Actually, I didn’t just “read one article” and get pissed. I was heavily involved in the libertarian movement for many years (about 15, actually), including trying to start a party on campus, spending a summer in Washington, DC. as a Koch Summer Fellow, spending time at the Institute for Humane studies, and being involved in my local party. How much have YOU done?
This article was written for a libertarian party newsletter, and was meant to be very short. Not that you’d have been expected to know that, but before slinging crap, you might want to be sure you know of what you speak.

[To borrow from Jack Handy]

Libertarian to Liberal by Mike Bast

(Yazad: Replaced full text of the article with a link)

There are many responses to Huben. I’ll leave that to my readers to google and find out.

By religious I meant the dogma. Libertarianism is propogated the same way religion is - by stating absolutes and by not requiring the provision of any proof to back up ones statements. Since I (irrationally) like to back up my arguements with facts, why don’t you send me a libertarian article which you think puts your case forward the best.

I bet you that by replacing (I’m betting that even the grammar will be correct - a simple Find-Replace in Word would probably do it) the word Capitalism/Free Markets with Jesus Christ and God and replacing Government and Taxation with Satan and Evil I could deliver the entire contents of the article as a sermon in any Church and get a pat on the back from a priest for a ‘well thought out’ and ‘rational’ arguement on the importance of God and the evils of Satanic practices.

I wish I could be as brilliant.

Since I am not as endowed, I shall begin first by telling you that, to me at-least,
Libertarianism and libertarian thinking isn’t a dogma.
(Frankly, if it were a dogma, it would boomerang on itself, wouldn’t it? The very basis of Libertarianism as I see it is that there is no dogma, and an individual is free, as in freedom, to believe what he or she wants to. SO where is the dogma here?)

But we’ll leave that aside. A libertarian, such as I am, didn’t wake up one fine day and heard a little priest extolling on the virtues of libertarianism on a street corner and was so moved as to become a zealot, and a converted libertarian.

I, due to some quirk of nature, maybe, and probably due to the fact that I fell on my head when born, but due to my own personal beliefs, and my way of thinking (however bad it might be) believed that an individual should have the utmost right to take care of his life, and that one shouldn’t let oneself be “led, and commanded” by others.

I also developed a strong dislike to authority figures, and to group goals and subjugating one’s better interest for the sake of society etc. I believed that one ought to do one wanted to do. Cause there is no point in putting off one’s dream in the hope that the entire world will one day have the same dream. I believed in it. I still do.

I have never believed that I was good, and that those who didn’t believe in libertarianism are bad. There, to be absolutely truthful to you, is no good or bad in my way of thinking. I don’t claim libertarianism to be the next big thing towards man’s salvation, and the promise of an Eden. I don’t claim anything at all. All I did say was that it is time people began believing in what they did, and not do it blindly, just because some guy up there told them to.

Now, I don’t see where there is dogma here. I don’t even see how libertarian thought could be adapted to a sermon against evil?

I have more to tell, but it would overload this comment board. Also, I want to do it as a post too, at my blog. So I shall stop here.

1. I only recently found out that I am in the cartel and I suppose it is an appropriate epithet, because the members spend an inordinate amount of time reading each others posts and discussing them. Believe you me there are plenty of differences, and a lot of “rational” discussion goes on, with reasoning and proof from various libertarian and non-libertarian quarters bandied about.

2. I thought “liberals” of the variety that you claim to belong to were supposed to also be pc about what they said. I am what is called an outstanding Catholic. From where I stand, which is admittedly outside the church, I here less of Satan and more about personal responsibility, and the value of family and church in weathering emotional and other storms. That ofcourse if just the lturgical line. Personally don’t see too much similarity, and I promise you that the moment there is I will be an outstanding Cartel-age.

3. Way back when the cartel was still young and was still mustering its forces, we (you and me that is) were having a discussion in the comments of one of my posts. I posted a long reply to your comments which you did not respond to. Would you care to have a look at it and show how I am being unreasonable or dogmatic? [Bihar Brutality] Or do you just want to declare my arguments “libertarian” and therefore beyond the pale of reasonable discussion?

Merci