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With the major party that is closer to their views, Democrat or Republican. Anything else consigns them to continuing irrelevance.
The 5% support this year, maybe it's 7%, maybe it's 4% (it's hard to be precise when dealing with such small numbers) represents the ceiling of libertarian support.
It's less than that really when individual libertarians are asked which government services and programs they benefit from would they support eliminating. Roads? Police? Schools? The military? Tariffs? Securities regulation? You might get 20% in favor of eliminating one of two. Another 12% that would get rid of a different two or three. But to get rid of all of them? That is a vanishingly small number. (And it should be noted that no libertarian government has ever existed anywhere in the world in all of history. Libertarians should ponder why that is so.)
There are two broad views of government from which to choose: limited and unlimited. Limited can mean many things. Unlimited we know only too well what it means because those of us over 45 have seen it in our adult lifetimes.
Limited is associated with freedom, unlimited with equality. These are the two essential political values. They are always in conflict. The tension between them is baked into their definitions.
People have only to choose which they hold more dear and support the major party that closer aligns with their preference. And live with messy, compromising reality. Getting part of something.
Or they can go their own way and rejoice in their consistency and intellectual purity. While they enjoy having all of nothing.
This is a continuation of the post before(Mikhail Bakunin wrote this back in 1873).
"The State can have no duties toward foreign populations. Hence, if it treats a conquered people in a humane fashion, if it plunders or exterminates it halfway only, if it does not reduce it to the lowest degree of slavery, this may be a political act inspired by prudence, or even by pure magnanimity, but it is never done from a sense of duty, for the State has an absolute right to dispose of a conquered people at will.
This flagrant negation of humanity which constitutes the very essence of the State is, from the standpoint of the State, its supreme duty and its greatest virtue. It bears the name patriotism, and it constitutes the entire transcendent morality of the State. We call it transcendent morality because it usually goes beyond the level of human morality and justice, either of the community or of the private individual, and by that same token often finds itself in contradiction with these. Thus, to offend, to oppress, to despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or enslave one's fellowman is ordinarily regarded as a crime. In public life, on the other hand, from the standpoint of patriotism, when these things are done for the greater glory of the State, for the preservation or the extension of its power, it is all transformed into duty and virtue. And this virtue, this duty, are obligatory for each patriotic citizen; everyone is supposed to exercise them not against foreigners only but against one's own fellow citizens, members or subjects of the State like himself, whenever the welfare of the State demands it.
This explains why, since the birth of the State, the world of politics has always been and continues to be the stage for unlimited rascality and brigandage, brigandage and rascality which, by the way, are held in high esteem, since they are sanctified by patriotism, by the transcendent morality and the supreme interest of the State. This explains why the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present, of all times and all countries -- statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors -- if judged from the standpoint of simple morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to hard labour or to the gallows. There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: "for reasons of state."
These are truly terrible words, for they have corrupted and dishonoured, within official ranks and in society's ruling classes, more men than has even Christianity itself. No sooner are these words uttered than all grows silent, and everything ceases; honesty, honour, justice, right, compassion itself ceases, and with it logic and good sense. Black turns white, and white turns black. The lowest human acts, the basest felonies, the most atrocious crimes become meritorious acts.
The great Italian political philosopher Machiavelli was the first to use these words, or at least the first to give them their true meaning and the immense popularity they still enjoy among our rulers today. A realistic and positive thinker if there ever was one, he was the first to understand that the great and powerful states could be founded and maintained by crime alone -- by many great crimes, and by a radical contempt for all that goes under the name of honesty. He has written, explained, and proven these facts with terrifying frankness. And, since the idea of humanity was entirely unknown in his time; since the idea of fraternity -- not human but religious -- as preached by the Catholic Church, was at that time, as it always has been, nothing but a shocking irony, belied at every step by the Church's own actions; since in his time no one even suspected that there was such a thing as popular right, since the people had always been considered an inert and inept mass, the flesh of the State to be moulded and exploited at will, pledged to eternal obedience; since there was absolutely nothing in his time, in Italy or elsewhere, except for the State -- Machiavelli concluded from these facts, with a good deal of logic, that the State was the supreme goal of all human existence, that it must be served at any cost and that, since the interest of the State prevailed over everything else, a good patriot should not recoil from any crime in order to serve it. He advocates crime, he exhorts to crime, and makes it the sine qua non of political intelligence as well as of true patriotism. Whether the State bear the name of a monarchy or of a republic, crime will always be necessary for its preservation and its triumph. The State will doubtless change its direction and its object, but its nature will remain the same: always the energetic, permanent violation of justice, compassion, and honesty, for the welfare of the State.
We have also seen that every state, under pain of destruction and fearing to be devoured by its neighbour states, must reach out toward omnipotence, and, having become powerful, must conquer. Who speaks of conquest speaks of peoples conquered, subjugated, reduced to slavery in whatever form or denomination. Slavery, therefore, is the necessary consequence of the very existence of the State.
