They All Must Have Fallen Out of the Stupid Tree

We Told You So

The scariest thing about libertarians is that they can vote.   As a general rule they cannot tell the difference between The Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and The Federalist Papers.  They are so gullible they actually believe the income tax is illegal and so ignorant that there is no way to explain it to them.  As Glen Cook puts it, they fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.   Unfortunately for us and the rest of the world, there are no IQ provisions for citizenship. Libertarians can vote. Small wonder the economy is tanking around us.

In Libertarian Land, I think the American Revolution went down something like this.   Little Tommy Jefferson went into their clubhouse (with the no icky girls allowed sign on the door.) and said, “That George III is a real poophead.  I don’t want to play with him anymore.”

And little Al Hamilton replied, “Me too.   Let’s get rid of him.”

Georgie Washington added “I’m tired of playing with this hatchet.   Let’s have a revolution instead. You got book learnin’, Tommy.   Why don’t you write him a letter and tell him to go soak his head?”

In the real world, the founders of America were a very diverse group. Many shared a common tie with the Masons, which only reaffirms the Mason’s mission of bringing different people together.   Jefferson and Washington spoke for the southern agrarian plantation owners.  Alexander Hamilton was the most progressive of the founders, but even he spoke primarily for the northern industrialists.  Then there were other founders such as John Adams and John Jay who were determined to see to it that the wealthy had the same special privileges as they had under England.   All these people were brought together out of a common need to escape British rule.   Jefferson wanted an agrarian utopia while Adams wanted a hereditary Senate in imitation of the British House of Lords, but all put aside their differences to achieve a common goal.

The Declaration of Independence was a legal document telling the British Monarch that the colonies were demanding independence.   It has no standing in American Law.   It was an inspiring piece penned by the inimitable Jefferson.   It had the effect of winning the loyalty of those who were going to die in the upcoming war.  Still, the Declaration of Independence was written in the proper legal language of the time.  When they said “All Men are created equal”, it was not the generic term as it is generally used.   Men was defined as people of substance with money or property.  It did not include women who were still chattel. It did not mean slaves or children.  They were legally chattel as well.   Men meant upper class white males.

By the end of the revolution, African slavery was still an accepted institution.   Children were still sold into apprenticeship and adults could still sell themselves into indentured servitude.   You could still be jailed for your debts and most of the thirteen states limited the vote to people above a certain income level.  In the State of Maryland you had to be both wealthy and Catholic to vote.  In Massachusetts you were only allowed to vote if you were a Congregationalist.   Each state was autonomous and sent representatives to Philadelphia mostly to negotiate trade.   Britain was killing the colonial industries by supplying finished goods at prices local craftsmen would not beat.  The south still sold its cotton to England but at much lower prices. New York and New Jersey went to war over access to New York Harbor.  The Free Market reigned supreme and the only one happy about it was England.

Thirteen independent nations were being eaten to death by England and internal rivalry.   Free Market capitalism was tearing the fledgling US into shreds and leaving the door open to England walking in and taking America back without a shot being fired.  This is why there is a Constitution.   This is why we are not the Confederated States of America.   The wealthiest and most influential men in the new nation joined together to create a more perfect union.  That is why they needed the Federalist Papers.

Keep in mind there was a lot of resistance to a Constitution. On the whole the southern states wanted it. They needed protection from England purchasing their cotton for too little money. On the other hand, the northern states had influential citizens who were making a fortune by buying cheap finished goods from Europe and a tariff would cut into their trade. So Madison, Hamilton, and Jay got together and wrote newspaper articles in favor of the Constitution. Put together, the Federalist Papers are a fascinating document. It outlines the philosophy behind the Constitution. It explains the economic and political conditions of the day. It has little to do with the Constitution itself.

