libertarians, who are these guys

I dropped into the Ten Cat last Friday and none of my usual buds were there, but the Cubs were on the tube so I watched that. There was some irregular guy (not that there was anything wrong with him, but he wasn’t a regular.) He was fiddling with his phone of course (What is with that, people fiddling endlessly with their stupid phones when they could be using their time more productively by staring blankly into space?). Anyway he roused himself presently from the tiny screen, and said something about the game, and then I answered, and then within five minutes it was apparent that he was a libertarian. Of course I announced immediately that I was a liberal democrat, and then there was an awkward moment when we could have both returned to our beers and the ballgame and not spoken another word to each other, or we could argue about it.

So we argued about it. We first laid the ground rules, no getting personal, no getting pissed, no name calling. And I even got to make my little speech about how we have to assume that the other guy is neither stupid nor evil, and we have to be logical about all this. And furthermore since it’s a logical world and we are both logical people it should be possible for us to get together and discover the true path (my path). Of course that is only theoretical, and probably never works in the real world. I think after three, four years the only truths we have hammered out is that Obama is not a muslim, and that gun nuts consider any move to limit firearms anywhere in the US is one step closer to their Old Betsy being taken away from them.

We argued until I had my limit of beers and the Cubs were well on their way to defeat, and I believe we both had a good time, and parted on good terms. He of course had his smart phone so instead of saying we would look something up on wiki overnight, he could look it up right then and there. I won once and he won a couple times, though my point was much more important than his two minor points.

Well what is it about you libertarians? Well maybe not all of you because you guys are not organized, but five minutes into a conversation even about baseball, they are announcing that they are libertarians. I have previously said that libertarians are just guys (not many women I think, though I don’t have any data on that) who don’t want to pay their taxes and want to appear to be principled intellectuals, but I think I have to add to that, people who like to argue. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

I imagine the idea has been around since revolutionary times. A quick trip to wiki reveals that libertarianism, like tartar sauce, has French roots. And over time the word has meant different things to different people. I’m not sure if Ayn Rand ever used the term, but I think we can trace it back to her. Most libertarians of today embrace her fondly, though not too close a hug because atheism was at the core of her philosophy and she sneered at Christianity, and most of these new libertarians are pretty religious. The guy at Ten Cat announced his Christianity a few times but we didn’t go there, because that area is such a quagmire, and boring to boot.

Alright then Ayn Rand, and Goldwater, who, though, a Christian, didn’t brag on it too much, and then after that the term fell in popularity. There were a few around, but they were considered odd, and you never ran into any in the local bar or anywhere else.

And now there are scads, well the tea party loves the term, though they mostly just like the low taxes, small government part, they are not crazy about the individual liberties and isolationist foreign policy.

Well we have done this before. I know I have told my part about how I went from a high school fan of Tricky Dick to a liberal democrat, and probably you have told how you went from Southwest side Methodist to libertarian. But nobody remembers what the other guy said as well as what they said themselves, so can we get the story of how Beagles came to Libertarianism?