Sunday, March 27, 2016

Libertarian Infighting Needs to End

There are several different ways to cripple if not outright destroy a movement. Infighting in my opinion has to be the worst among them because it destroys a movement from within. Infighting causes movements to take sight off of the enemy, view themselves as the enemy while the main goal becomes swept under the rug. It's bad enough when one has to worry about their enemies attacking them while not being sure if the ones you call friends won't sucker punch you.

Over the past week or so I noticed on twitter various libertarian anarcho-capitalists I follow attacking each other because some are advocating voting for one of the Libertarian party candidates in the presidential election in November. For the record I don't vote as I like many anarcho-capitalists view voting as a waste of time because the system itself is rigged. However I won't attack a fellow libertarian for voting like I would attack a liberal, a conservative, or a neoreactionary on their brand of statism. In Man vs The Welfare State, Henry Hazlitt said that libertarians need to attack from multiple directions if the movement has any hope of advancing real liberty. Hazlitt is right in that regard, especially in today's world where statism has morphed into several different forms.

Getting into awful and hateful arguments because some in the movement are pushing others to vote is a waste of time. I was watching a YouTube video between radio host Scott Horton and Jeffery Tucker in which Horton said that he views the Anti-Trump and Pro-Trump groups getting into fights as when red shirts were getting into fights with brown shirts in 1930s Germany. These are the types of groups libertarians as a whole should be fighting with, not with ourselves. There will always be people within the movement that people will or won't like. I'm sure those who are reading this can name three to five writers, podcasters, speakers, etc that they like or have a problem with. Libertarians should be attacking warmongers, protectionists, economic interventionists, anti-government accountability groups, those who hate individual rights and believe the "greater good or the majority" takes precedent, anti-self defense groups, drug warriors, those who support foreign aid, etc. These are the people who are enemies of liberty not ourselves.