“We’ve got to rise above the need for cops and laws”
-Dead Kennedys, “The Stars and Stripes of Corruption”
The Fox News website said that last week, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire “ignited a social media firestorm” when its Twitter account posted: “Legalize child labor. Children will learn more on a job site than in public school.”
First let me say: I actually agree with this. But that is not an endorsement of child labor so much as my assessment of the public school system.
Now, the text of the article indicated that the LP position had a little more nuance: “”Our proposal is that the minimum age requirement be lowered to 16 without school superintendent approval, if a child is homeschooled, this option is difficult for them,” (party chair) Jarvis said. “We also propose that if a minor has graduated high school or obtained a GED, they have already proven themselves and should not be required to obtain permission to be employed. The law in [New Hampshire] currently prohibits these individuals from seeking employment without a signed written document from a parent on file.”
Even so, 2016 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson went on record saying, “I’m sorry, but no. This isn’t what libertarianism means to millions of Americans – pushing a disturbing and out of touch stance on child labor is entirely detached from what people need in America today. This does not advance liberty, or help change people’s opinions”. Jiletta Jarvis supported his right to an opinion even though she said “I know that there was an emotional reaction to his criticism and we are working internally on that issue.” Personally I think they should take Johnson more seriously. I mean, he’s the leading expert on how to make libertarianism look bad by taking a public position with absolutely no knowledge of the subject.
As far as the “working internally” on the emotional reactions, this whole thing seems to be just one example of an extremely confusing mini-civil war, where other state parties of the national Libertarian Party are having their say, where Jarvis asserts that “I have watched secret plots occurring” and new members wish to discredit the Party and use the same tactics to take over the Republican Party. The LPNH Executive Committee, or “Mises Caucus” (Twitter page ‘Temporarily the home of the @LPNH Executive and Communications committees’) published a tweet from the Connecticut Party saying “There was no convention … that disaffiliated the original LPNH… Jilletta Jarvis’ actions were not authorized by any noticed meeting under any set of bylaws… Our Regional Representative is ORDERED, DIRECTED and COMMANDED TO BRING A MOTION TO THE LNC FOR THE REMOVAL OF THE CHAIR”.
Now here’s the real fucking joke: Nobody else knows this. There are a few newspaper websites covering the story, but you’d have to know to look for them. The only reason I even bring it up is because I know any time I try to advocate for libertarianism against authority, some smart aleck liberal is gonna look up that LPNH child-labor tweet and go “Yeh whaddya thinka THIS, Mr. Glibertarian? Ha? Ha? HA? Oh, I almost forgot: SOMALIA!!!”
Nobody else is gonna CARE, because it doesn’t matter. For all the impact you actually have, the Libertarian Party may as well be a bunch of SciFi geeks arguing over whether the Millennium Falcon could beat the USS Enterprise, and on that score, the Millennium Falcon is to the Enterprise what your uncle’s 1970 VW stoner van is to a modern US Navy guided missile cruiser, the Falcon is using a point-to-point hyperdrive jump system when the Enterprise can operate at faster-than-light warp speed, and in any case, neither of them are real and at the end of the day you’re just debating the minutiae of fictional fantasy BULLSHIT.
Not that fantasy and science fiction are bad. Take the cellphone. A ubiquitous convenience of modern life. A lot of Star Trek fans would say it was inspired by the flip-communicators the Enterprise crew used in the Original Series. I always thought it was derived from Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. But in any case, it used to be fiction, and now it’s reality. That’s the difference between supernatural fantasy and science fiction, science fiction shows you that there is a path between desire and reality. But you still have to create that path. You still have to have organization and planning and marketing to get the cellphone to be other than just a cool idea or a project in your friend’s basement. And you also have to acknowledge that some cool ideas are more feasible in the present than others. Our science does not yet allow us a feasible path to cold fusion, the atmospheric conversion engine, or immortality technology, let alone a social system that makes government obsolete. And here’s the thing, we’re that much LESS likely to get there if we disregard what science we do have cause the coronavirus or the vaccine or both are some kind of government conspiracy to control the masses. If you know how many people have already died and you don’t want to get vaccinated cause “FREEDOM” then the Science Fiction future you’re most likely to advance is the one where chimpanzees and gorillas on horseback oversee naked humans in labor camps because We, the People have chosen to become inarticulate apes.
