This article was written by Tom Carpenter and sent as a letter to the editor to a local newspaper in Arkansas.
Humans habitually think in simple, contrasting oppositions. We often think of hot and cold, light and dark, rich and poor, right and wrong, left and right, good and bad. We probably think this way because we have two sides to our bodies with two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears, and even two halves of our brains. But, sometimes thinking in twos can distort reality.
Consider the way people think about politics. People talk about conservatives and liberals, and they talk about Republicans and Democrats. Sometimes they may mention moderates and Independents, but even these are seen as simply half way points along a straight line from left to right or from Democrat to Republican.
However, if people think that protecting freedom is the most important goal in politics, then thinking only about conservative and liberal or Republican and Democrat just doesn’t work.
Conservatives often say they’re for property rights, small government, and low taxes. And, sometimes they even act in Congress to support these goals. That’s the positive message. Unfortunately, when conservatives are elected, they also sometimes forget their campaign promises and vote for larger government and more spending. For example, just a few years ago, these conservative Republicans supported the hugely expensive drug option for Medicare. There was a time when conservatives were opposed to social programs like Social Security and Medicare, which now they say they want to maintain.
And, there are more negatives that come with conservatives. Most of them are too eager to start wars and expand United States’ military commitments around the world. I’ve read that right now the United States has troops in one hundred and twenty-five of the roughly two hundred countries in the world. That’s madness!
Conservatives are also not very likely to be concerned about personal freedoms. Many conservatives see nothing wrong with prayer at events connected to government, and they even support so-called “faith based” initiatives. And, they don’t understand that most illegal immigrants are in the United States because they want to escape repression and want to work hard to get ahead. Conservatives are often unconcerned about the equal rights for gay people or other minorities. And finally, conservatives want to impose their personal, lifestyle choices on other people. Take for example their support for strict penalties for the use of marijuana or their lack of interest in people’s freedom to make their own end-of-life decisions.
On the other hand, liberals often care about maintaining a separation between religion and state. They are also more likely to be sympathetic to the plight of immigrants. They are likely to care if gay people have the same rights as others. They are more likely to want to de-criminalize the use of marijuana. These are all positive features of liberal thinking.
On the negative side, liberals seem unconcerned about property rights. They’re for bigger government with increased spending, and that, sooner or later, leads to taking more of people’s money through higher taxes. Right now the United States has borrowed almost thirteen trillion dollars and has promised over sixty trillion more in payments to Society Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs. And, liberals have just voted for massive increased spending for government-run health care. More insanity! From subsidies for corn growers to determining what type of light bulb we use, to wanting us all to have ID cards, to wanting a tax on soft drinks, they simply think that more government spending and control is the solution to every problem.
So, people wanting a free society, one that protects both property and civil rights, have to be looking for something better than either conservatism or liberalism.
That third, more consistent point of view is libertarianism. It starts with one central idea. People should be free to live their lives as they choose, just as long as they respect the equal rights of other people also to live as they choose. Because of this core belief, libertarians support property rights. They think people should have the right to keep or spend the money they earn by their own efforts on whatever they choose. And, libertarians also think that people have the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of sexual preference, freedom to use drugs as they think best, and other civil rights. In other words, people should have the freedoms of life, liberty, and property.
In terms of political parties, people who genuinely believe in freedom cannot support the Republican Party because of its history of going along with liberals to maintain big, intrusive government, its support for military expansionism, and its insensitivity for civil rights. Nor can freedom loving people support the Democrat Party because of its history and active support for expanding government control over people’s lives and its refusal to consider the long term effects of reckless spending which leads to unsustainable, huge deficits.
The only political party that consistently supports property and personal rights is the Libertarian Party. Of course, at present it is smaller than the two older parties. They take massive campaign contributions from corporations and special interests to create laws favorable to those interests, but the Libertarian Party doesn’t. Corporations and big labor know that they’d get no special treatment if Libertarians were elected.
So, given a choice between the conservative Republicans with its Tea Party shadow group on one side and liberal Democrats with its leftist special interest groups on the other, the only wise choice is to reject the traditional two dimensional, two party way of thinking and look to a rational third choice, one that systematically protects both property and civil rights. And that third choice is clearly the Libertarian Party.
