy Government is to thank for the economy, the emergence of the middle class, and the advance of science. But tell me this: why did none of this happen for the thousands of years your precious states dominated the world? Why was it only when we started getting these ideas of individual liberty, personal autonomy, and free markets that progress was finally made? Why is there no reference to anyone objecting to slavery before the 1600s? Why did it take one and a half millennia from the invention of the steam engine in ancient Greece to when it was finally being used to drive industry, coinciding perfectly with the advent of libertarian ideas? You say government invented the Internet, but why didn't they do it thousands of years ago? Why didn't we land on the moon in 1969 BC? Why did none of those things happen until we started freeing up markets and reducing government intrusion?

And why is it that the economic improvements of the poor and working class improved at their greatest rate by far in 19th century America, where the economy was one of the freest in history?

You blame us for slavery. But it was the free market innovation of the underground railroad that was able to get slaves to safety, even as the Federal government used its US Marshals to recapture them. Your wonderful state even arrested those who helped them escape and put them on trial; it was only the libertarian concept of Jury Nullification that set them free, a concept you statists almost universally hate. Your Holy Government ended up denying trial by jury to many of these accused slaves for that reason, mimicking the very actions King George III took decades earlier, that was one of the big criticisms mentioned in the Declaration of Independence as a reason for America breaking away from Great Britain.

You blame us for segregation. But segregation was the result of laws, passed by your Holy Government because businesses weren't discriminating! We ask you repeatedly why they would need to pass a law if businesses were doing it anyway; you have no answer. You certainly have no answer for why these laws had to be repeatedly amended to hold business owners and even employees responsible if they don't police these laws. It was law-breakers like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. who are responsible for this atrocity being overturned, not your Holy Government who fought it tooth and nail. And while I'm at it, stop giving the Democratic Party credit when they're the ones who created the segregation laws in the first place and actually fought the Civil Rights Act in Congress, going so far as to filibuster it in the Senate. That wasn't usdoing that.

You say we hate competition and want monopolies. But even after repeated requests, you can't point to one single example of a free market monopoly. And yet, your Holy Government creates monopolies all over the place—power, phone, cable—and you seem to think it's just fine! Whenever a libertarian complains about this, you say they're "natural monopolies." Well, if they're natural monopolies, how come they have to be maintained by the force of the state?

You say we hate workers and don't like labor unions. Well, when labor unions started in this country in the 1800s, your Holy Government fought them! You blame groups like the Pinkertons for being armed thugs murdering striking workers. In reality, there isn't the first piece of evidence suggesting that the Pinkertons acted in any way that wasn't defensive. The horror stories you mention, like the Lattimer Massacre or the Ludlow Massacre, were actually committed by the local police or the National Guard or even the US Army.

Labor unions in this country started as mutual aid societies, which we applaud. The reason why we don't like unions today is because of what your Holy Government has done to them. You see, back before government corporatized and monopolized them, unions had to actually persuade members to join—meaning they had to give workers benefits that made it worth their dues. But now, in many states, workers are not only forced to join a union, they're often forced to join one particular union. Another monopoly your Holy Government created, yet you say we're the monopolists.

And in other states, many so-called "right to work" states, you go the other way: you make it illegal for a business to contract with a union if that's what they want to do. You try to compare us to religious fundamentalists to make us look like hypocrites, but who could possibly be a bigger hypocrite than you?

You even have your apologists, the people who say the crimes of your Holy State aren't crimes at all. Cops are caught on video beating to death a mentally-ill homeless guy and get off scot-free, and you say, "Well, you don't know the whole story!" Your Holy Government turns our cities into war zones waging its insane War on Drugs, and you tell us it's for our own good. "You don't want people smoking dope, do you? That would be bad!" Your state does things like collect unfair taxes that would get a civilian arrested as part of an organized crime mob if he tried it, but when the IRS does it it's okay because they're part of the Holy Order.

And then, of course, you apologists try and write off everything bad government does as "corruption." You deny that taxes are force, yet when Eric Garner is strangled to death by police simply for having untaxed cigarettes, you claim it was because they were corrupt. But your own government says otherwise. From the police officer's commanders, to the District Attorney, to a grand jury, to the state government itself, they all said that these officers acted appropriately. This is not the system being corrupt; it's just the system.

They drone-bomb children, and you make excuses. They arrest and convict blacks far more often than whites who commit the same crimes, and you make excuses. They keep competitors off the ballot, and stifle them raising money to oppose incumbents, and use gerrymandering to draw up "safe districts," and you make excuses. They tell us lie after lie after lie after lie, to get us into war, to pass more health insurance cronyism, or to spy on our everyday activities, and you make excuses.

