top 10 reasons libertarians are not nice to you

21.4.2014 Top 10 Reasons Libertarians Aren’t Nice To You – LewRockwell.com

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Top 10 Reasons Libertarians Aren’t Nice To YouBy Christopher Cantwell

ChristopherCantwell.com

April 12, 2014

Originally published at ChristopherCantwell.com

[http://www.christophercantwell.com/2014/04/08/top-10-reasons-libertarians-arent-nice/]

People often complain about libertarians being rude and obnoxious. It’s not nearly as widespread

a problem as some would make it out to be, and contrary to popular belief, this did not begin with

me. To the extent that it does exist, I have become to many this sort of picture of the asshole

libertarian who doesn’t give a shit about your feelings or opinions. So I figured I’d put this list

together of why libertarians aren’t nice to you. Even libertarians who are nice to you, I think will

get a kick out of it, because despite their outward appearances, they are every bit as frustrated

with your statism as we are. Feel free to bookmark it and produce it every time you hear someone

make this complaint.

Libertarians Aren’t Nice To You Because,

10. Ridicule works.

Believe me when I tell you, we would really prefer it if mankind were a rational creature that

responded to reason and evidence. If that were the case, we would have already won this debate,

and we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. The State would not exist, and there would be no

political arguments pertaining to it.

What we have observed from watching your elections and propagandists, is that there’s more of a

“that guy sucks so you should support me!” type of psychology behind all of this. Leftists call

everybody who opposes them fascists, and racists, and religious nuts, and homophobes, and

greedy. Rightists call everybody who opposes them socialists, and enemies of God, they promote

xenophobia about homosexuals, and immigrants, and foreign countries that they want to go to

war with.

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It’s unfortunate that this has become the nature of political discord, but that’s the reality we are

met with. You folks have obtained such wonderful political success by being completely miserable

towards one another, so we figure this is how to win political battles. Thus, we are sort of

compelled to work within it. We make fun of you, because that is the nature of political discussions

that we have been met with. We tear down your leaders and your people because they promote

terrible ideas, and we don’t want people to take you seriously.

9. If you already have an ideology, we’re actually not terribly concerned withconvincing you.

Most people have no concept of politics, economics, or philosophy. If they take an interest in these

subjects because of something we said, or because they are genuinely interested in finding some

kind of objective truth, then we have some hope of bringing them over to our side. Those are the

people we are primarily interested in convincing.

Most people involved in these things aren’t actually interested in finding any sort of objective truth.

As far as we’re concerned, the fact that they aren’t already libertarians is evidence enough of this.

They chose a side for whatever reason, and they represent their team for better or worse. Liberals

don’t tend to become conservatives, conservatives don’t tend to become liberals, and neither tend

to become libertarians. At best for us, they try to get libertarians to assist them in their own anti-

libertarian political agendas, and they’ve done an excellent job of accomplishing this. Trying to

work with you then, generally ends up hurting us, and we’ve learned this lesson too many times to

ignore it.

Having an ideology tends to imply some study of the subject at hand. If you have studied

government, and determined that it has any potential to do anything positive, this implies you are

really not very good at processing information. The failures of the State are so numerous and

ridiculously obvious, that we find it difficult to believe any rational person could justify its

existence. Your informed adherence to this absurdity tells us that you are pretty much beyond all

hope of rescue.

So when libertarians argue with you, it’s not you we’re trying to convince. We’re doing it for the

sake of others who might be watching. It gives us the opportunity to put information out there,

and while you reject fact, after fact, after fact, we try to make you look like idiots so that others

who may be watching have a negative opinion of you and your ideas, so that they do not join your

cause and advance them.

8. We’re not trying to win elections

Any libertarian who tells you he is trying to win an election is either lying to you about trying to

win the election, lying to us about being a libertarian, or terribly misinformed. As far as we’re

concerned, elections are a bad thing. We’re trying to end them, not win them.

The nature of the State is to make false promises to bait support from the people it victimizes. They

promise to protect you from boogeymen, they promise to solve your economic problems, they

promise to carry out the will of your deity. We see this as completely ridiculous, we know it will fail,

and we know that most people are stupid enough to swallow it hook line and sinker, so we can’t

compete with it in a popular vote.

Libertarians are anarchists, whether they realize it or not. Even the ones who are delusional

enough to think that they are going to get elected and restore the bloody republic, are little more



than useful idiots who are repeating anarchist propaganda for us through channels normallyreserved for government. The goal is not to win your elections, the goal is to turn a large enoughminority against the legitimacy of the State as to make its continued function impossible. So there’sabsolutely no incentive to work with you in promoting candidates, which is the primary function ofyour political activity. You’re right when you say “No candidate is good enough” for us, no matterwho runs for office we will tear him down because nobody has the right to be our ruler.

7. We’ve already had this discussion a hundred times

If you had ever bothered to study the works of any of the great libertarian theorists, you wouldn’tbe asking us the questions you are asking. You ask “Who will build the roads?” or “What aboutdefense?” you tell us “There is no such thing as utopia” and a lot of other really tired arguments. Itshows us that you haven’t taken so much as 10 minutes out of your miserable life to even make theslightest effort to understand what we are proposing.

In the meantime, we are always staying tuned to the propaganda you consume so that we cancounter it. We write thoughtful articles, and make informative videos, and produce compellingaudio content that explains in great detail what exactly it is your politicians and propagandists aresaying, and why it is wrong.