 

You will find nothing inspiring in the Constitution. This is why the libertarian propagandists rarely quote it and libertarians never read it.   It is as bland as oatmeal and as exciting as watching hot grannies knit sweaters. Alexander Hamilton did not conceive it after a night of peyote buttons and cheap tequila.  The Constitution of the United States was written by a committee.  Many people worked on the Constitution, and the finished document had little in common with the hopes of the Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton fought against the Bill of Rights.  Jay must have cursed when the rabble were awarded the vote, but managed to slip in the electoral college anyway.  The south was happy to get a central government which could both ratify and enforce treaties with Europe.  The north was pissed because the new Federal Government could impose and enforce tariffs, ending England’s domination of American trade.   More to the point, the new Federal Government had the right to impose and collect taxes.  How and when the Federal Government can regulate business is written into the Constitution, even though Hamilton and Madison both argued against it.

The most frustrating thing about the Constitution is its vagueness.  It was a document that was designed to change with the times.   You can peruse the constitution all your life but you will not find one word that enshrines capitalism as our only possible economic system.   There is no clause that makes the income tax illegal.  There is nothing that says we have to vote for either Democrats or Republicans.  The people who joined together to create the Constitution understood that conditions change.  They expected their tomorrow to be different than their today, and they left it to us as to how we wanted to interpret the Constitution.  The Constitution shall not fall because we voted for the single payer system.   There is nothing unconstitutional about unions.

The libertarians have forgotten that the American Revolution was more than the hand full of dead statesmen they canonized into their lords and saviors. They forgot that Jefferson had very little influence on the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton created the first American Tax, and that Washington lead troops to put down the Whiskey Tax rebellion. They are like Christianoids and the Bible. They have no idea of what the Constitution says or represents but parrot any damned babble that their leaders tell them. Laws that protect American industries, impose taxes, and impose limits to unacceptable behavior are written in the Constitution. Libertarians can hold their breath and kick their heels all they want, and it will still not change the fact that they are the greatest threat to the Constitution since George III.

And We Are Not Taking You Back

Making the Clock Move Backwards

He Was The Man

Sometimes I feel dizzy from all the changes we have gone through over the past 50 years.  I still remember the shock I felt on my third day on the Internet.  I found myself posting to somebody from Russia.   Russia!!!  In my day, it was illegal to even speak to anybody from the old Soviet Union.  If it was discovered that you were talking to somebody from Russia on the short wave, it would earn you a visit from a federal officer.   Yet there I was, joking around with a guy from Russia on an old Yahoo Club. The shock of it drove me to tears.  The next day I told a coworker, a retired marine colonel, about my experience.  The old man began crying and told me that he was still too frightened of the Russians to ever trust them.  We Americans are frightened of change, and yet change is the only fundamental truth in life.

Fear of the future is the hook that politicians use to control the masses.   All you have to do is promise the masses that the world will stay the same and it is guaranteed that they will vote you back into office.  Promising that you can make the clock move backwards is an even more effective means of winning votes. Hitler got up and promised the German people that he would lead them back to the brave days of Charlemagne, and all he succeeded in doing was leading them to hell.  The road to hell can be found by looking backwards.   Ronald Reagan promised Americans he would lead them back to the magic land of small government.  Surprise!  We were led right back to 1929.   The question now is, shall we try to bring ourselves back to the Stone Age, or will we bring ourselves back to the present?

Change happens whether we like it or not.  What was true in 1776 may not be true today.  Transportation has been a tremendous goad to the future.  Back in 1776, transportation was limited to animal power and boats.  By the time of the Jackson administration, England had so invested in American canals and early railroads, that England controlled American transportation as well as being the King of the Sea. Something had to be done to protect American commerce from British domination. Despite what you may have learned in elementary school, Jackson was not the one who busted the trusts.   That was done by the Supreme Court with the Taney decision. The Taney decision declared that the Federal Government had the right to redistribute property belonging to the transportation trusts for the common good.  The transportation industry was broken into competing companies for the common good.

