LibertasPost

Gerry Nicholls recently explained on this site why he is a libertarian. Since I've come to belong to the same general political persuasion myself, I thought that I would share a few of my own thoughts on libertarianism, and what I see as its future.

Now, it's a good thing that libertarians are not the same as anarchists, or they wouldn't get along with the police. Indeed, that seems to be one of the principle differences between libertarians and anarchists: libertarians resist unnecessary authority; anarchists resist all authority, period. And while this is not to say that libertarians don't have their points of conflict with the police, the reason for their disagreement lies with the practices performed by the police and not with the badge itself.

That is why, bless their little hearts, anarchists are really fighting for an illiberal cause – as the vacuum of pure anarchy only benefits those who could work their way to the top of the hierarchical food-chain.

Fair enough. Anarchists can hold their demonstrations, cause the occasional bit of property damage at the odd G-20 summit, and further cement public opinion against themselves. Meanwhile, the libertarians and libertarian conservatives can try to slowly, incrementally inject their viewpoint into the political discourse.

I write all of this to highlight two things: First, anarchists are not, by any means, necessarily related to the libertarian cause. Second, and more importantly, libertarians, by nature, seem to rely more on incrementalism than anything else to inject their message into the public sphere.

That is, unfortunately, the libertarian's lot in life. A true libertarian state has never been implemented; it is doubtful that one ever shall be. Libertarianism itself is often misunderstood – quite often for anarchism – and to make things even worse, libertarians themselves seem to be incapable of reaching a consensus about what, exactly, their political beliefs actually are.

If you ask twenty libertarians to define libertarianism, you will find yourself with twenty different answers. Oh, sure, you'll have common themes – minimum government, maximum freedom – but if you wish to get any more specific than that, those twenty libertarians will no doubt find themselves trying to argue out a consensus over the next few hours, or days. And if you locked those twenty libertarians in a room somewhere for a week, and told them that they would only be allowed to eat after reaching a consensus on the specifics of libertarianism, I can almost guarantee that all twenty would be dead by starvation or each others' hand by week's end.

And libertarianism is limited to incremental insinuation and insertion for precisely that reason. Certainly, libertarians can agree on the broader picture. They want more freedom and less government. But to go any deeper than that, to actually propose a form of libertarian politics, requires such a large amount of discussion,debate, and research into philosophers, economists, writers, and libertarians past ( with comparisons to be made between the ideas of every one of them ) that the task becomes near-impossible. Libertarians remain a small, insular community, but with almost too large an amount of substance. In fact, so much substance that for anybody other than a libertarian, it simply requires too great an effort to participate for libertarianism to be generally viable. If you go any further than to rather vaguely propose more freedom and less government, you run into problems. Socially, culturally, and politically, the only course of action that remains is the slow, incremental approach.

Of course, this is not to imply that libertarianism is some sort of vast conspiracy for incremental change. It isn't. There are undoubtedly many libertarians who would like to do much more, or alternatively, who are indifferent to the whole issue. However, as a whole, the libertarian movement is a victim of its own largeness in scope and span. Unfortunate really, but if it were any different, libertarianism would not be nearly as worthwhile a pursuit as it is today.