The liberals are back. For proof, just check out the antics of two noted liberals, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews and Salon.com editor in chief Joan Walsh. This week both of them went apoplectic over a libertarian’s having the audacity to exercise two fundamental rights at the same time — free speech and the right to bear arms, both of which are guaranteed by the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution.
What caused Matthews’ and Walsh’s apoplexy? A New Hampshire libertarian named William Kostric showed up at a protest outside Barack Obama’s town meeting in Portsmouth carrying a sidearm, which is perfectly legal, and a sign that, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote, stated, “It is time to water the tree of liberty,” which also is perfectly legal.
Interviewing Kostric on his television show “Hardball,” Matthews was so angry that he could barely constrain himself, to the point that Matthews, a Catholic, even took the Lord’s name in vain in a raging attack on Kostric.
Matthews’ anger was rooted in Kostric’s decision to openly carry a holstered pistol to the protest. When Matthews saw the gun and the sign, he apparently jumped to the conclusion that Kostric was planning to assassinate the president. The notion that Kostric was simply exercising fundamental rights apparently never occurred to Matthews until Kostric began calmly and politely answering his badgering and abusive questions.
Rather than simply engage him in an intellectual debate over gun rights and free speech, however, Matthews employed a favorite tactic of both liberals and conservatives — try to marginalize the person so as to make him look like a kook. The idea is that by making the person look like a weirdo, the need to engage him at the intellectual level disappears because no one will take seriously anything the kook says.
That tactic was picked up by Walsh, who quickly posted in her Salon blog a piece entitled, “Who Was that Gun-Toting Anti-Obama Protestor?” in which she detailed all sorts of things that were clearly designed to prove that Kostric — and by implication all libertarians — were kooks and weirdoes — i.e., people whose arguments should not be taken seriously.
Walsh pointed out that Kostric was one of those “far-right libertarians” whose heroes include Ron Paul, William Wallace (Braveheart,) John Galt (Atlas Shrugged), Thomas Jefferson, and Randy Weaver. She then pointed out that Kostric was part of the Free State Project. Walsh even pointed out that Kostric, like other “far-right libertarians,” opposes a national ID card (which, if I’m not mistaken, is also opposed by Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald). She pointed out that he also opposes the drug war and sympathizes with the people being killed in drug raids rather than with the cops who are sometimes killed in such raids.
Now, mind you, any libertarian would ask, “Well, what’s wrong with all that?” But let me assure you, Walsh’s intent was not designed to be complimentary. Instead, her intent was to do precisely what Matthews had done in the interview — create a dark, sinister picture of somebody outside the margins of respectable society.
You know, that respectable society that favors a government that has adopted statism, socialism, interventionism, and imperialism and is now threatened by the fact that libertarians, who oppose all those things, are a growing force in American society. That’s what is scaring the statists to death — the thought that increasing numbers of people are breaking through to reality and recognizing what the statists have done to our country and what they’re still trying to do with their immoral and destructive policies.
Matthews asked Kostric whether he was “birther.” The purpose of the question, of course, was that if Kostric had said, “yes,” then Matthews would be able to exclaim, “See, you’re a weirdo!’ To Matthews’ surprise, Kostric calmly responded that he had looked into the issue but was not competent to conclude that Obama’s presidency was illegitimate.
That wasn’t good enough for Walsh, however. She suggested that Kostric was lying. What was her proof? That Kostric was a member of an anti-income tax group called “We the People.” How does that make Kostric a liar on the birther issue? Well, it turns out that the group has filed a lawsuit challenging the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate.
So, what Walsh is suggesting is that that lawsuit must mean that Kostric is a birther too and a liar. In other words, when people join the ACLU, that must mean that they endorse not just the ACLU’s positions on civil liberties but also all its pro-socialist economic positions as well. Walsh’s insinuation is obviously dishonest and inane.
Of course, the attempt to marginalize libertarians is no different on the conservative side. Recall that Republicans attempted to do the same thing with Ron Paul, one of Kostric’s heroes. When Paul stated that U.S. foreign policy was what caused the anger and rage that produced the 9/11 attacks, Republicans went as apoplectic as Matthews and Walsh have. In the conservative mind, the state is sacrosanct, at least in what it does to foreigners. To suggest that it has engaged in wrongdoing overseas is akin to heresy. In the minds of his fellow Republicans, Paul had committed a grave sin for suggesting that the federal government had done bad things to people in the Middle East.
The liberal mindset is no different, especially when it comes to their beloved socialistic welfare state. Matthews and Walsh aren’t angry at Kostric solely because of his exercise of gun rights or for quoting an advocate of limited government such as Thomas Jefferson. They’re angry at him for having the audacity to be a libertarian, a person who challenges the entire paradigm of the welfare state. In their minds, the welfare state is holy and sacrosanct. After all, welfare programs help the poor, needy, and disadvantaged, right? Anyone who opposes the programs hates the poor, right?
Well, not so. As liberals have learned to their dismay, libertarians are much better versed in economic principles than liberals are. As such, with their articles, op-eds, speeches, and books, libertarians are showing people that socialist economic policies are the very worst thing that could ever befall the poor.
For example, one of the programs that is the pride and joy of liberals is the minimum wage, a law that liberals have long proclaimed helps the poor. Alas, as libertarians have shown, however, the minimum wage locks the poor out of the labor market, thereby relegating them to a life of welfare dependency.
Or take public housing, which liberals say provides housing to the poor. As libertarians point out, however, if the person earns too much money, he is thrown out of his government-provided house, thereby providing him with an incentive to remain poor.