“For the common good” is a very slippery concept.  It is a legal term that changes its definition according to court decision.  Court decisions change according to the needs of the time.  Something that worked for the common good fifty years ago may not work for the common good today.   This is why change is built into our legal system.  What was fair and just in 1829, when Jackson was President, could turn out to be a dangerous anachronism today.  Business practices that worked in 1829 turned out to be pure poison in 1929.  The same could be said for the Constitution.   When it was first ratified, the federal government was to be funded by tariffs on foreign trade. Complaints about the tariffs began around the Jefferson administration.  The Southern states were being penalized because their economy depended on European trade. Their livelihoods were being squeezed to death by tariffs.   It was actually Jefferson who began exploring taxation as an alternative for funding the federal government.

Today Jefferson is revered by Libertarians, Born Again Christians, and Reagan Republicans as the father of non-taxation, due to some things that Jefferson wrote in the Federalist Papers.  These groups have rewritten history rather than accept the fact that change is something that happens to us all.   Even beloved documents like the Constitution can be battered by the seas of change. The Constitution survived for over two centuries because we have a court system that is free to reinterpret it according the needs of our times.   We also have a system to amend the Constitution, so we can replace the obsolete with structures more in tune with today’s needs.

Yet Americans still fall for the same damned tricks.   We still fall for the myth of government spending, and Jefferson has become as important a religious figure in American politics as Jesus.  We still respond to the words of the Federalist Papers, even though the conditions that brought them into being belong to the past. Like Germans listening to Hitler, we Americans still listen to demagogues who claim to be able to bring us back to the past.  It never works.  The problems of the present can never be solved with the solutions of the past.   We can only solve today’s problems with tomorrow’s answers.

Gives Us That Grand Old Politics

2. Disdain for Human Rights Part 2: The Minutemen

Nazi Minuteman

There is no branch of the Libertarian Party that shows its true fascist colors better than the Minutemen. That they are tolerated within the ranks of the Libertarians is proof that the Libertarians have absolutely no respect or regard for the Constitution they claim to be defending. The Minutemen are the Libertarian version of the Nazi Brown Shirts. Rather than tormenting Jews, the American Fascists are tormenting undocumented workers. Their actions vary from posting bizarre paranoid articles on the Internet to threats of actual violence and bodily harm to Mexican immigrants; documented and undocumented alike.

Claiming 2^nd Amendment rights, The Minutemen are armed and claim that they are a legal and well regulated militia. They are not legal. Minutemen exist in defiance of the 14^th Amendment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Everybody within the borders of the United States has the same legal protections. Undocumented workers have the same rights to legal protection for their lives and property as American citizens. Undocumented workers have the same rights of due process and a jury of their peers. So far, the Minutemen have contented themselves with blowing off a lot of hot air. They do some counter protesting, or they swill beer in their yards while watching the border. So far there has been no violence. Once the Minutemen harm an undocumented worker, they will prove themselves to be an illegal organization and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The Minuteman are a perfect illustration of the mindless nationalism which dominates the entire Libertarian movement. It is reminiscent of Nazi Aryan superiority. To the Libertarians, only American citizens have the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Apparently Constitutional rights are so rare that there are not enough to share with guests. The very name “Minutemen” brings to mind the Revolutionary War and Paul Revere’s famous ride. It is a chilling reminder of the Brown Shirt’s association with the Teutonic Knights and the Vikings. The Minutemen evoke mythic history to confront their make-believe danger.

Indeed, undocumented workers pose no danger to either the American economy or the tax payer’s money. Undocumented workers take jobs that the average Libertarian spits upon, and the undocumented worker’s role in agriculture is the only thing that keeps the small farmer competitive with the agromonopolies. In a healthy economy, the cost of medical and social services are easily absorbed through the intelligent investment of our tax money. True, right now we do not have a healthy economy. Thanks to the Neocons and their Libertarian lap-dogs, we have a very sick economy. Still, that is no excuse for ignoring the 14^th Amendment.

This brings us to the Libertarian disdain for human rights. Just like the Nazi Brown Shirts, the Minutemen exist only to deny rights to a minority. In this specific case, to a brown skinned Spanish speaking minority. You might notice that the Minutemen are not that active at the Canadian border, even though we do get our share of undocumented Canadians. I have not heard of the Minutemen protesting the undocumented Irish in San Francisco. The Minutemen are simply an expression of economic white elitism that is one of the cornerstones of the Libertarian movement.

