Antidisenstablishmentlibertarianism

The parsing of the title term is left to you, dear reader. If it makes a certain amount of sense, that is purely accidental. It was coined in an attempt to describe the fallacy of terms. The following rant was a response to my daughter who envisions herself as a twenty-first century libertarian (no link yet, but maybe soon).

I think it’s time for some examination of the word libertarian. There are ever so many political dichotomies: Republican/Democrat; liberal/conservative; free market/socialism; and collectivist/individualist. (Geezer alert: my saw is that there are two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people and them what don’t.) A libertarian is a person who comes down way on the side of individualist. Individualist means that each person should totally provide for themselves and leave other people the hell alone. We haven’t really seen true individualists since the days of the mountain (ahem) man. Even then, the mountain man needed the fellowship and economic support of other people. Today we are a totally enmeshed society. We can’t even use a word like niggardly without looking over our shoulders to see who is being offended. A pure individualist is extremely unlikely, and anyone who claims libertarianism looks mostly like a pure kook.

So then, how can a person communicate that she favors personal responsibility? And how can we tell the government to keep out of our pants? Like most folks, we use the term libertarian without bothering to distinguish our libertarian goals from the ideals of the extremist libertarian moonbats. I’d like an alternate term. Social-libertarian would explain that we have libertarian longings while still wanting to coexist with other people; but the word social may be too easily confused with socialism. I used to like Republican-libertarian, but the Republican party for the past ten years has been competing with the Democrats to see who can least support individualism. So too the word conservative used to mean that you are in favor of balanced budgets and less spending, but now it means that you want the government to regulate your reproductive organs; thus conservative-libertarian is a total oxymoron.

Certain Christians make great examples of the problems of trying to explain stuff using terms. If you ask them, they are totally in favor of providing for themselves and not taking government charity. Yet at the same time, they are generous to a fault of making others dependent on their generosity. I know of no term that can adequately describe this.

A true libertarian could never seek to persuade others of the rightness of her beliefs. Therefore, my treasured daughter cannot be a true libertarian, QED. (I'm merely being droll, esteemed logicians.)

Anyway, my point is that claiming to be a libertarian twenty-something may conceal more than reveal. Sometimes we throw around the word libertarian so the demolicans and republicrats will leave us alone. That advantage aside, maybe we should simply use the word independent.