With the Bush administration behind us and with the advent of the Obama regime, conservatives are despondent and depressed while liberals are aglow with hope and optimism. Actually both sides might have their feelings misplaced, as Obama might well turn out to be as much like Bush as Bush was like Clinton.
What’s important for libertarians to keep in mind in the coming four years is that our philosophy is not about how to reform or improve the statism that conservatives and liberals foist upon our nation. Our philosophy entails an alternative paradigm, one that is based on restoring individual freedom, free markets, private property, and limited government to our land.
As most everyone would agree, things are bad in America, both in terms of individual freedom and economic prosperity. Freedom and prosperity are getting squeezed by federal policies in both the foreign-policy and domestic-policy arenas. The common denominator to both arenas is big spending, big government, and less freedom.
In foreign policy, the advocates of big government have produced the ideal situation for themselves. The government goes abroad and kills, maims, tortures, and abuses people. The victims finally tire of this and strike back. The government then uses that blowback to justify doing more of what caused the problem in the first place. It also uses the blowback as the excuse to spend more money on the military and the military-industrial complex and as an excuse to suspend the civil liberties of the people. The cycle perpetuates itself indefinitely.
As long as people continue to buy into the conservative-liberal paradigm of empire, intervention, and the war on terrorism, our nation will remain mired in the big-government muck into which our nation has been plunged.
On the domestic side, Barack Obama threatens to be the biggest spender in U.S. history, bigger even than George W. Bush. Both liberals and conservatives have converted the federal government into an engine of welfare-state plunder and redistribution, one in which everyone is trying to get into everyone’s else’s pocketbook while at the same time doing his best to protect his own assets from being plundered.
How can this not have horrible ramifications for the American people? If welfare-state socialism and big spending were really a key to economic prosperity, then wouldn’t the Soviet Union still be around?
Maybe the Obama-Keynesian mindset is this: “While socialism and big spending plunge foreign countries into bankruptcy, they bring prosperity to America because we’re exceptional.”
Well, with all due respect, that’s idiocy. History has repeatedly shown that profligate governments bring down nations and they bring down freedom. They are a sure-fire recipe for tyranny, oppression, and impoverishment. The principle applies to the United States as much as it does to any other country.
Meanwhile, the drug war, the favorite federal program of both conservatives and liberals, remains in full force and effect. The U.S. military is champing at the bits to use the drug-war violence in Mexico, which is a direct consequence of the drug war, as the excuse to exercise its battle-tested prowess gained in Iraq and Afghanistan to the U.S. borderlands It’s just another example of how statist programs foisted on our nation by conservatives and liberals bring about chaos and crises, which then engender militarism, interventionism, big spending, big government, tyranny, and oppression.
In the coming four years, libertarians must resist the urge to come up with ways to fix or reform the conservative-liberal paradigm of empire, socialism, and interventionism. We must instead continue raising people’s vision to a completely different paradigm — the paradigm of libertarianism, which includes the following:
1.The dismantling of the U.S. government’s overseas empire.
2.The withdrawal of all overseas troops and discharging them into the private sector.
3.The end of all foreign aid.
4.The end of all federal involvement in foreign wars and disputes.
5.The repeal of all welfare-state programs.
6.The repeal of the federal income tax.
7.The separation of the economy and the state.
8.The end of the drug war.
9.The abolition of the Federal Reserve.
10.The restoration of sound money.
Libertarianism, not reformed statism, is the key to restoring freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony to our land. What greater legacy could we leave to future generations than to restore libertarianism to our land? What greater gift could we give ourselves?