In my next post I will be describing scapegoating in Libertarianism, and then we will return to the subject of the Minutemen.

Change You Can Predict

1. Powerful and Consuming Nationalism Part Two: The Myth of Government Spending

The Face of Freedom in Corporate America

Corporations are leeches sucking the life’s blood out of any government which allows them to grow out of control. Many of the people who penned the Constitution knew this. This is why the Constitution grants we the people the rights and powers to regulate corporations. This is why Libertarian propagandists keep quoting the Federalist Papers instead of the actual Constitution. When confronted with the actual Constitution, the Libertarian propagandists claim that the Founders didn’t really want government regulation of corporations. So Libertarians simply ignore the parts of the Constitution they don’t like.

The problem with corporations is that they are clever and adaptive parasites that rarely kill their hosts the same way twice. Nationalism is a form of protective coloring that helps corporations fool their victims into thinking that they are benign entities. In Germany, the corporations wrapped themselves in the trappings of socialism. They even called their political instrument the National Socialist Party and sucked out government money in the name of the people. The Nazis funded the construction of the Volkswagen factories, but it was Henry Ford who pocketed all the profits. Hitler began a program of guaranteed employment, but it was the government that was actually paying the salaries. The corporations were getting free labor.

American corporations are living in hog heaven. They have no less than 50 individual governments to suck dry, but they are held back by the Federal Government. For instance, in order for Enron to have ripped off the State of California as badly as they did, they had to trick the California voters into deregulating the state power industry and take it away from federal oversight. Once the feds were no longer monitoring its bookkeeping, Enron stole with impunity and then used Federal bankruptcy regulations to steal from their employees. This is the true purpose of the Libertarian party. The idea is to so weaken the Federal Government so that it can no longer regulate the corporations and Enron scams can become common business practices.

Having no real Constitutional means to deregulate themselves, the corporations rely on deception. The biggest lie that they are telling their true believers is the myth of government spending. According to the myth of government spending, all our tax money is stuffed into a giant mattress, and then parceled out by a Scrooge-like treasurer. I think that it is a major failure in our public school system that anybody would fall for that whopper.

The truth of the matter is that our tax money is an essential and irreplaceable part of our national economy. Our tax money is not stuffed into the Presidential mattress. Our tax money should be put to work keeping America healthy, working, and strong. Our tax money should be invested in industries which are on American soil and paying living wages to Americans. Our tax money should be invested in small business loans to guarantee competition in a capitalist economy, mortgages for affordable housing, and into other interest accumulating and profit making investments to assure the health of the American economy.

We do not spend our tax money. It is the interest on our tax money that is spent. Spending more money than is taxed is a sign of a healthy economy. After nearly 30 years of Neocon rule, we have an extremely sick economy. We have massive unemployment and homelessness which succeeds in keeping wages down for the few service jobs left in the U.S. Corporations are sucking out billions in profits while Americans are losing their homes, and the Libertarians blame the victims.

The idea behind all this is to so weaken the Federal Government that it will never again be an effective public guardian. The Libertarians wrap themselves up in the flag to pretend they act in the public interest. They make up evidence that the income tax is illegal and unAmerican; ignoring both the 18^th Amendment and the Administrative Law Act which certainly makes the income tax legal. 30 years of Neocon rule has left the Federal Government too broke to effectively monitor corporate crime, and the corporate criminals who fund the Libertarian Party like that just fine. The fact that Libertarians, Born Again Christians, and the Neocons are all telling the same lie shows that they are all working for the same corporations.

Cleaning Up After Bush

The Great God Market Place

Christian Savior

Libertarian Savior

The problem with Libertarians is that they have the exact same circular logic as Born Again Christians. Ask a Christianoid for a solution for unemployment and he will reply that the unemployed should pray to Jesus for a job. When asked how he knows that praying to Jesus will help, he will reply that it says so in the Bible. Ask him how he knows that what the Bible says is true, he will reply that everyone knows it is the literal word of God. Finally if you ask him how he knows that the Bible is the literal word of God, he look at you like you were nuts and say that it says so in the Bible. See? Circular logic.

