Calling all Stalinist-Jeffersonian-Bozoian Libertarians

Apparently it's becoming ever more popular to create crossbred mutant coercive philosophies and then attempt to smuggle them into unsuspecting minds by incorporating the "libertarian" label.

A recent article, "Politics not as usual - second look" warned of other groups hijacking the libertarian brand and contorting its meaning into whatever some budding ideologue wants it to mean.

First, modern collectivists took the liberal American founding ideals of individualism and strictly limited government and turned it bottoms up so that today the liberal label means the opposite of the Founder's liberalism; the oxymoron of "group rights" as opposed to individual rights and massive intrusions into virtually every aspect of the personal and private lives of individuals by an elitist-run government with nearly unlimited power.

Monday came the announcement that earlier in the month a Danish group founded Libertære Socialister, translating literally to "Libertarian Socialists" and describes itself as oriented towards "syndicalist, anarcho-communist and collectivist anarchist currents."

None of this sounds even remotely libertarian to American ears. It's as though a group got together and started the "African-American Ku Klux Klan". Or maybe "the Holy Church of Blessed Atheist Catholics." Or perhaps "the La Leche League of breastfeeding men."

Or started a group with the self-contradicting designation of "progressive libertarian" as a misguided guy already has.

At its simplest, libertarianism means maximizing freedom for all and minimizing government intrusions into the affairs of free and sovereign individuals. The anarchist form of that means total freedom and zero government. To all libertarians it means uncoerced, voluntary interactions amongst people. It means free trade, free travel, free thought. It means capitalism in its individual, non-government corporatist form.

The only way that any manner of "socialist libertarianism" can exist while incorporating the inherently coercive elements that define socialism, communism, and syndicalism is for individuals to freely give themselves over to the collective, in which case it's no longer libertarian.

So why can't these people be content with just calling themselves Socialists or Communists or Syndicalists and quit pretending to be libertarians?

The answer, apparently, is that more and more people are seeing the spreading popularity of libertarian ideals and want to twist the concept to further their own ends, which inevitably includes hoodwinking the unwary.

In a libertarian society people are free to voluntarily pool their money, buy and hold property in common, and as long as all individuals retain the right to join and unjoin at will, they can set up any kind of voluntary Marxist Leninist Maoist Castroist Whateverist collectivist society they want.

But it cannot, by definition, be a hyphenated libertarian society because their ism, as in all isms except the libertarian ism, absolutely requires coercion to make it work.

While libertarians will always tolerate voluntary collectivists, those same collectivists will never tolerate libertarians.

So c'mon people, if your philosophy is so great why don't you just call it what it is and stop trying to smuggle it into people's minds by pretending that it's something else?

And that goes for American progressives, too. When will you admit that your beliefs can't possibly work unless they're forced onto everyone by the power of the government's gun?

No person can ever legitimately claim the name "libertarian" without first curing oneself of the obsessive-compulsive disease of power lust, commonly known as "initiation of force."