If you truly love liberty and want to see more of it, allow me the freedom of non-participation.

Foaming at the Mouth for Liberty

We’ve all heard it before: “I’ve done MOAR FOR LIVERRRDY THAN U!” Or that popular alternative: “(insert politician’s name) has done more for liberty than you will in your whole life!”

The sad fact is, guys, “liberty” didn’t ask you for, nor does it require, any of your feeble attempts to help it. It simply is. Freedom is a wild, heady reality, and not a charity case to be hobbled along to political podiums and podcasts like a Make-A-Wish Foundation kid so you can gain social cred in photo ops for being part of “the movement.” Go ahead, coax celebrities to say “taxation is theft” for your social-media-clout begging, two-second soundbites. It’s great you’re in the LP. Do you want a sticker, or something?

The big question is, if freedom is so important to these people, why are they so hot and bothered about people like me freely choosing not to participate in politics?

Hacking Leaves vs. Pulling Up Roots

In one sense, you are already free and living in complete liberty. If you don’t like your situation, you are 100% free to make changes, and to fight to change it. You might die doing so. You might go to prison. You might lose everything. That much is true. But you are still free to take action. It seems some individuals are under the impression that until the state and political bodies approve everything they want to be approved, they are not free.

When I look at my life, however, I must admit I can see where they are coming from.

I see that I am practically a slave. Much of the reason for this — almost the entirety of it — is due to the active enforcement of violence-backed laws from the state. Some individuals thus wish to leverage local political processes in saboteur fashion, to change small things about their immediate reality. Others wish to influence national elections. Still others wish to drop out of political participation completely and encourage others to do the same. This last option is, in the long run, much more effective and finally the only logical and lasting libertarian solution.

Of course, hallucinating that one can influence national elections and the reality-divorced assumptions that this requires (i.e. votes are counted fairly, democracy is not mob rule, the state’s foundationally violence-based mechanisms of selection can be used to bring about logical, moral solutions) is an exercise in moronic futility. Still, on a smaller level, getting your local school board to remove a mask mandate, getting minor traffic laws changed in your town, nullifying a bullshit jury in a pot case at your county court — these types of things sometimes work. In other words, chopping the leaves of tyranny here and there to make life more tolerable as you further propagate the anarchist message that the only good government is no government. That’s not the problem this article seeks to address. The problem this article seeks to address is those shouting that not taking political action is lazy and fruitless.

In fact, a complete rejection of political participation, and actual balls-having-action-taking, would change things immediately. But it seems most of these folks active in the LP and spin-off groups like the “Mises Caucus” just want to shuffle papers, virtue signal online, and lick some politician assholes in the meantime.

In short, long-term freedom can never be manifest by using the very mechanisms designed by statists to stifle freedom in the first place. This should be blindingly obvious. Cancer does not cure cancer. Adding more sand to the engine will not help it run better.

Let’s Shit on Some Golden Cows

H.L. Mencken has famously said “a good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

Most libertarians, even in the LP, will agree with this superficially. But what about applying it to some real life examples? Oh. That’s when things get hairy.

Ron Paul – Absolutely worshipped (not an exaggeration) by anarchists, LP stooges, “conservatives,” and everyone in and around and between in the world of “liberty.” I remember even seeing on Twitter a well-known libertarian/agorist podcaster posting a photo of Ron’s wife and captioning it “the matriarch of liberty” unironically.

But if we put our emotions aside (I have a lot of respect for the individual human that is Ron Paul, as well), guess what we see? A politician who stated that “taxation is theft” while receiving an extorted salary year after year-after-year. As well-intentioned as he may have been, Ron Paul continued to speak about the unquestionable evil of government, but never once said “That’s it, I quit!” Why?

Unless I am mistaken here and, for example, he returned his $1.1 million-dollar salary in 2011 to the people paying for it. But even then, if one knows the state is hopelessly evil at foundation, why continue participating, salary or not? The same libertarians who claim “there are no good cops” because to participate in state policing is to participate in evil, still gave Ron Paul a pass though he participated for 37 years in the state.

Also, as I’ve discussed in my articles here at the Nexus before, Ron Paul famously used a United Nations legal body to sue his own grassroots supporters in 2013, to secure ownership of a web domain they owned, after they had tried to sell it to him.

This is not meant to be a personal judgement of Paul, but to avoid looking at reality would be stupid. A 37-year career politician with a $6 million-dollar net worth tied up with politics “doing more for liberty than me” is laughable. Who cares? As someone who staunchly supported Paul in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, marching for him, demonstrating for him in the street, and sending him my money, the criticism means little.

The Libertarian Party – A Washington D.C.-embedded participant in federal electioneering. The LP puts forth such shining manifestations of libertarian principle as Gary Johnson, who once famously stated that the non-aggression principle goes “over my head,” and Jo Jorgenson, who hallucinates that to be libertarian is to micromanage the lives of hundreds of millions by personally making sure they are “actively anti-racist.” It is hard not to laugh at the LP. At least it provides decent comic relief for principled anarchists everywhere, dealing with the stresses of statism.

The LPMC – The Libertarian Party “Mises Caucus.” A spinoff group of the LP, created by a fellow who helped cover up the violence and corruption of desert cult leader Adam Kokesh, which fancies itself to be a sort of “rebel” group, more principled than the larger LP, supported by cookie-cutter celebritarian types everywhere, and putting forth such radical “libertarian” solutions as renegade politician… Jacob Hornberger.

Ultimately, Personalities Don’t Matter, Logic Does

There are also many reasons I suppose people in the “liberty movement” (God, what a cringe phrase) could be critical of me. The above golden-cow-shitting is not meant to be an attack on individual characters as much as a clear demonstration of why politics is simply an unworkable means to bring about the end of statism.

In the most clear terms: Nazism does not end Nazism. Cancer does not end cancer. A poisoned person is not cured by putting more poison in their stomach, and a fire is not put out with more fire. This is such basic shit it is hard to believe so many miss it. Testament to the pure hysteric power of statist brainwash, I suppose.

Logically, the thing which can be done for liberty by any and all individuals, which is most lastingly effective, is changing the minds of those they meet, and taking direct action in freedom. Instead of encouraging others to look to a leader to guide them, leveraging the violent mechanisms of the state, why not show them the truth: life is risky, and no matter how you try to buffer yourself from danger with politics, what goes around comes around.

The state has never reduced itself in scope via its own mechanisms. Awakened minds acting in disobedience and taking risks, however, make the state increasingly irrelevant. The beauty of what Ron Paul did was to preach the message far and wide. The message, not the persona, is what matters. The mistake the “what have you done for liberty” idiots make is in conflating the statist persona with that message. Which, ironically, is detrimental to the message itself. Yes, the message is true. Taxation is theft. Ron Paul should have heeded his own words and quit politics.

The next time someone says they are “doing more for liberty than you” simply ask them why that matters. If liberty is the goal, then why would you try to force me into politics?

Leave me at liberty to do as I please, hypocrite.