Top 10 Signs You Might Not Be A Libertarian

[Truth2Tell]

Entertaining post by DarkSyde at Kos:

Top 10 Signs You Might Not Be A Libertarian

...

10. If you think Ron Paul isn't conservative enough and Fox News is fair and balanced, you might not be a Libertarian.

9. If you believe you have an inalienable right to attend Presidential townhalls brandishing a loaded assault rifle, but that arresting participants inside for wearing a pink shirt is an important public safety precaution, there's a chance you're dangerously unbalanced, but no chance you're a Libertarian.

8. If you think the government should stay the hell out of Medicare, well, you have way, way bigger problems than figuring out if you're really a Libertarian.

7. If you rank Anthonin Scalia and Roy Moore among the greatest Justices of all time, you may be bug fuck crazy, but you're probably not a Libertarian.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/30/773243/-Top-10-Signs-You-Might-Not-Be-A-Libertarian">Continues to nail it at the link...

[FLAprogressive]

1. Actually in many cases you probably are

especially on points 2, 7, 8, and 9

libertarians can kiss my ass

[lapfog_1]

2. Libertarians are ultra right wing republicans who want to

get laid and smoke dope. "Normal" ultra right wing republicans want to arrest and convict people that get laid and smoke dope.

[jmowreader]

4. That's pretty much what I've said for a while

"A Libertarian is a Republican with a bag of weed in his pocket."

[orleans]

5. that's so funny--never really thought of it like that.

more i think about it now, the more accurate it sounds.

[Chemisse]

3. Libertarians are a unique breed

Part Republican to the extreme and part Democrat to the extreme.

I sympathize with the extreme left positions, the concern over privacy issues and the insistence that the government stay the hell out of our personal lives.

The extreme right side of the Libertarian is wacky to me - no government programs AT ALL.

Nevertheless, I respect the purity of their beliefs.

The wingnut religious fanatics are not Libertarians. The Republican party cannot shuck them off that easily!

[FLAprogressive]

6. I don't respect libertarians because the only thing they're concerned about is money

most of them are pricks and corporate whores.

[Truth2Tell]

7. Very few of the people you're referring to

are actually libertarians, in the classical sense. There are more actual libertarians among the legions of the libertarian-left on DU than there are at every Ron Paul site put together. The word has been hijacked.

[jmowreader]

11. There are two kinds of libertarians

On DU they're referred to as "small-L libertarians" and "big-L libertarians."

Small-L libertarians are the libertarians in the classical sense. Big-L libertarians are the Republicans with bags of weed in their pockets.

[Dutch]

14. Indeed.

These far-right ultra-capitalist chalrlatans of the LP/Randroid variety would be better described as propertarian (if I'm feeling particularly generous, that is: Assholes would be my usual word of choice). The nightmarish world they seek to create would offer very little actual freedom to any but the richest of its inhabitants.

[Truth2Tell]

16. Exactly! Well said Dutch. nt

[arcadian]

17. ^^^THIS^^^

Every libertarian I know is pretty comfortable monetarily but they want to be richer, richer, richer. They also have liberal friends, so they don't want to be uncool and lumped in with pro-war, anti-abortion, death mongering, religious zealots on the right. They think they are some kind of rock star, but most of them are just selfish, greedy, pricks.

[Selatius]

13. That's not an extreme left or extreme right proposition.

The insistence on protections afforded in the Bill of Rights is a matter better placed on the spectrum between libertarian and authoritarian. I generally ascribe "left" or "right" on their economic stances, not their social ones.

You could have a left winger who is totally in favor of removing people's freedoms. Joseph Stalin is a good example. He could be called a left-authoritarian.

On the other hand, you could have a left winger who values the individual choice each person has and would rather they be given the choice rather than having it shoved on them. Mahatma Gandhi is a good example of that, and he could be easily described as a left-libertarian.

Right wingers have their own antecedents in the form of right-authoritarians and right-libertarians.