Ask a Libertarian what his solution to unemployment is, and he will tell you that deregulating the market place will solve all our problems. When asked how he knows that deregulating the market place would work, he will reply that it is in the Constitution. When asked how they know it is in the Constitution, he will respond that it’s what the Founding Fathers said in the Federalist Papers. When you point out that the Federalist Papers are not the Constitution, he look at you like you were nuts and say that it’s what the Founding Fathers wanted. To put it another way, Jefferson said it, I believe it, that settles it. See what I mean? Circular logic.

Examining the Constitution, we see that the Federal Government most certainly has the right to impose regulations upon industries that cannot regulate themselves according to the public good. Stocks and bonds are regulated due to the stock market crash of 1929. As soon as the regulations were relaxed junk stocks went right back on the market and stock brokers were selling them on the margin, and that lead to the stock market crash of 2000. So why do Libertarians believe that deregulating the market place would not lead to further abuses?

When you get out a copy of the Constitution and show a Libertarian that economic regulations are most certainly constitutional, He gets all indignant and self righteous and points out that the Founding Fathers were against it. It says so in the Federalist Papers. So Libertarians are not really Constituionalists. They are followers of the Federalist Papers, and they follow it with the same unthinking devotion as the Christianoids follow the Bible. The Federalist Papers were propaganda used to convince the public to accept the Constitution. The Constitution itself was subjected to many revisions and compromises before it was finally ratified. The finished product has remained in the basic spirit of the Federalist Papers, but practicality caused many fundamental differences.

Besides not really believing in the Constitution, the Libertarians also believe in Founding Fathers who are as mythical as the Biblical Jesus. Take their hero Tom Jefferson for instance. The Libertarians are the first to point out that their hero considered taxation as tyranny. This makes the historical Jefferson the nation’s first tyrant. As Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Jefferson made paying off America’s war debt to the French as his first priority. Unlike what was said in the Federalist Papers, Jefferson was a keen enough politician to know that his fledgling nation would never fly without foreign investment. So to establish credibility amongst European investors, Jefferson pushed through many unpopular taxes to pay off the debt early. Point that out to a Libertarian and they get as angry as a Christianoid at the denial of Christ. Then they pull out a copy of the Federalist Papers to show you the holy word.

It seems to me that Jefferson plays the same role in the lives of Libertarians that Jesus plays in the lives of Christianoids. Jefferson is the way and the truth and none come unto the Market Place but through him. So if Jefferson is Jesus, than who is God? Why the Market Place of course. The Market Place is a mysterious invisible force that moves through the earth keeping the economy in balance through “economic readjustments” I suppose “economic readjustments” are the Libertarian version of miracles. Point out that the current mortgage meltdown is one of Market Place’s “economic readjustments”, and Libertarians rejoice for you have seen the light. Point out that people are losing their homes and living on the street, and they will blame FDR and the New Deal for all the unnecessary laws. If there wasn’t any laws against selling fraudulent mortgages, there wouldn’t be any crime, right?

So what happens when you point out that if the laws and regulations were respected, there would not have been a mortgage meltdown, and people could still afford a roof over their heads? The Libertarians get angry and accuse you of supporting Big Government. You see if the Market Place is God then Big Government is Satan. So demanding just and fair laws to protect our economy, a compassionate social safety net, and a national health plan makes me a Satanist. So all I can say to that is, Hail Satan.

So why do Libertarians confuse the Market Place with the almighty? The answers can be found in the works of Adam Smith and the other early Capitalist economists. They were writing during the earliest years of the Industrial Revolution. Their works can be seen as a transition from theological thought to scientific thought. Like Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin, the early capitalists were Mechanists who still saw natural law as something created. That is why there are so many points in common between Adam Smith and John Calvin. So it is obvious that there would be plenty of confusion between Market Place and The Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Boycott Coke and Google

What Do They Mean That Paris Can’t Run?

Maybe You'd Rather Look at McCain?

