“I’m definitely a libertarian. Consenting adults want what they want, and if I’m not supplying it, they will get it somewhere else.” – Breaking Bad
So, I checked out an Ayn Rand book at a public library . . .
To give context to what follows, I was a Libertarian. Yes, a capital “L” version, which is what this post is about. I had the card and everything, and this was back when I had to use MS-DOS® to get anything done. C:/DOS. C:/DOS run. Run DOS Run!
It was also before Libertarianism became rabidly open border and I was always more of a nationalist than a libertarian, so there’s that. I have since realized that libertarianism is a road only to globalism, socialism, and gay communism in 2026. Honestly, libertarianism in the United States doesn’t work for any date past, say the 1880s or so.
Let me elaborate. I’ll start by being fair and noting that not every libertarian believes the same exact things, because the difference between a libertarian wedding and a libertarian funeral is one less opinion.
First, let’s explore the concept of the basic unit of society. As I’ve mentioned before, the basic unit, the atom of society is the family, not the individual. Individuals don’t reproduce unless they’re lower forms of life like paramecium, which only accounts for bankers and Hollywood© executives, and most politicians. Last I checked, only a man and a woman can reproduce.
A friend ordered a bride from Eastern Europe. Sadly for him, the Czech is still in the mail.
Libertarianism, like communism, is based on freedom and the removal of constraints. What constraints? Well, family, religion, tradition, ancestors, culture, border, community, and hierarchy. The first thing the reds did when they took over Spain was burn the churches, kill the nuns, and abolish marriage.
Let me assure you, Francisco Franco was far too kind to these people when he won.
Libertarianism, like communism and globalism, depends on Homo Economicus.
What’s a person? Well, one Homo Economicus is very much like another. So much so, that they have the same desires, the same wants, the same potential, the same value. In extremes of this viewpoint, they even have the same intellectual potential. Don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but smart kids very, very rarely come from dumb parents. Idiocracy was right in that respect.
I knew one person who was so dumb they tried to drown themselves on a pool table.
Is it any wonder that rabid Libertarians and Communists both want open borders and free trade?
The problem is that ripping out family, religion, tradition, ancestors, culture, border, community, and hierarchy removes all of the intermediate steps that prevent communism or GloboLeftism from even existing. If you view your nation as something given to you on loan by your ancestors to bequeath to your kids, well, that’s an entirely different mindset than “Let’s go shopping at Wal-Mart© or let in infinity foreigners for cheap strawberries”.
These institutions and traditions, and, yes, collective beliefs that Libertarianism wants to remove are the real anti-communist and anti-globalist technology.
Where Libertarianism is strongest is against the state as a monopolist of violence and against price controls. To be clear, when the firearm was invented, the state monopoly of violence disappeared, and they knew it. The idea of how governments should be configured was in play.
And this occurred in Europe. Why Europe? Because European nations typically had a dominant state religion, a national people, a single language, borders, and some with ancestors going back thousands of years in the same plot of land. These people had all of that in common, and could therefore ask the question of, “how should we set up a government?”
Europe refuses to put caps on new immigrants. I thought the French had an excess of berets?
As an example, if the Founding Fathers had consisted of Somalians, Indians, and Nigerians, they would have just spent their time in tribal warfare against each other. No, the Founding Fathers were mainly Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and English. Franklin was pretty sure the Germans were suspect. The United States wasn’t conceived for moslims. Nope. It was conceived for a predominantly white, Christian, moral people with low time-preference, trust, honesty, deferred gratification, and a shared sense of ownership of the nation as a whole.
And Libertarianism was okay for that group. Don’t like the rules in Pennsylvania? Move west to Ohio. Don’t like the rules in Ohio? Move west to Utah. I mean, move there if you’re Mormon.
This might have continued to work okay, but we ran out of land, and we started importing people from cultures that atomized the nation. And slavery. That was a stupid idea. Guys, always pick your own cotton. And your own strawberries. And write your own programs.
Soon enough, we had “the oppressed” and “the marginalized” which are fodder for a client class for socialists. Add in the Libertarian desire to remove every cultural constraint as an “illegitimate barrier to trade” and you get, well, chaos. Honestly, you get India after you’ve spent down the cultural inheritance of what was formerly a nation.
What’s orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot.
Free trade doesn’t mean free to trade anything, it means trade free from coercion. Libertarians spend forever and a day criticizing closed borders, tariffs, vice laws, industrial policy, and cultural constraints that have made it into law.
But HR? The credentialization of every job? Payment processors excluding people based on politics? Universities spewing out carbon-copy socialists? Social media where people aren’t even allowed to utter the phrase “Great Replacement”? NGOs? Asset managers?