Slavery may change its form or its name -- its essence remains the same. Its essence may be expressed in these words: to be a slave is to be forced to work for someone else, just as to be a master is to live on someone else's work. In antiquity, just as in Asia and in Africa today, as well as even in a part of America, slaves were, in all honesty, called slaves. In the Middle Ages, they took the name of serfs: nowadays they are called wage earners. The position of this latter group has a great deal more dignity attached to it, and it is less hard than that of slaves, but they are nonetheless forced, by hunger as well as by political and social institutions, to maintain other people in complete or relative idleness, through their own exceedingly hard labour. Consequently they are slaves. And in general, no state, ancient or modern, has ever managed or will ever manage to get along without the forced labour of the masses, either wage earners or slaves, as a principal and absolutely necessary foundation for the leisure, the liberty, and the civilisation of the political class: the citizens."
I don't think either of you truly understand how difficult it is to hold a "nation" together, and to convince people to cooperate with one another.
Think of it like this, "Why is any government legitimate?", "Why should you obey any government?"
This is the great difficulty of all governments throughout all of time. Which is why they had to make up a variety of excuses, such as the Divine Right of Kings, or consent of the governed, and other such absurdities. But the reality is, no government is legitimate. And as I said before, men have NEVER come together except by force.
Everything our government is doing, and everything it has done, it basically had to do. Not because it was "right" or "good" in the traditional sense. But merely because it was necessary for the preservation and power of the state.
This logic applies to everything, from the Civil War, to the Civil-rights act, to all the Keynesian and Neo-Keynesian government programs/policies, as well as our interventionist foreign policy. Had our government not done all of those things, this country wouldn't even exist, and we would have ceded the rest of the world to the likes of either the Soviets, the Chinese, or some European empire.
With that said, I do not like the fact that this is true. It came from a sort of epiphany I had when I was at my most-radical. I had wanted to basically cause an American Civil War, by trying to organize what amounts to potentially hundreds of "Waco standoffs" at the same time, all across the country.
I felt like such an event, would bring out the radicals/militias/three-percenters from all over the country, and the government would be forced to overreact, which would destroy its legitimacy, and plunge the country into something like a Civil War, and possibly lead to a revolution.
And then, ISIS came along. And I was trying to imagine a world in which America had lost its empire, and had crumbled apart into possibly hundreds of hostile republics. What would the rest of the world do?
That is when I realized that everything Mikhail Bakunin had said was true. And I realized that there is nothing that can be done about it.
When I read that it was you that sacrificed their life for a corporation I'll take you seriously.
I think Thomas Hobbes gave the best account of the formation of governments. It's essentially a transaction: men surrender part of their inherent executive authority to a central power in exchange for protection.
History, particularly European history, is full of examples. A chieftain typically ascended to a throne because he vanquished an enemy of the clan or tribe. I think the divine right of kings developed as a mutual justification and support for king and church. But well after groups of chieftains had united under a leader, accepted as their king, had already established rule by kings as a fact.
When Hobbes revealed his theory, that power originally inhered in individuals, the divine rights dogma had become so accepted that he was viewed as a radical.
Nothing much has changed: how much power, i.e. rights, should people have vs. how much should they surrender for their own good? The libertarian view is one extreme, the socialist or national socialist view is the other.
Hell, we can't get 5% of the vote when running against Clinton and Trump.
Try actually coming up with an actual coherent principle that all like minded supported could agree on.
Lets talk about "big government".
If Sweden's economy is 80% public is it "big government'" ? Not even if the US was 20% public spending vs GDP since 20% of the US economy is much larger.
When I read that it was you that sacrificed their life for a corporation I'll take you seriously.
I'm not trying to convince you to support anything. I merely said that, trying to fight against "the state", is as effective as trying to fight against human-nature itself.
We didn't get to where we are today merely by chance. Everything happened for a reason. And even if you could somehow start over entirely from scratch, we would end up right back where we are.
And in the same way that the current time is more-or-less predetermined, so is the future. And the future is not want you want it to be.
If you understand the forces which have guided our world since the beginning, not only will all of human history make perfect sense, but you'll also know what lies ahead.
I'm not trying to convince you to support anything. I merely said that, trying to fight against "the state", is as effective as trying to fight against human-nature itself.
They are doing pretty good in North Dakota.
Quote:
We didn't get to where we are today merely by chance. Everything happened for a reason. And even if you could somehow start over entirely from scratch, we would end up right back where we are.
And in the same way that the current time is more-or-less predetermined, so is the future. And the future is not want you want it to be.
If you understand the forces which have guided our world since the beginning, not only will all of human history make perfect sense, but you'll also know what lies ahead.
I guess it is Sunday.
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