Fellow Camp Followers, are you as outraged as I am? Some bean counter at the election board is trying to tell me that Paris Hilton cannot run for president because Paris is too young? Can you believe that? Can you believe the outright audacity of it? This is blatant age discrimination against us dirty old men. How dare they tell mature white male voters that we cannot vote for the candidate of our choice. What is this, Soviet Russia where the state tells us who to vote for?

To make things worse, you will never guess what excuse they used to block Paris’s candidacy? They had the nerve to tell me that Paris cannot run because of the Constitution! Who cares about the Constitution? It’s just a piece of paper, people. I mean, who pays attention to it anymore? Who the hell cares that the Constitution says that you have to be 35 in order to be president? By the time Paris is 35, she won’t be worth voting for. We want Paris now!

The worst of it is the hypocrisy. Right now we have a president in the White House who was not elected through Constitutional means. Nobody kicked Bush out into the gutters of Pennsylvania Avenue just because he cheated in the election. Nobody stops Bush when he gives billions of dollars to Sun Young Moon through his faith based initiatives. Nobody has stopped the government from denying undocumented workers their legal rights under the 14^th amendment. Who cares about the prisoners being illegally held in Gitmo, the lies behind the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, or illegal wiretapping? Nobody seems to care about any of that, and some clerk has the nerve to tell me that my candidate cannot run for the presidency? The nerve of some people.

So the bean counters and the nit-pickers are going to waste more tax-payer’s money by making us do this the hard way. The “public servant” I spoke to said that we would have to have a Constitutional amendment in order to be able to vote for Paris. I say why bother amending something that everybody only pays selective attention to? Let’s just ignore the Constitution and vote for Paris anyway. After all, if the current POTUS can just ignore the constitution any time he wants, why the hell can’t we?

So vote for Paris Hilton, the Only Change that Matters in Washington.

Why People Become Libertarians

Who Would Possibly Take This Character Seriously?

I think that everybody goes through a Libertarian phase while growing up. This phase tends to begin during college and lasts all the way up to the point where the you actually have to live in the real world, make a real living, and realize that the world around you doesn’t really give a damn. Libertarianism lasts until you have two kids, rent or a mortgage, and your job has been outsourced to Timbuktu. That social safety net starts looking pretty damned good when you have to explain to your landlord why the rent will be late, or your sitting by the phone afraid it is going to be the bank asking about your mortgage payments. To give another example, when Mr. or Ms. Libertarian comes down with cancer and cannot cough up the co-payments for the treatments and feed the kids, then suddenly it looks like the government just might be able to do something better than the private sector after all.

From my limited experience, internet companies tend to be Libertarian. This really makes sense to me. If I were the CEO of an internet company I would certainly foster a Libertarian corporate culture. Could Yahoo have supported their Chinese overlords in the suppression of human rights if Yahoo programmers and technical people had a union that could strike in support of human rights? Would Google be able to discriminate against older workers if there was a union to file a discrimination suit? Now that the major internet companies are outsourcing their jobs to Israel, it’s too late to unionize. All they can do is sit in their foreclosed houses and wait for the sheriff to turn them out in the street. Maybe if they pray in front of a picture of Ron Paul, the great god Market Place will readjust the economy in their favor.

Another thing I have noticed about Libertarians is that they entirely miss the correlation of cause and effect. They remind me of my oldest boy when he was three years old. We would tell him not to touch the stove and he would touch the stove as soon as our backs were turned and then get angry at us because he got burned. Five minutes later he would be trying to touch the stove again to see if it would burn him again. Our oldest grew out of that phase, but I have met Libertarians in their 60s who are still don’t believe that a hot stove will burn them every time they touch it. I am still waiting for them to make the basic correlation between the rise in the cost of food and the persecution of undocumented workers. On the subject of undocumented workers, I cannot believe that a group of people who are so paranoid about “big government” can support a fence across Mexico. I cannot believe that a group of people who are so adamant about the sanctity of property rights would support a wall that illegally cuts through Apache-owned lands, and which disrupts and destroys the Apache’s livelihood. The United States and Homeland Security have no right to build anything across the Apache Reservation. I suppose that sacred property rights only apply to White Anglo Protestants. I can’t wait until the Libertarians figure out that governments only build fences to keep their own citizens in. I can’t wait until the penny drops on that one. I will laugh myself into a hernia when the border guards turn their guns on U.S citizens for trying to follow their outsourced jobs into Mexico. You will be able to tell which U.S citizens are Libertarian, because they will be the ones who charge at the armed guards a second time.

