Why I'm not a libertarian – again

It's always fun to read one of the many "Why I'm not a libertarian" articles that continually pop up on the Internet year after year after year, even as libertarianism continues to be discovered and captured by ever more open and excited minds.

Typing the phrase "Why I'm not a libertarian" into Google, with quotation marks, will get you page upon page of results of postings and videos, all with the identical title.

While non-libertarians have endless reasons for rejecting their own freedom they apparently have a paucity of imagination when it comes to titling their articles.

The fun part is wondering which verbal summersaults, handsprings, headstands, cartwheels and backflips a writer will use to justify his or her rejection of freedom.

Reasons for not being libertarian range from openly loving government ("The government as a whole is 'unjust?' Please.") to the supposedly profound ("The libertarian has no vision of a good society, no ideal of the human good. He simply has a principle – and a crude, simplistic one at that. What could be less inspiring, less interesting?")

The latest denial of individual freedom and personal responsibility under the "Why I am not a libertarian" franchise comes from Jeremy Egerer at American Thinker.

He too takes the "feelings" approach for rejecting the libertarian philosophy, as though feelings somehow trump all and invalidates everything.

Egerer had to pause in his reading of Ludwig von Mises' Human Action because, he says, "my soul buckles under the total burden of his meaninglessness" and because Mises' work "has little to no soul, reducing man to a rational, pleasure-seeking animal" and because "When Mises reduces civilization to production, every ounce of romance is lost, every bit of glory stripped, and every ounce of patriotism defiled."

But such values as meaning, romance, glory and soul don't exist in the writings of Mises or Marx or libertarianism or The Bible or anywhere else.

These qualities exist within the human being. Individual readers impute their own values into the texts they read. What individuals read is not inspirational but a mirror to the inspiration that is already within them.

If people cannot find meaningful values in the concept of individual freedom it is because they value coercion, intimidation and fraud.

Jeremy Egerer likely doesn't get that he hasn't rejected libertarianism; rather, libertarianism has rejected him.

It is the Egerers of the world who have no souls.