Monday 19 July 2010

Sine qua non

It seems the most unlikely characters are claiming to be libertarians. Some no doubt would say they are libertarian instinctively, and its only in their conscious, thinking minds that they are rabid state-worshipping, jackboot-licking authoritarians.

As others have noted, this could be an inchoate attempt to do to libertarianism what they have done to liberalism: i.e. take over the word, twist it into something else, something that stinks of dirty socialist socks. The motivation for this would be envy and fear. Leftwingers hate libertarians, because we expose the misanthropy of their worldview and their economic theories as busted flush fallacies.

In one sense this could be a good sign, imitation being a form of flattery, but libertarians must rise and challenge these imposters, and the better we understand what we're talking about the better we can lay down some sine qua non libertarian principles that will flush out these charlatans and self-deluders.

I guess I'm really talking to myself, here, so I continue to try to educate myself, working my way through Hayek, von Mises, Lord Acton, Sir William Blackstone and others. Without knowledge, we must rely on rhetoric and shallow emotionalism. Better to leave that to our foes.

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