Everything a company does is fine. That’s free trade.
No!
Marxism 1.0 wanted the party to own everything. Now, GloboLeftism is fine with private ownership. The companies and the media do the heavy lifting and shift coercion into forms that don’t look exactly like the “State” that Libertarians love to hate.
Libertarianism fails because it calls collective self-defense “collectivism” when America is being assailed by collectives of Indians and Mexicans and moslems and other groups that all have a collective strategy to protect themselves at the expense of the rest of society. If you try to get a job in certain sectors of the economy, if you don’t speak Spanish, aren’t a Brahmin, don’t bow to Allah, or don’t go to synagogue, well, you’re never going to get that job. They’ll pick people more like them.
When a strip club shuts down for the night does the sign say, “Sorry, we’re clothed”?
Markets really are the main engines of prosperity, but random, chaotic markets aren’t the predictor of economic success, it’s the people. In Sweden, all adopted (non-European) foreign children perform well below the norm on IQ tests. Except the Koreans.
Go figure. People make a difference. I’d rather live in socialist all-Dane Denmark than in multicultural Johannesburg.
Libertarianism fails because it cannot generate or defend the particular social order that limited government requires. Full stop. The Founding Fathers didn’t spring forth from a Libertarian Eden. Nope. They were forged in plain-old British values.
Liberty without a people, a border, and a moral center is a corridor, and corridors get occupied by whoever shows up, and whoever owns the institutions. Limited government isn’t a software package that works on any computer, it is very particular on what platforms it works.
So, don’t treat it like a software program and skip to the end and hit, “I agree.”
A form of libertarianism could maybe exist in a very small, racially homogeneous society but the main problem with libertarianism (other than libertarians) is that it fails to understand the basics of human nature.
That failure to understand human nature is why I left the LP. The idea of minimalist govt sounds great in college when you are surrounded by other affluent kids in a system that is isolated from the rest of the world. But out in the real world, I was surprised by how many people were constantly trying to cheat and steal from others to get ahead (and the LP does nothing to address any of this).
Fully agree on the smaller homogeneous societies. Rural groups can function in a more libertarian way because most are more self suffiicent and do not interact with others much. But as interdependency between people grows then it becomes harder to make libertarianism work. Large cities, for example, have to have much stricter rules on everything from walking your dog to traffic laws because failure to stay in line can create all sorts of chaos for everyone. I still think most city govts go overboard on some of this, but I can see how libertarianism just isn’t going to work in these areas.
Exactly. Maybe they should go live in the Shire? Same thing.
I’ve never been much for political theory. I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and my main conclusion was that she could sure use a copy editor. My first exposure to libertarians was observing (what seemed to me) their takeover of the old L-5 Society back in the early 1970s. We’d conquered the Moon, the Space Shuttle was gonna make mass to orbit too cheap to meter, and O’Neill was out popularizing utopian space colonies to be built with lunar materials at the position-stable Lagrange points in space, particularly L-5. (As an aside, the Webb and new Roman Telescope that launched last week are anchored at L-2). If there was gonna be built-from-scratch space utopias in fifty years by 2025, those Libertarians sure wrote lots of essays on how to run it. It all sounded a little crazy to me and so I never paid attention over the to their further plans for the actual utopia we now find ourselves mired in here in 2026.
It’s all good. We’ve conquered low earth orbit, Starship is gonna make mass to orbit too cheap to meter, and Elon is out popularizing utopian space colonies on Mars.
Plus ça change…
Could have been a great 250 page book. Instead? 95 page speeches. Ugh.
I was never a libertarian, but I was raised as your garden-variety liberal. When I got to college in the mid ’70s, I found all these people talking about reading Ayn Rand in high school and I had no clue who she was (I finally read “Atlas Shrugged” in the 2010s and found it astonishingly verbose). I was never much into political theory, didn’t take the Gov100 class many did (regret that now) and still have no real desire to read political theory – of any sort.
I came to my current beliefs via life – leaving the place and people I grew up among, and literally traveling the world (not as a backpacker but initially a grad student and then employed first privately and then with the US govt). Since I am not quite thick as two short planks, as the English like to say, I noticed things – and people. And I thought about what I noticed, and I thought about my ‘identity’ and what categories others put me in and thought about whether they mattered – and why. Kinda like your stereotypical Peace Corps loon, but in reverse.