Now, any professional libertarian-hater would be telling you all of this and already has, but I AM a libertarian. If you’re a libertarian who thinks I’m NOT one cause I think we should be practical and reform the government we already have rather than pretend it doesn’t exist, well, who cares? Your premise is, “libertarianism means you can’t label me or tell me what to do.” Right back at you, guy.
And why would I still call myself a (L)ibertarian, especially after this shit? Sadly, it’s the same reason I still called myself a Libertarian in 2016 – as sad as the LP is, the Party of Trump is that much worse. As for the Democrats, I already reconciled myself to the practical reality of having to vote Democratic because the greater evil is not simply disagreeable but an active threat to national security. That doesn’t change the fact that while the Democrats may be the only party with any relation to reality, sometimes it’s hard to tell. At times they seem that much more smug and naive in their assumptions about the world than the Libertarians, and it’s that much more irritating because they claim to know better. They’re constantly telling us all the wonderful stuff that they’re going to do now that they’re in charge, and constantly crying about how they can’t do any of it because the Republican bullies are taking their lunch money every day, and only a few of them have figured out that they need to stop wringing their hands and fight back.
According to a 2021 Gallup poll (that President Biden referred to this week) only 25 percent of voters identify as Republican and only 30 percent identified as Democrats. Now, when you add independents who lean to one faction or the other for practical reasons, you have slightly less than half of polled voters (49%) identifying as Democrat or Democrat-leaning, but only 40 percent of people are Republican or lean Republican. Do the math and that’s a 9 percent gap in favor of the Democratic coalition. But this also means you have 19 percent of voters as “left” independents and 15 percent as “right” independents and when you do that math, that total is 34 percent. So we have reached a point at which the largest group of voters, over a third, might not agree on anything else, but agree they can’t align with the duopoly.
But when someone in the Libertarian Party seriously pushes an idea like child labor, that is to the libs what “Drag Queen Story Hour” is to the conservatives: Waving the freak flag in front of Middle Americans that we might have otherwise been able to persuade.
There was this one guy discussing the subject on YouTube who lamented the situation insofar as libertarians almost don’t want to be taken seriously. They do have some real critiques, such as, that our government is too powerful and unaccountable, or our civilian police are too militarized. He also said that what usually happens when he debates a libertarian is that they’re capable of a cogent argument for about 72 seconds, then they go off into the Ether. That clip also led to the usual dopey, sneering arguments like “libertarians are just Republicans who like pot.” It’s a lot harder to argue the point when libertarians concede it. A lot of them seem to be more exercised about taxes and COVID regulations than the fact that a large segment of the society is more oppressed than white people were under COVID, and have been for decades if not centuries.
But that just gets to the point that the problem is not the stupid leftist caricature. The problem, as with their caricature of the former Republican Party, is when right-wingers obsessively seek to live up to and exceed the caricature. Because a lot of these guys are living on social media and think that the main aspiration of life is to be a cartoon. This is why both libertarians and “conservatives” will promote child labor, or reducing the voter franchise or some other innovation from the 19th Century, cause they’re trying to show their punk rock edge.
And that just gets to the point that you’ve already got one party in government that is actively against government and has written itself out of any idea of what they want to do when they get a majority, that thinks asking what voters want is too much of a compromise of the ideal, that as a result, they’re losing voters left and right, and as a result of that, act like majority rule is communist. I am again reminded of that one time where Thomas Massie, a Republican Congressman who claimed to be libertarian when that was still sorta cool with his team, said: “But then when I went to Iowa (in 2016) I saw that the same people that had voted for Ron Paul weren’t voting for Rand Paul, they were voting for Donald Trump. And the same thing happened in Kentucky, the people who were my voters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the primary. And so I was in a funk because how could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren’t voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage.”
If all you have to offer is being the craziest son of a bitch in the race, you can’t compete with what the Party of Trump is now. THEY STOLE YOUR ACT.
Maybe try writing some new material?
With what we have misruling the country, there is plenty of room for alternatives. There is plenty of opportunity for Libertarians to take advantage. Which is why it pisses me off that they refuse to do so.
I am sick and tired of my Party and my movement being taken as a joke.
But apparently you’re not.
So maybe I’m getting sick of you.