Everybody else falls into the gray area between all those points.

[benEzra]

24. Well put. (n/t)

[Dutch]

15. What you call purity, I call fanaticism.

And since they target that fanaticism at the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, to me that makes them about as worthy of respect as the dog shit I scraped off the bottom of my shoe when I got home today.

[BOG PERSON]

8. I don't have a problem with every libertarian.

Austrian libertarians for example are harmless nuts, Ron Paul libertarians are usually slobbering racist lunatics, and so on. You have to judge them on an individual basis. They're not all malicious. They are über-white though.

[shortbusgeek]

21. What about John Monds?

Really? What about this guy: John Monds - http://www.VoteMonds - he doesn't look uber-white to me!

[BOG PERSON]

25. I can see the glimmer of madness in his eyes.

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

[baldguy]

9. #11. I'm not ten yrs old.

#12. I realize there are things in this universe that will effect my life that I have no control over. Therefor I can join with my fellow citizens to form a government so we can.

[no bad days]

10. 1-10 and your 11 and 12

Do not seem to fit the Libertarian credo. They believe in minimum government (paved roads/fire department etc.) If they believed in no government they would be anarchist's. While I am no libertarian it is clear that whoever wrote that list was not either.

[jmowreader]

12. Why Libertarianism will never work

By this I mean classical Libertarianism, and not the kind of Libertarians who are really Republicans who don't agree with the GOP's drug policy--the Repukes with weed. Big-L libertarians are friends indeed, for as we all know a friend with weed is a friend indeed. And so it goes.

The basic tenet of libertarianism is, "you are better able to take care of yourself than the government is." Which is somewhat true, and somewhat false. On a micro level, a rational human being knows what he needs to survive. On a slightly more macro level, this emphasis on self-reliance means the community at large isn't going to do so well. Without some control over business, someone who controls the supply of a needed commodity can control the lives of the people he sells it to by manipulating the price. So there's GOT to be some government control here.

Besides, I think everyone here can think of someone who, given an environment where the government played no part in helping him live his life, would starve.

[guitar man]

18. you pretty much nailed it

I've always said the reason it won't work is because of selfish assholes. The utopian fantasy of a lot of big L Libertarians is that our friends, neighbors, corporate leaders etc. will all somehow magically do the right thing without any type of regulation or requirement to do so. In reality, we know it doesn't work that way. Too many people these days would sell their own mother for a measly profit, let alone their neighbor.

That's why I call myself a libertarian-realist. libertarian in the social sense and a realist in the economic sense. We have 300 million people in this country that have to eat and we can ill afford to rely on the benevolence of the upper classes to make sure it happens without some arm twisting.Their past track record just isn't very good

[HughBeaumont]

22. That last sentence is why Libertarians are libertarians -

Most of us HERE know someone like that. Some of us HERE were that at one point.

Libertarians never were that because in all likelihood they weren't raised or grew up in circles which required them to have empathy for others. I've seen it far too often; they're born on third base and think they hit a triple. The funniest ones are those that come from well-to-do families, work in family-run corporations, embrace every hard-right capitalist pig trait imaginable and call themselves "Libertarians".

They think their "hard work" got them where they are in life, when they don't seem to understand that networking, money, luck and better-than-average social skills factor in also. Any one of these four elements can be the success roadblock to the greater amounts of people that also worked hard. They also seem to miss the point that anyone who's wealthy relied on governmental resources of SOME kind to get there.

[FLAprogressive]

23. "they're born on third base and think they hit a triple" ^ that

[YoungAndOutraged]

19. I used to think I was a libertarian when I was a little kid

Then I checked out some Ayn Rand philosophy book from my local library. Only then did I realize that anyone over ten years old who calls themselves a libertarian/objectivist is worthy of nothing but a strange stare and maybe a laugh in the face, as you walk (quickly) away from them.

[BuyingThyme]

20. I think it would have been easier to stick with "might be."