It also never ceases to amaze me the other basic results of cause and effect that Libertarians simply don’t get. In one breath they will berate the FCC and then kvetch about Fox News. I understand that many of them are simply to young to understand that the FCC had prevented obscenities like Fox News before Reagan deregulated it, but I simply cannot believe they have not made the correlation between corporate crime and deregulation. They keep insisting that corporate crime and the Media can be controlled through some mysterious, unseen omniscient force called The Market Place with the same vehemence a Christianoid argues about The Rapture and with just as little evidence.

As a salesman and former Public Relations worker, I often wonder what attracts otherwise intelligent people to a political cause that accomplishes the opposite of their stated goals. Libertarians claim to be in favor of liberty (hence the name) yet their entire philosophy guarantees the opposite. They reject unions and labor laws and then they blame “big government “when they are illegally fired and there is no union to protect them. They claim that business laws and regulations are a waste of tax payer’s money and a threat to their liberty, and they don’t seem to notice that it’s not their mortgage broker who is losing his house. Government deregulation has successfully disempowered everybody and has made us all subject to the whims and fancies of the corporation without any legal recourse, and yet Libertarians continue to place the blame government for their problems and see the solution as continuing to surrender more of their legal rights to the very corporations that are screwing them.

Of course a big part of it is that Libertarians identify with those whom they see as having power. This is the same social force that inspires Bill Cosby to blame his fellow African-Americans for the very bigotry that oppresses them and which made a flaming queen like J. Edgar Hoover to hide in the closet and oppress his fellow homosexuals. It is the basic psychology of the schoolyard; if you stand behind the bully, defend the bully, and do what the bully tells you, and bully those you see as weaker than you, the bully won’t pick on you. This is why Libertarians who claim to support the separation of church and state support a flaming Christianoid like Ron Paul. As Libertarians surrender all their power to the employers and live in constant fear of outsourcing, workplace discrimination and, illegal termination, they pass on their fear and frustration by supporting Ron Paul. Ron Paul would allow discrimination against women by removing the federal protections for abortion. Ron Paul would remove the federal civil rights laws which would allow corporations and the southern states to continue and increase their discrimination against minorities. Libertarians have already supported Bush, Clinton and the rest of the neocons in taking away the social safety net, but Ron Paul would take away what few shreds were left. Ron Paul would end the drug war, the Libertarian would argue. If American society was a schoolyard, Ron Paul would be the bully who beats up the little girl, the black kid, the poor kid, and the disabled kid for their lunch money, and ending the drug war could be seen as Paul giving his schoolyard cronies a nickel of it.

In my opinion, this is why so many internet Libertarians are also trolls. Rather than empower themselves through unionization, political unity against corporate abuse in the economy and the workplace, and aiding others to empower themselves through an intelligent and compassionate social safety net, they take out their abuse on others. Then, when they discover that their victims also have power and legal protections, they cry and scream like elementary schoolers being sent to the principals office. They cry censorship and constitutional violation with the same immaturity as a little kid screaming obscenities in the classroom to see what the teacher would do. I suspect that most Libertarians have deep seated boundary issues, and that would certainly fit into my school bully analogy. Ultimately I think that is the true appeal of the Libertarian party. It appeals to the inner child who still thinks that he can have ice cream for dinner every night when he grows up. Libertarian propaganda stresses the concept that nobody has the right to say no to you no matter how badly your actions inflict the rights of others, and ignores our responsibilities to our fellow person, our children, our grandchildren, our nation, and the world.

So is it any wonder that a rapture believing Christianoid like Ron Paul would become the candidate of choice for internet trolls?