You don’t pay any attention to any of that content because it’s not coming from “your team”, andeveryone on “your team” repeats the same propaganda. So every time we get into a politicalargument, we already know what you’re going to say as soon as we know which team you’re on.We already know what the proper response to your propaganda is, and we already know that youare going to act irrationally when we respond. This is extraordinarily frustrating, because we’veactually put a great deal of effort into this, and these repetitive arguments are tiring, especiallywhen they yield no results.

6. All those “what ifs” you’re so concerned about, they’re called choices.

The nice thing about freedom is, people get to make their own decisions. We’re not entirely surewhy this bothers you so much. Every time you ask us “What if X?” we have a thousand differentanswers we can give you, if you don’t like the first one, we’re happy to give you another. The wholepoint is, you get to decide for yourself what suits you best in a market environment.

You have become so used to the State being the arbiter of all things, that you seem to panic atevery uncertainty. The funny part about this is, the State hasn’t provided you with any certainty atall. There’s absolute chaos in the world, governments have murdered over 260 million of theirown citizens in the last century, not including war, and you’re still freaking out about speedlimits.

5. I can’t teach you economics in 140 characters or less

The nice thing about the internet is, it allows us to communicate with many people very quickly.The downside is that this instant gratification has led people to believe answers will just be fed tothem without any effort. If you really think that you’re qualified to walk into a voting booth anddecide who will run the world and how, then you should have the common decency to studyeconomics first.

All these discussions we’re having really boil down to economics. Your politicians andpropagandists feed off of your prejudices and religious ideas and emotions because that’s the



easiest way to manipulate you into acting against your own best interests. These tactics allow them

to operate in a soundbite world and oversimplify matters. For us to explain to you what’s wrong

with those soundbites actually requires some understanding of how human beings respond to

incentives in a market environment. We produce thousands of pages of text, and countless hours

of audio and video explaining these things. The best we can hope for in a tweet is to link you to

some of it and hope you read/listen/watch, but you never do, do you?

4. We actually are smarter than you

The Triple Nine Society, an organization whose membership is reserved for people with IQ’s in the

top one tenth of one percent, even more discriminating than Mensa, did a survey on the politics of

its members. The results [http://www.triplenine.org/poll/press.htm] don’t surprise us. Members

overwhelmingly supported legalizing all drugs, prostitution, and gambling. They supported gun

rights, and free markets. They opposed government involvement in medicine, and income taxes.

Government is a scam, and like other scams it relies on the gullibility of its victims. We’re not

falling for it, but you are, and your support of that system harms us. Your stupidity literally hurts.

3. Our moral superiority is justified

We know that you have some pretty twisted ideas on morality that stem from religious doctrines

and other ancient texts, but logically speaking, morality should be consistent. If your moral

platform can’t be applied universally, then it really doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

That’s why your politicians, religious leaders, and propagandists are always getting caught doing

things that go against the words they speak. Priests get caught having gay sex, socialists acquire

vast amounts of wealth, “family values” candidates get caught cheating on their wives, gun control

advocates murder millions of people. Their moral platforms are inconsistent, this makes them

rather meaningless, and so there is no reason for them to adhere thereto.

Our moral platform is basically just the non initiation of force. As long as we don’t rob, assault,

kidnap, and murder, we’re perfectly within our moral code. This is pretty easy for most people,

since violence doesn’t appeal to us, and so we rarely end up looking like hypocrites.

2. We’re not asking for much

If you want to have people threaten you all the time and tell you what to do, that’s your business.

We don’t recommend it or anything, but really you’re more than welcome to submit to someone

else’s authority in the absence of the State. We might talk to you about the virtues of freedom, but

we’re honestly not trying to force you to be free. All we’re saying is you have no right to force us

under the same authority.

By contrast, you want to take our property, force us into wars, “educate” our children, and control

our business and personal relationships. You have some really weird idea in your head that this

notion of “government” makes that okay, but there is no other circumstance in which you would

consider that socially acceptable. We don’t believe in government, so we look at this like any other

lunatic trying to do these things to us.

Seriously, what the fuck? Just leave me alone.

1. You always resort to violence



Polite discussion in State politics is an illusion. At the end of this discussion, it really doesn’t matterwho’s right or who’s wrong, the person with the superior numbers is going to force their bad ideason everybody else at gun point. Just imagine doing this in reverse, where you start with a threatinstead of ending with it. Nobody would try to be polite about their disagreement under thosecircumstances.

[http://www.lewrockwell.com/assets/2014/04/ccanyc.jpg] Since we know we haveinferior numbers, and the minority always gets screwed and threatened by democracy, this isexactly what this discussion looks like to us. It begins and ends with the threat of violence, so thefact that we don’t shoot you in the face really speaks volumes to our civility.

You give us absolutely no option for escaping this violence. We are forced to choose between theviolence of you, or the violence of someone else. You tell us “Love it or leave it!” or “Move toSomalia!” like I don’t have any right to be left in peace in my own home. The fact of the matter is,if you give us a choice of violence or violence, eventually we’re going to give some violence back toyou, and making fun of you on twitter will become the least of your concerns.

Reprinted with permission from Christopher Cantwell [http://www.christophercantwell.com/] .

Christopher Cantwell is an activist, writer, and satirist originally from New York. From ananarcho-capitalist perspective, he covers news and current events, addresses philosophicalquestions, and even cracks a joke or two at ChristopherCantwell.com. Follow him onTwitter.com/VoteForCantwell.

Copyright © 2014 Christopher Cantwell

top 10 reasons libertarians are not nice to you

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