My ‘noticing’ and cogitating turned me into a patriot and a conservative – and a baptized and believing Christian along the way. Online reading (beginning in the ’90s) turned me first into a hard-line conservative and then – combined with more real life experiences and my natural curiosity – I read wherever links lead me and discovered the ‘alt-right’ and all sorts of forbidden thoughts and ideas. I am an ethno-nationalist, a White nationalist, or – if I’m talking to your average normie – a fascist. Although I detest economics (took what I had to in grad school but concluded it was all about quantifying the qualitative), I straddle the line between your definition of ‘free trade’ and economic populism (albeit only within a White nation). Along the way I discarded any belief in ‘equality’ along with any trust in institutions, including ‘representative democracy’ along with universal suffrage. I still argue about ‘the market’ with my husband, and align with the people who just want to left alone. I despise most women (irrational and emotionally incontinent) but cherish children and family. I value the men who built society and keep things working. I continue to learn from history and the wisdom I find in unexpected places. God, family, hierarchy, ordered liberty, tradition . . . with enough room for White eccentricity – gee, sort of like other far wiser people than I figured out centuries ago.
Amen Sister…
I’ve always been a nationalist, which doesn’t jive at all with today’s libertarianism.
Thought about voting for Harry Browne when he ran for Prez on the Libertarian ticket but didn’t. His “How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World” is a must read classic.
To me, Libertanism was always a 50/50 thing. Some parts good, some parts bad. Kinda like the Republican Party. But not Democrat, where all parts are BAD. That’s BAD in the sense of Paul Fussell’s book “BAD”, where he argues that there’s “bad” and then there’s “BAD”. Subtitled “The Dumbing Of America”.
Yup. Would love for it be something that would work.
I am fighting this very battle right now within the Libertarian Party of Florida against what I call the “Cloward-Piven Wing” of the LPF. As I see it the issue is that a lot of “Libertarians” aren’t, at least not in the Lockean sense. Instead they are “anarcho-pacificts”. Locke, generally acknowledged as the father of Libertarianism, clearly articulated A. the need for a social compact whereby a very limited government exists in order to protect the natural rights of the population against force and fraud, B. part of this task was specifically to protect the population against “foreign force” and C. a foreigner living among the population does not make him or her a member of that society. The Cloward-Piven strategy is nothing if not an attack on the rights and property of the population, a large part of which is the foreign force of mass immigration, so Locke would have been a strong proponent of a CLOSED border. Ditto on unfair trade, which is a defacto economic attack on the rights and property of the businesses and prosperity of the population. So your criticism is valid, but I disagree with the conclusion. The answer isn’t to walk away from the LP, it is to push out the fake Libertarians and replace them with a new Based Nationalist LP the same way MAGA is displacing RINO’s in the RP. Just my .02 cents.
As a real Scotsman, I agree. But I’m lonely. I’ve never met another me.
They are, especially the ones that are left after the nationalists completely leave the group.
The uniparty is exactly like the muslims, a radical muslim wants to kill all infidels and the moderate muslim wants the radical muslims to kill the infidels. We have hit the low IQ jackpot. We have them all and this is all going to be just fine until the first free meal is missed. Paying people to not steal and kill is never sustainable.
While the other half is incentivised to steal and kill “legally”. The entire vampire economy is zero sum. The can must be kicked as to avoid reconciling the moral till.
Yup.
Don’t blame me. I voted for Ross Perot!
Although I did later look into the local libertarian party, but ended up attending meetings of the State Militia’s (completely legal, BTW) political and propaganda arm. I did an investigative journalism piece on the then brand-new electronic voting machines. They were just as bad then as they are now.
I didn’t vote for Perot, and now admit I was wrong to not vote for Perot.
Please explain why the losing side of the Perry Expedition is the more desirable situation to be in.
This post defends the male version of the longhouse. Female liberals and male conservatives are both control freaks, but their narrative sales pitch is different. The male flavor sounds hyper-nationalist towards the ingroup instead of hyper-empathetic towards the outgroup.
The economic disruption and innovation which comprised the industrial revolution and ended the risk of starvation, only happened because the dissatisfied were able to avoid doing what the “family” wants. “Family” here is a small group often controlled by the matriarch, who wears the pants and uses sex as a behavioral training treat.
The rabid libertarians want open borders and free trade for several reasons. One, because trading hubs are always richest. Two, because Darwinism is not optional, and if you don’t compete with the outside you fall behind in competitiveness for war; see Perry.
The economic analysis in this post pretends the US is a Libertarian policy paradise, instead of the centrally-planned communism with American characteristics it actually is. This error of misattributing bad results to too much freedom increases the desire for Socialism among the young.
