The good thing about being a libertarian is that governments around the world are constantly doing things that reinforce the wisdom of our ideas.
The bad thing about being a libertarian is that politicians very rarely care about – or act upon – our ideas for better policy (thank you, public choice).
To add insult to injury, we also get mocked, usually for being doctrinaire and/or dorky.
Today’s column will feature new examples of anti-libertarian satire. We’ll start with a story about a Libertarian Doofus.
This clever jab would be even better if the person who put it together understood the difference between commensurate and consummate, but let’s not get hung hung up on details.
The point is that libertarians have a reputation for dorkiness, particularly when it comes to romance. Indeed, Garth Tundrell is actually the fifth iteration of Libertarian Doofus (see Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV).
Our next item isn’t satire. It’s a real-life report, by at Vox, about the failure of a libertarian community in New Hampshire.
But I’m sharing it today because libertarians are definitely the target of some mockery.
Every ideology produces its own brand of fanatics, but there’s something special about libertarianism. …they…tend to be cocksure about core principles in a way most people aren’t. If you’ve ever encountered a freshly minted Ayn Rand enthusiast, you know what I mean. And yet one of the things that makes political philosophy so amusing is that it’s mostly abstract.
You can’t really prove anything — it’s just a never-ending argument about values. Every now and again, though, reality intervenes in a way that illustrates the absurdity of particular ideas. Something like this happened in the mid-2000s in a small New Hampshire town called Grafton. …The experiment was called the “Free Town Project” (it later became the “Free State Project”), and the goal was simple: take over Grafton’s local government and turn it into a libertarian utopia. The movement was cooked up by a small group of ragtag libertarian activists who saw in Grafton a unique opportunity to realize their dreams of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community. Needless to say, utopia never arrived, but the bears did!
For the article, Mr. Illing interviewed Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author of a new book titled A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. Here’s some of what Mr. Hongoltz-Hetling said about the Grafton experiment.
…a bunch of loosely affiliated national libertarians…chose a town in rural New Hampshire called Grafton that already had fewer than 1,000 people in it. And they just showed up and started working to take over the town government and get rid of every rule and regulation and tax expense that they could. …so all of a sudden the people in Grafton woke up to the fact that their town was in the process of being invaded by a bunch of idealistic libertarians.
…They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district and to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, or to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone, some of the outlandish things like that. But they did find that a lot of existing Grafton residents would be happy to cut town services to the bone. And so they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, things like road services and fire services and even the public library. …Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town. …the bears in the area started to take notice… Free Towners…just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. …So they started aggressively raiding food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up. …more bear attacks will come. Luckily, no one’s been killed, but people have been pretty badly injured.
The moral of this story, I guess, is that libertarianism leads to bear attacks.
But that’s presumably better than the supposed libertarian policies contained in this cartoon (some of my lefty friends actually believe this).
For what it’s worth, this mimics the satire about Ron Paul’s breakfast, but isn’t nearly as clever and funny.
We’ll close with this look at how libertarians perceive themselves vs what they actually are.
Ouch. Since I spend much of my time in front of a computer, this one hurts.
Sort of like the final two images in this collage.
But I guess that’s better than being some of these libertarians.
P.S. You can peruse the entire collection of libertarian humor, including pro-libertarian items, by clicking here.
International Liberty 