Even the most right-wing of American citizens probably have those moments where they think that a hint of sanity and normality from the Democrats might offer a welcome change of pace after the exhausting past few years and provide a tempting alternative vote next year. So we must survey what the left has to offer, and then be reminded its nothing but ever more totalitarian schemes for social controlcompletely unacceptable, and for a libertarian, unthinkable.
WitnessBeto ORourke with his yelps of enthusiasm for gun confiscation. Witness, too, his Twitter spat with Texas State Rep. Briscoe Cainin which ORourke accused Cain of making a death threat merely because Cain said hed defend himself if ORourke came to confiscate his guns. ORourkes hysterical-sissy reaction suggests hes either the most passive-aggressive person alive or cant even understand the childhood playground concept of Who started it?which I regard as the bedrock principle of all morality. Left-liberals dont like concepts like guilt and innocence, I suppose, let alone complex notions such as assailant and self-defense. Never, never again give such people political power.
Its not just guns, though. Consider ORourkes ill-thought-out insistence you somehow have aright to live close to your job. How does he plan to enforce that? No, dont tell me, please. I dont want to spend the night shuddering in horror at the thought of the mass relocations.
You might think Joe Biden provides a moderate, albeit doddering, option. But then, in last weeks debate,Biden at one point (in a healthcare segment) basically accused Bernie Sanders of not being socialist enough. Biden should attend to his teeth and leave Americans to attend to their own dental and health plans privately.
Andrew Yang continues his nerd-niche attempt to look cool offering to buy votes and, once elected, to decide whether companies are operating in a human as opposed to merely capitalist fashion. This distinction is essentially meaningless, but it reveals Yang thinks government makes things human whereas buying and selling in the marketplace doesnt, as if there were no humans doing the buying and selling. Not surprisingly, Yang recently bailed at the last minute on a debate at the libertarian Soho Forum, where he would surely have ended up receiving UBIan Unambiguous Beatdown Intellectually.
Elizabeth Warren is just as nuts, wanting what sounds like a Yang-ish but even more strictly enforced set of benchmarks for corporations to obey each year if they want the federal government to do them the great favor of allowing them to continue to operate. That way lies socialism, pretty quickly and not in a good way. She also opposes school choice, though no intellectually honest person thinks trapping people in bad schools is the way to get those schools to perform best.
Thats how a kidnapper thinks. The kidnapper swears youll eventually learn to like it in the basement, so theres no reason to let you wriggle out through the back window. Pardon me: thats how kidnappersand teachers union headsthink. Same thing, really.
Meanwhile, a book out this week claims that a DC non-profit head claimed to recall that back at Yale, at one naked college party, friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis onto a womans hand, but the non-profit head recounted that back before Kavanaughs Supreme Court confirmation, doesnt want to comment now, and has not had his story confirmed by the woman who supposedly had the penis shoved onto her (a penis that is also perhaps being victimized in this account). Indeed, her friends say she has no memory of any such incident. Thats good enough for some Democrats, though, and presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Julian Castro have called for Kavanaughs impeachment.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The Democrats are so awful and so detached from reality that they have no grounds for complaining about things like the mild hyperbole in thatwonderfulanti-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ad from theNew Faces GOP PAC. With historical photos, it depicts the bodies and piles of skulls that tend to result from the communist philosophies with which AOC and others on the left are now openly flirting.
Such a simple, emphatic ad and yet it clearly got under the socialists skin, with their allies in media and tech declaring the ad offensive and graphic. It wasnt all that graphic, but was a rare reminder in an anesthetized republic how high the political stakes really are, which is itself shocking. Good. More of this, please.
Or you can hypocritically condemn such comparisons between democratic socialism (as if the commoners will be calling all the shots) and nightmarish really-existing-socialism, then go right back to likening all non-leftists to Nazis.
Weve reached the point where even self-proclaimed liberal (but largely libertarian) Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek, deceased for two and a half decades, is condemned as semi-dictatorial by the loathsome French economist Thomas Piketty, who appears to have decided to join the Nancy MacLean school of history, smearing libertarians as radical anti-libertarians to avoid having to grapple with their (potentially appealing) real messages. She tried to make milquetoast libertarian economist James Buchanan out to be a de facto Klansman. Others tried a similar attack on economist Ludwig von Mises afterwards (even though he actually fled Continental Europe to escape the Nazis).
Then they came for Hayek, and there were far fewer libertarians left to defend him than there should bebecause so many libertarians were busy trying to find something nice to say about liberals and Democrats instead of defending their own core principles. Give it up. The Democrats know our love of freedom makes us their natural enemy. Its high time we were as clear-eyed about the situation, hard as it may be to keep ones eyes open during another Democrat debate.
Todd Seavey is the author ofLibertarianism for Beginners and is on Twitter at @ToddSeavey.
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