You insist that the rest of us follow these moral rules, but say it's perfectly okay when your God disobeys them with impunity. Your God the state.

Probably the worst of your apologetics is when you tell us that if we don't like it, we can leave. First problem? Hmmm...why don't we leave and form our own country based on the ideals of small government and personal liberty? Oh, wait a minute, we did—this is it! So if you don't like it, why don't you leave? If you can't leave us this one place in the world to be free, then it's because you know your argument is disingenuous. It's belief-in-belief, nothing more.

But that's not even the worst of it. The worst is that your Holy Government gets to decide whether or not we're allowed to leave! We have to get their permission via a passport that they can revoke at any time, we have to submit to searches at customs and TSA checkpoints, and they claim the right to indefinitely detain us at any given time. And even if we do manage to get out of the country, the IRS still makes us pay Income Tax, even if we're not working in America or even setting foot there! And to stop being an American citizen, they make us pay an expatriation tax of $2,350! And even then, the bureaucratic process to go through all of that can take years. It was far cheaper and easier for a serf to leave his feudal Lord than it is for us to stop being a citizen. No, we can't "just leave."

If you continue to support a system that demands violence against peaceful people, your own fellow humans, then we will oppose you. Not because we're some ultra-religious cult who has to go after anyone who disagrees with us, but because your position is morally indefensible, and is responsible for almost all of the violence and misery throughout human history. Even just looking at the 20th century, governments of the world murdered 262 million people not including wars and punishments for capital crimes. 262 million. The number of private murders in the same time period? Less than 9 million.

The thing is, we're not the ones positing a central authority with the power to command our lives. We're not the ones advocating violence against nonbelievers.

If you want to try something different, we'll let you, unless you're initiating force against others. But what does your state do when someone tries something different, like make an online marketplace that functions outside of the control of its High Priests? They put the person in prison for life!

We're not the ones who believe in magic. You're the ones claiming that wealth can be created by a printing press or a central bank; you're the ones claiming that reality changes just because politicians put words on paper and call it "the law"; you're the ones claiming that government gets to pick winners and losers in the economy; and you're the one who insists that your Omnipotent State can get all the information it needs to completely manage every aspect of the economy when not even industry leaders can get that information about their own flagship products.

Libertarians believe that the only justifiable use of violence is in defense against an initiation of force—it's a last resort, and even at that, it's wrong to use any more violence than is reasonably necessary to stop the infraction. But to the state, violence is not a last resort, but an inherent quality of the system. Your defense of the state means that you agree that this violence is moral and justified.

The only thing libertarians require to change our mind is evidence. Show us the evidence, and we will change our minds. That's how most of us became libertarians in the first place! We're something like 3% of the electorate; most of us were born in Democratic or Republican families. We switched when we looked at the evidence and saw all of these horrendous problems with statism. So if you can actually show evidence for what you claim—that, say, competing police agencies will result in the chaos and destruction you claim, enough to justify the force used to maintain monopoly police forces—then we'll reconsider our position. But you can't, even after repeated requests to do so. All you do is say how horrible and irrational we are—even after we've shown you the evidence that it just isn't so, evidence we didn't need to show anyway because the burden of proof is on you. We shouldn't have to disprove your justifications of the use of force against peaceful people, because you never bothered to prove them to begin with.

You say we're fundamentalists, but we don't really have anything even approaching faith. We are nowhere near arrogant enough to think that our way is the only way. Not like you do, in the powers your Holy State—just a group of people—has, that no other group of people could possibly have, ever. Just because they're a state. If that's not faith, then what the hell is?

We're libertarians because we don't know the best way to run people's lives—and from what we've seen of your Holy State, politicians and bureaucrats certainly don't know, either. We take the humble position; you take the position that you're so certain that you get to use force to make everyone else comply, and then insult and degrade and marginalize anyone who dares to question it.

I am a fundamentalist. I am fundamentally opposed to the state, because if the last 5000 years have proven anything, it's that government is a primitive holdover, causing violence and wars and economic damage, while preserving the wealth of the ruling classes and their cronies over the poor and the common people—and that this only started changing once individual liberty and free market principles were put into action. But you agree with the primitive, barbaric actions of the obsolete state, and like a creationist trying to deny evolution, you use every woo tactic possible to defend your indefensible state.

So if I'm a fundamentalist, then what are you?