re: Describing Libertarianism

So David Boaz, who has written several books that attempt to redefine libertarianism as beltwaytarianism combined with libertinism, now says libertarianism means “limited government.”  But the question is:  How “limited”?  One percent smaller than the current governmental leviathan?  Five percent less?  More importantly, WHO will impose such limits?  The American people lost the ability to control their own central government when their rights of secession and nullification were destroyed at gunpoint almost 150 years ago.  Boaz and all of his fellow beltwaytarians  are, of course, dead set against secession and silent about nullification because their primary goal is the Quixotic one of being “accepted” by the leftist zealots at the Washington Post, New York Times, etc.

Having destroyed the rights of secession and nullification, the central state took the appointment of U.S. senators out of the hands of the people of the states (by state legislatures) with the Seventeenth Amendment calling for popular elections.  Once elected by popular vote, senators can then cater exclusively to wealthy donors, the people back home be damned.  They could no longer be recalled (fired) for bad behavior by their state legislatures.  That’s how a John McCain could move to Arizona, and a Hillary Clinton could move to New York, and become U.S. senators “from” those states.

The income tax and the Fed then enabled the state to impose and enforce military conscription beginning in World War I.  Having thus reintroduced slavery, the state demonstrated that it owns us and all of our income, only allowing us to keep whatever percentage IT decides by announcing what income tax rates were to be.  Decades of case law have “reinterpreted” the Constitution to render it meaningless as a means of limiting government, just as John C. Calhoun predicted it would in his 1850 Disquisition on Government.   The state then went hard to work making it virtually impossible to unseat any incumbent in Congress with gerrymandering, taxpayer-funded permanent campaign staffs, hundreds of committees and subcommittees designed to streamline the buying of votes by ladeling out massive amounts of individual and corporate welfare, the virtual banning of third parties, and myriad other forms of barriers to entry into politics.  Ask Ron Paul about that.

“Limited government” is not only not the definition of libertarianism; in today’s world it is meaningless blather.

 

 

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8:58 pm on April 8, 2014