At the 2022 Libertarian Party national convention in Reno last May, the L.P.’s Mises Caucus, which is named for the uncompromising libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, succeeded in achieving a complete takeover of the Libertarian Party National Committee (LNC). The takeover was undoubtedly one of the most significant developments in the Libertarian Party since its inception.
Since then, I have heard lots of positive things about how the new LNC is reorganizing operations and engaging in longterm planning. Even though the initial signs for the party are positive, in my opinion all of this will be for naught if the new L.P. fails to restore its original libertarian brand to pure libertarianism.
During the past 20 years or so, disgruntled Republicans flooded into the Libertarian Party. Unfortunately, however, many of them brought some of their conservative baggage with them — baggage that (1) consisted of measures designed to reform the welfare-warfare-state serfdom under which we live and (2) transformed the goal of the Libertarian Party.
Over time, these reform-oriented Libertarians came to dominate and control the Libertarian Party. The result has been that the Libertarian brand has come to be a combination conservative-libertarian reform-oriented mush — a mush that has left countless people wondering what the L.P. actually stands for.
Even worse, some people have come to be convinced that the LP is a conservative political party, one that serves as a revolving door for the Republican Party. For example, this was reflected just recently in a July 28, 2022, article on the prominent leftist website Alternet that referred to the “right-wing Libertarian Party.”
Equally significant, over time many of these disgruntled Republicans succeeded in transforming the goal of the party. We are a political party, they say, and the aim of any political party is to get people into public office. Therefore, they say, the goal of the Libertarian Party is to get Libertarian candidates elected to public office. That mindset now widely prevails within the L.P.
But this mindset is all wrong. Electing people to public office was never the original goal of the Libertarian Party. The original goal of the Libertarian Party was to achieve a free society. That’s one of the important things that distinguished the L.P. from the country’s two other major political parties. Electing people to public office was the means of achieving that goal, not the goal itself.
Over the years, transforming the goal to getting L.P. candidates elected to public office worked perfectly in tandem with the reform-oriented mindset that the disgruntled Republicans brought into the Libertarian Party. The way to get more votes — the way to get elected — they said — was to abandon pure libertarian principles in favor of reform-oriented proposals that could be sold as “libertarian.” In that way, voters would feel more comfortable voting Libertarian because the reform proposals would seem less dangerous or threatening because they would leave statist programs intact.
It bears emphasizing that virtually all these reform measures — e.g., school vouchers, Social Security “privatization,” health-savings accounts, drug-war reform, tax reform, regulatory reform, Pentagon reform, CIA reform, NSA reform, selective foreign interventionism, and much more — would find favor within the Republican Party.
This reform-oriented mindset gradually became the dominant mindset within the Libertarian Party. But there was one big problem with it: Reform is not freedom. Reform is reform. Freedom necessarily entails identifying infringements on freedom and removing, dismantling, terminating, or ending them. Reform necessarily entails leaving infringements on freedom intact and simply reforming or improving them.
Moreover, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, simply because some reform proposal is advocated by a Libertarian does not convert the proposal into a genuine libertarian position. It remains a reform proposal even if it is endorsed by Libertarians.
Republicans and Democrats have mired our nation in a perfect storm of crises — fiscal, monetary, drug war, immigration, foreign policy, education, healthcare, and more. There is only one way out of this statist morass — libertarianism, which is the most honorable, glorious, and noble political and economic philosophy in history.
In the political arena, the Libertarian Party is the only hope for leading America — and indirectly the world — out of this welfare-warfare-state morass. But the only way to do that is by rejecting the conservative-libertarian hybrid mush that the L.P. has come to represent and instead restore the Libertarian brand to pure libertarianism.
Let’s leave welfare-warfare-state reform to the Republicans and Democrats. Let us Libertarians be the ones standing unequivocally for liberty.