There are also the massive assaults on savings and capital that the welfare-state’s out-of-control spending brings about. Yet, it is only through capital accumulation that real wage rates can rise.
In other words, libertarians are causing people to pierce through to reality and see the welfare state for what it is — a fraud that hurts the very people liberals purport to help.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the rank hypocrisy of the liberals. While they purport to love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged, have they not waged their war on illegal immigrants as much as the conservatives have? Where would you find a better example of the poor than that group of people? Yet, the liberals, led by their icon Barack Obama, have continued the anti-immigrant policies of the conservatives, raiding businesses and rounding up poor people who are doing nothing worse than working to sustain their lives and the lives of their families. But don’t forget, liberals love the poor, which they say is why they support a welfare state.
Or how about the poor people in Afghanistan, who the liberals continue bombing and killing just as the conservatives did for 8 years? Where is the remorse for those wedding parties and other innocent people every time a bomb is dropped or a missile fired on a suspected terrorist? Oh, well, maybe we’re supposed to love only the American poor, rather than the poor in general.
Or maybe we should go back to the era of liberal icon Lyndon Johnson, who liberals proudly point to as the originator of Medicare and Medicaid, whose love for the poor was manifested by the hundreds of thousands of (poor) Vietnamese people he killed with bombs, missiles, and bullets, not to mention the tens of thousands of (poor) American men who were sacrificed under a Gulf of Tonkin lie that that liberal icon knew was a lie.
The shame of the matter is that it’s the liberals who should be ashamed — ashamed of what they have done to our country with their socialistic welfare state. Look at what they have done — out of control federal spending funding massive tax-and-transfer schemes, and everything just getting worse and worse. But according to them, it’s all the fault of free enterprise, speculators, bankers, and greed, reflecting once again that holding the concept of personal responsibility up to a liberal is like holding a cross up to a vampire.
And look at what they’ve done to the American people themselves — converted them from a people who once valued the principles of self-reliance and independence to frightened wards of the state who are desperately afraid of losing their dole. Even worse, they’ve produced generations of selfish people who don’t give a hoot at how much hurt they’re imposing on the generations of their children and grandchildren as long as their get their loot to fund their retirement.
We libertarians must never permit ourselves to submit to the insulting tactics of people like Matthews and Walsh. It is they, not us, who should be ashamed of themselves, for the damage they have wrought on our country.
But there’s another reason why libertarians would be wise not to permit ourselves to be marginalized by these people. As we learned in places like Vietnam and later at Waco, liberals marginalize people as a prelude to killing them. During the Vietnam War, the liberals told us that the Vietnamese people were nothing more than “gooks” who didn’t place the same value on human life as Americans did. And don’t forget what liberal icons Janet Reno and Bill Clinton said about the Branch Davidians before they massacred them through gassing and incineration. Prior to the attack, all we heard was how weird and kooky those Branch Davidians were. Thus, after the massacre was over, the liberal mindset was, “No big deal. Let’s move on. They, and their infant children, had what was coming to them.”
And let’s not forget what Waco was all about … guns, the same thing that got Matthews and Walsh all upset with Kostric. That’s why the Branch Davidians are dead — they were possessing guns and the liberals didn’t like that.
Walsh takes Kostric to task for listing Randy Weaver and William Wallace as his heroes. You see, Weaver wasn’t really a hero. He should never have attempted to defend himself from government agents who were trying to kill him and his family. He shouldn’t even have had … guns … to shoot back. No, the real heroes were those government agents, under Reno and Clinton, who heroically shot Weaver’s unarmed wife in the head as she held her baby in her arms and heroically shot Weaver’s teen-aged son in the back. Hey, their deaths were no big deal. After all, they had already been marginalized as “white supremacists,” the description that Walsh employed in her blog post.
Too bad the feds ended up paying a million dollars to Weaver after he sued them. The payment of such taxpayer money obviously took a bit of the shine off those heroic liberal actions.
Or consider William Wallace. You’ve probably seen the movie Braveheart. Well, you may have thought that Wallace was a hero, but statists would mock and ridicule you. Wallace was wrong, they would argue, to arm himself and engage in violent revolution in response to the government murder of his wife. He should have simply acquiesced to the murder, just as the young man acquiesced to the rape of his young bride at the hands of the government official in the opening scene of the movie, primarily because the husband lacked the weaponry to resist the rape of his wife.
In the ideal world of liberals, the only people who would have guns would be the cops and the troops. In that way, if the cops and troops inflicted the torture, sex abuse, and rape on American citizens that they have inflicted on people in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo or the massive rapes that U.S.-supported Congolese troops are currently inflicting on their people, American men (and women) will simply have to acquiesce, thanks to the tyranny of gun control.
There is one — and only one — solution to all this statism that both liberals and conservatives have brought our nation. That solution is libertarianism. We libertarians are engaged in one of the grandest and most glorious movements in history — the restoration of liberty, free markets, and limited government to our land. It is a movement that is garnering more and more adherents every day.
With the increasing crises and chaos that their statist policies are producing, the statists are getting increasingly frightened and desperate. That’s undoubtedly why they’re going on the attack against us libertarians. Not surprisingly, however, they won’t take us on in direct debate because they know that they will wilt under the relentless logic of libertarian arguments, as Matthews himself did by the end of the Kostric interview. That’s why they resort to their old tired tactic of insults, insinuations, and innuendo. That’s not a bad sign. It’s a good one.