The Difference Between Libertarians and Libertards

The first libertarian I ever met in my life was a guy diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. I was a teenager, and this guy left an impression on me that I would spend the next decade shaking. The impression was that all libertarians were nuts. I now know that my schizoid lover of liberty was what I would now call a "libertard." "What's the difference?" my smirking leftard and fasctard critics will ask. Here's the difference.

Despite his paranoia and delusions, my schizophrenic libertarian friend was correct that many of the things that government does is unjust. He had been involuntarily committed on numerous occasions by his family just because he annoyed the fuck out of them. He wasn't dangerous. He kept a job. He minded his own business. But he told me how they would him down and force injections in his ass that messed with his head. When I consider how many religious people there are who are encouraged in their delusions, I have to feel bad for a guy who merely believed that the FBI was tapping his phone line.

There are a lot of people like Mr. Paranoia in libertarian circles. They even gain a following like Alex Jones and Jesse Ventura. They believe weird things such as massive government conspiracies and the like. This is where libertarians and libertards part company. Both libertarians and libertards oppose the government. The difference is that libertarians believe the government is stupid and inept while libertards believe the government is hyperintelligent but evil.

Now, I believe there are government conspiracies. But these conspiracies have evidence. I believe the government under Nixon lied about Watergate. I believe the government lied us into Vietnam and Iraq. I think the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iranian nuclear facilities was a government creation. These are real conspiracies which the press uncovers.

False conspiracies have little or no evidence. Libertards make bold conjectures and piece together facts to weave a tapestry of utter bullshit. They believe things like the JFK assassination was not the product of a lone gunman, or the moon landing was a hoax used to gain PR against the USSR, or that 9/11 was an inside job. The problem with such colossal conspiracies is that no credible person has come forward as a whistleblower on any of this shit. How is this possible? Nixon's guys couldn't hold their lie together for very long, yet we are supposed to believe that the supposed architects behind the 9/11 inside job have been able to keep their secret for a decade and not one person had a crisis of conscience. This is simply unbelievable.

The reality is that the government is very bad at keeping its secrets. All of the controversy sparked by Wikileaks shows this. The government is secretive but because of its sheer size there is simply no way to keep water in that massive leaky bucket. This is why the real secrets they keep end up getting exposed. This is how you get the absurdity of the US Air Force forbidding its members from reading the New York Times.

The people in government are idiots. They aren't evil so much as stupid. The idea that a conspiracy involving the Bilderberg Group to kill off 6 billion people through poisoning our food, water, and medicine is simply ludicrous. I might be wrong, but what are the Bilderbergs supposed to eat and drink? Or could it be that the real conspiracy is that libertard types want us to buy their herbal remedies and whole foods?

If you go over to a site like Infowars, you will see all sorts of advertisements for water filtration, organic food, and homeopathic quackery along with buying gold. Conspiracy mongering is big business. The people who push this tripe are little more than con artists along the lines of infomercial hucksters and televangelists. The fact is that fools are big business, and an entire industry exists to serve this foolishness.

Duping people is fairly easy. Splice together a few real facts with some sinister theorizing and play some ominous music in the background. People conditioned by movies and television journalism follow these cues in much the same way a rat will press a lever for a food pellet. This conditioning dupes them into believing the bullshit. Yet, anyone with a capacity for critical thinking and access to Google can poke holes through this crap.

This insanity is not limited to the libertarian section of the political spectrum. On the Right, we have groups like the John Birch Society, militia groups, racists, and what have you. On the Left, we have Al Gore. But virtually all the people on the Left and Right are idiots anyway because they already ignore evidence such as the failure of the drug war, foreign intervention, and the welfare state. What is the remedy for all this madness?

The remedy is an empirical approach to politics. There is a reason so many students of economics become libertarian. As they study the facts, they come to see what is true. This is why hard nosed skeptics like Michael Shermer and Matt Ridley also identify as libertarians. This is also why my own arguments are so devastating on places like Facebook. I eschew word games and roll with facts. I defend free markets by pointing to our material abundance relative to past eras and communist regimes. I oppose the drug war and refute it by pointing to the fact that they do drugs in prison. And I blast foreign intervention by giving a list of people who used to be on the US payroll--Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Hosni Mubarak. These facts which are verifiable demand that you either change your viewpoints, or you choose to look like a complete idiot.

The problem with libertards is that they give the government idiots way too much credit. They don't have the brains to pull off such conspiracies. The other irony is that the libertards ignore the real conspiracies which we have evidence for. The things that go on in the foreign policy area are simply mind blowing. But this is ignored in favor of speculations about Area 51.

Few libertarians want to call out these kooks because they at least oppose government even if it is for ludicrous reasons. From a political viewpoint, you never argue with your supporters even if they are idiots. But you begin to look like an idiot the more you humor these people. This is a big reason that libertarians find it so hard to get elected. They get smeared with the guilt by association. But I don't run for political office, and I think real change happens in the culture and not at the ballot box. These people are idiots, and I am calling them out.

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