It's Hard to Tell

My left-leaning friends – and right-leaning ones, too, for that matter – get terribly riled up when I trot out the old libertarian line that, from our perspective, it's hard to tell a Republican from a Democrat.

What blue-staters and red-staters have in common – and it is a much stronger bond than the petty details of tyranny which divide them so publicly – is a love of dictatorship, a belief that if only their guys were in power all the same terrible methods developed to control people for all the wrong reasons could be turned to the service of Triumphant Good. The very reason for the red-state/blue-state bitterness is that they are fighting for the exact same prize – the control of millions of people's lives. Those who fight for freedom stand against both of these groups...

The proper question of politics is not whether the world vision of red-staters or blue-staters is better or should prevail, but whether any one person or group's world vision should be forced on another person or group. That is the only relevant political question – and to libertarians at least the answer is a loud and clear "NO!"

The vital thing, though, is that freedom is the only political value we should strive for. Pursuing values other than freedom with the tools of politics leads with absolute certainty – as long as men rule other men – to tyranny, slavery, and dictatorship. That's why, when I look at GWB declaring War-on-Whatever, I see Lyndon Johnson, and FDR, and Stalin and Mao and... well, Big Brother, behind them all.