Nick Gier stuck his head up again, and mislead the readers of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
He’s really not stupid, so all I can figure out is that he’s either purposefully misdirecting the readers or he’s ignorant of the facts.
I generally agree with the libertarians on maximizing personal liberty on social and cultural issues. The Libertarian Party platform states that “individuals own their bodies and have rights over them that other individuals, groups, and governments may not violate.”
And it starts right here. Gier confuses libertarian with libertine.
A libertarian is someone who is in favor of liberty. A libertine is someone with loose morals (dissolute, licentious, profligate, etc).
It doesn’t surprise me that Gier is in complete agreement with libertines but is against personal liberty. Personal liberty gives priority to the individual over the collective.
Now when it comes to actual freedom and personal liberty, Gier shows his statist cards. He’s for the collective hive having power over the individual:
I find myself very much at odds with libertarians on the role of government. Their charge that governments are responsible for “damage done to our environment and have a terrible track record when it comes to environmental protection” is groundless. Without agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency our air and water would be far less clean.
The Libertarian Party wants to privatize all health care and abolish Medicare and Medicaid. However, single payer and other government-run systems around the world provide coverage at sometimes half the cost and produce health results better than the U.S. Obamacare is now failing because private insurers are pulling out of state exchanges because they cannot make a profit.
Libertarians would lift all regulations on the economy for a goal of complete laissez-faire. However, economic facts from around the world disprove this theory. The “mixed” economies of Europe and Asia should have failed long ago, but they survive and in many cases thrive with high taxation and heavy regulation.
Libertarians should be commended for their theoretical consistency, but they fail miserably at matching theory to the realities of human nature. Libertarians overrate people as selfish, rational actors, just as communists overrate their altruism.
Traditional libertarians are right on personal choice issues, but they are dead wrong in the proper role of government.
So while he’s for being libertine, he’s against any actual personal freedom. You cannot have true personal freedom when the state is your god.