There’s a lot of people walking around free these days under the patently obvious delusion that they are small government libertarians who believe in a highly restrained, pared down government in order to maximize freedom.

Tonight, I thought I would provide some enlightenment to said legal citizens, and provide them with a handy list of signs that they are not libertarians and therefore are free to seek a more accurate political label for themselves.

This document will also function as a sort of field guide for the casual observer of libertarians and their colorful ways.

Without further ado, YOU ARE NOT A LIBERTARIAN IF :

You are against gay marriage. Even the most simplistic imagining of libertarianism would state that individuals should be able to enter whatever sort of legal relationship they choose with one another. And it is certainly not the job of the State to decide which marriages are legitimate and which are not. There is absolutely no libertarian justification for opposing some marriages based on gender combination. If you are against gay marriage, you are not a libertarian.

You support large military expenditures and/or military interventions. Not only is war the most expensive thing a government can do (and therefore the thing which puts the most strain on the tax dollars they extract from you), having a very powerful military makes government beholden to defense contractors instead of to the people they supposedly represent. That makes government more likely to want more taxes to feed their war machine, and even make them more likely to want to curtail your freedoms in the name of their Statist fear agenda. You cannot claim to be for smaller government if you turn a blind eye to the biggest use of your tax dollars and let private corporations who are not beholden to you or any other citizen continue to blatantly rape the public purse with impunity. They openly mock the very idea of accountability by selling your government good they know are defective. They are parasites on the body public, and should be the sworn enemy of anyone who values small government and lower taxes. If you love a big shiny military, you are not a libertarian.

You support harsher prison sentences served in harsher prisons. Of all the powers granted the government, the power to lock someone in a cage should be the true libertarian’s least favorite. There can be no greater loss of freedom to an individual than imprisonment. All true libertarians wish to limit this government power the most, and would favour, if anything, lower sentences in gentler prisons. The very concept of minimum government dictates no less. Government infringement on personal liberty has to be kept to an absolute minimum, and there is certainly no room in true libertarian thought for the bizarre notion that one somehow loses all their rights simply because the State has assigned them the label “criminal”. The State cannot confer or remove rights. They are inborn. If you support increased prison sentences in harsher prisons, you are not a libertarian.

You are against all forms of government interference in the world of business. True libertarians seek to maximize individual liberty by whatever means necessary. That extends far beyond the realm of government. Just as the police protect your freedom against your neighbor’s decision to take your possessions, so does government regulation protect your freedom from the other main threat to your liberty, economic force. Both government and money can take your rights away and crush all autonomy and individuality out of public life. If you favour either one of these forces, you support leaving the other unchecked. The two forces must be made to hold one another in check for any hope of freedom for the individual to survive. If you are against government intervention in the free market, you are not a libertarian.

You support the “war on drugs”. There is no room in true libertarianism for the government to have any opinion whatsoever about what chemicals an individual ingests. It certainly leaves no room for a bizarrely selective and arbitrary set of rules that allows some very harmful chemicals (nicotine, alcohol) and forbids other non-addictive and safer ones (cannibis, kava kava). And even more, there can be no justification for the kind of massive expansion of government and increase in government powers required to fight people’s right to do what they want to their own bodies. The entirety of what is known as “vice” in law enforcement (like the government has any business policing people’s vices) stands in direct opposition to libertarian values of individual liberty and minimum government. If you support the war on drugs (or prostitution, or pornography, or gambling), then you are not a libertarian.

And finally, the biggest one of all :

You think corporations are people. There can be nothing more offensive to the sensibilities of a true libertarian than a collective being given the rights of the individual. The entire crux of libertarianism rests on the notion that rights attach to individuals only, and that collectives do not and cannot have rights except those that stem from an aggregate of individual rights. The idea that a collective can be granted any of those rights for the expressed purpose of avoiding full liability for their actions should shock and enrage any true libertarian. The fact that they get to pick and choose which or the rights they feel like having at any given moment (with none of the responsibilities or accountability associated with them) should only further enrage.

As you can see, with just this handful of disqualifiers, I have eliminated most of the people calling themselves libertarians today. Most of them are merely social conservatives hiding under a cloak of false patriotism and ideological purity in order to avoid the realization that they have become the exact sort of person they used to hate when they were young and ethically intact.

The rare exceptions are people like Ron and Rand Paul, who are bugshit crazy, but at least they are consistent.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.