So how come we’re not free yet?

Subject: So how come we’re not free yet? Mon Jan 05, 2009 1:23 am

21. December 2008

Last week Lew Rockwell hosted Libertarian Party co-founder David Nolan on his regular podcast, in which the two discussed at length “what has happened to the Libertarian Party.” Or more to the point, why it seems to have gone off the rails, and why has the world gotten more statist despite all the blood, sweat and tears invested in reversing that trend.

Nolan’s remarks have been reverberating around the libertarian blogosphere and via mailing lists in the days since, and were passed on by long-time LP activist Richard Boddie. One responder opined that it was unfair to blame the LP for this failure, but the fault lies instead with a “failure of people to want freedom.” Which to me sort of begs the question.

I began what was to be a two-paragraph response which quickly telescoped into a full-blown essay, which took me a few hours to get down, and with that sort of time investment, I figured I might as well post it to my blog as well. Herewith, with some minor edits for style:

In much the same way as declaring property is owned by everybody, really makes that property owned by nobody, spreading the blame for failure around to everybody is pretty much the same as blaming nobody.

But rather than assign blame for our current situation either to particular libertarians, or to libertarians generally, it might be more constructive to examine the strategies and strategic philosophies that were pursued, and consider whether or not they were helpful.

It might also be useful to compare the success or failure of the libertarian movement with that of another popular movement which developed at the roughly same time — environmentalism...

http://www.bigheadpress.com/TheTimeSink/?p=126

So how come we’re not free yet?

So how come we’re not free yet?

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