Plain old British political values are for an aristocracy, a centrally-planned communism with British characteristics. That’s why the US Constitution produces a structure nearly identical to the British government of the time, except the royal families could compete to supply a CEO without assassinating each other.
So, coerce people into “trading” at the point of a gun? That’s your libertarian ideal? Ooooookay.
“The losing side of the Perry Expedition” is Japan’s legal environment at that time. Intense nationalism and isolationism, uniform race and religion. Tariffs and an iron curtain to prevent anyone from outside competing with and displacing their internal industry by offering a good or service far cheaper than natives can produce it. Sounds like the central planning Conservatives want, right? Protectionism implemented by high tariffs and industry subsidies?
Then somebody from outside arrives in a new weapons system and informs you that you’ve just lost a war, and they’ve helpfully written up your terms of surrender. Oops, that’s why you shouldn’t have listened to Conservatives.
What I want is an end to the coercion. You can’t prevent outsiders from courting your customers. You can’t prop up your internal industry practices, which are now obsolete on the world stage, by laws demanding they be used or subsidized by taxes. Then everyone is free to trade, or don’t trade, as they wish. Self-adjusting.
Once you’ve shown you have no idea what “central planning” means, I can safely ignore anything else you have to say about economics.
Once you’ve bragged about how you support open borders, I can safely ignore anything you have to say about politics and nationhood.
Denninger doesn’t address the points either, he just bans the dissenter because he’s a liberal. I conclude his policies are determined by his feelings, because the historical track record and the analysis literature is extensive.
Yes, it is human nature that humans want to make decisions which feel good, but that’s just arguing for witch doctors, cargo cults, and religions, none of which work. Did you get your c*v*d v*x yet? 4 out of 5 epidemiologists recommend it to their patients who chew gum.
But you can prevent some outsiders from providing some things to you people. Heroin, for instance. And computer chips.
You’re going to make a steam-powered warship in Japan using handicraft methods for swords and cooking pots, instead of drop hammer forges? Build artillery shell casings by blacksmithing with manual hammers instead of semi-automated turret lathes powered by fossil fuels? Keeping all that handicraft in your heavy industrial base will be manpower/logistics competitive with Perry, because production is augmented by magic spells from the genre of magical realism anime? The World Made by Hand book series is fantasy, not science fiction. The only known way to compete with Perry is to duplicate the economy that produced Perry.
I’m pretty sure they’d have preferred to not have lost millions of their men in war and, well, you know, that nuclear war.
“limited government”
BWAHAHAHA!
I’m afraid you lost the plot. WHY do furriners come here? It’s for the reward of free stuff, ain’t nobody itchin’ to git into cuba, that airplane sailed long ago.
Only through free stuff, and .gov mandates like preferential treatment in oh so many things do those of non-White non-European ancestry find this ccountry appealing.
Cut off the free stuff and it’s a different game.
On “free trade”; we pbserve such is not possible ab initio with a .gov mandated and enforced currency system, one in which a certain group arranged for themselves to be the sole proprieters of, and immediate beneficiaries of as well.
Corporations? Another creation of the State – see A. Nock for the definition thereof.
True, Libertarian ideals can only work in a level playing field. That field doesn’t exist thanks to government. Libertarian thought IS NOT anti-GOD, not anti-family; that role is taken by government so that all will worship the State.
Corporations should die every 20 years, I’ve said that for years on this blog.
Tom Wolfe in his novel THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES summed America up very thoroughly. And keep in mind, that tome was written many years ago. In the American Empire’s long march towards collapse, what we have seen are just milestones: The Nanny State, Abortion and Infanticide, the LGBTQ+ agenda, the destruction of Southern Heritage, the falling away from true Christianity, and the glorification of celebrities and sports figures. I could go on, but you get my drift. The novels for our future would be THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS, and Matt Bracken’s FOREIGN ENEMIES AND TRAITORS. Amerika ist verloren. Bleib ubrig. -DTW.
You’re right.
Libertarians I have known seem to believe their pipe dreams, but not what actually goes on. We’re in deep doo doo to be sure, and the answer ain’t no political party, plan, or idea. What will happen is what happens when too diverse of a population encounters its own storm of wants and needs, as opposed to the other groups. And it won’t be a case of may the best man win. The winner, as in every civil war, will be the one most savage and ruthless. Libertarianism will be a subject for future scholars to discuss over tea, for about thirty seconds.
They think the answer is more illiterate Mexicans. So, there’s that.
Regarding the ‘I wonder if it’s mine?’ meme – in all fairness, the parenting person might be a progressive democrat – in which case there might be some question in their mind as to if the soon to be born parasite belongs to the State, so…. 🤷♂️
Indeed!