I always thought that Libertarianism was a pretty popular concept that most people understood, and then I got to college and boy I was wrong, but to be fair I can see why. When Politicians like Ted Cruz praises Ron Paul and calls himself Libertarian minded (he’s not) it’s easy to see were the confusion is, so let me clear it up.
1. We don’t lean towards the left or the right.
We aren’t republicans, and we aren’t democrats. We’re libertarians. I’ve actually seen a lot of people throw us into conversations with liberals because of our social views, and I’ve seen others throw us into conversations with conservatives because of our economic views, but that would be misleading. We simply just want freedom and the government to stay the hell out of our lives.
2. We aren’t anarchists.
I sure do hear this one a lot. “If you’re a libertarian than why do you use the roads? Why don’t you want traffic signals?”. I hate to break it to you but libertarians want a government, just a small one. There is a group within our party that has labeled themselves as “Anarchist Libertarians” but that’s a minority. Sure we have a lot of beef with government, but that’s just because they love to take advantage of us.
3. Our friends don’t always get us.
I’ve gone on long rants about Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders all in the same day. If you asked us why we don’t like Obama we could give you a long list, we could do the same with George W. Bush. This can come off as pretty confusing, and I see why some might feel that way. The truth is we just don’t like the majority of politicians, partially because we’d prefer less of them.
4. We aren’t isolationists, we’re noninterventionists.
We really love the constitution, and the bill of rights. If those documents got anything rights it’s how to handle foreign policy, and boy have we been messing that up. We don’t want our military all over the world, and we don’t want war. We want a strong defense at home and then if there’s a reasonable threat we want our commander and chief to take it to congress and if they approve then we take action however, a lot call us isolationists because of this and that’s not true. We still want to keep up communications with just about every other country in the world, and just don’t believe that we should be shoving our military down other countries throats.
5. Capitalism isn’t a bad word.
I’ve noticed since I got to college a lot, and I mean a lot of people act like capitalism is the dirtiest word in the American lexicon, but we think it’s pretty great. Sure some people take advantage of our free market (which actually isn’t that free anymore) but when you have someone like a Martin Shkreli raising the cost of a pill by hundreds of dollars, you have several companies lowering the cost of the same pill to $1, and that’s all thanks to capitalism. We don’t want a free market to protect big business and make the rich richer, we want a free market so start ups are no longer next to impossible and so the little guy can actually stand a chance, and it’s not like we enforce the rules we put on business anyway, that is not when they’re paying for our politician’s campaigns.
6. We just want love freedom
Rather you agree with me or not, we all just want to live in the best country we possibly can, and the way we see it is the more freedom we retain from the government the better. We believe that through small government, the individual will get more power, and the country will go back to the people instead of corrupt politicians and the corporations that control them. We’ll hopefully see some change for the better sooner rather than later, because if we can agree on anything it’s that we’re all sick of things being bad.
This piece is the second installment of a blog series about what our writers' political views mean. Check out others here!