Libertarians: Live Free AND Die

I get a kick out of libertarians, and it’s not where kicks are well received. Libertarians preach rugged individualism and self-sufficiency and rant against Big Government like there’s no tomorrow…and in their view there will be no tomorrow as long as BG gets in the way of individual freedom.
The latest iteration of their uproar over BG is their call to repeal Obamacare because it requires everyone to buy health insurance. One of their representatives, a federal judge in eastern Virginia, recently ruled that requiring health insurance is unconstitutional. Libertarians can take care of themselves, thank you, and no government should be able to require a person to buy anything he doesn’t want. The problem with this thinking is that when the libertarian gets sick enough to go to a hospital, unless he has a lot of spare cash in his mattress, we the people who do buy insurance end up paying higher premiums because the cost of the libertarian’s stay in the hospital is spread among us premium payers. In other words, the libertarian ends up mooching off the rest of us.
Another pet peeve of the libertarians is gun control. However, thanks to them and their great lobby, the NRA, we have loose and easy gun laws in this country. This looseness enables Mexican drug cartels to sneak across the border in Texas or Arizona, but particularly in Texas, and buy all the semi-automatics and ammunition they need to add to the 30,000 of corpses they have already strewn around northern Mexico. Our libertarian-inspired gun laws or lack thereof have enabled drug cartels to assume such power in Mexico that the Mexican government can’t begin to gain control of its own country. No wonder Mexicans want to come to the United States. We have made Mexico unsafe for habitation, thanks to our libertarian gun laws. But that’s just part of the story.
Of course our libertarian attitude toward drug use in the U.S. has also provided the funds for the cartels to be able to buy the weapons to kill their people, but that would be pointing the finger at a whole different species of libertarians who think they ought to be able to ingest any substance they feel like and to hell with the law and the social and economic cost to the rest of the law-abiding public. Drug users are unwittingly willing to sacrifice Mexican lives and the health of American culture for another selfish hit toward personal oblivion. It is their liberty to do so, they insist.
But maybe there is a silver lining in this selfish behavior as other libertarians see it. If the drug-addled libertarians keep buying drugs, most of which come from Mexico, and the cartels then can buy more guns from the U.S., America’s trade imbalance is improved. Moreover, if the cartels help keep down the population in Mexico, we can make those libertarians in Arizona happy because there will be fewer Mexicans crossing the border to take American jobs. It’s a win-win for everyone, except Mexicans. But who cares about them. After all, the libertarian motto, which is featured on the New Hampshire license plate, is “Live Free or Die.” Translated, it means we’ll live free and you’ll die. But that’s your problem, not mine. After all, we’re all libertarians and should look after ourselves. That’s what “real America” is all about.
Then again, if we go back to the libertarian healthcare issue, why not let them have their way and not require health insurance. However, when they show up at the hospital with a life-threatening injury or illness, make them pay up front for any anticipated costs. It may take a while to assess their situation, but they can simply plunk down a $100,000 - $500,000 deposit, depending on the severity of the case, and any surplus left after service will be returned to them. If the libertarian can’t produce the deposit, that’s too bad. He can go take care of himself. In that case, the motto shifts to “Live Free and Die. But a “real” libertarian wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Only Power Left

The debate over the meaning of the second amendment often focuses on two issues: hunting and self-defense. Hunters fear having their guns taken away by liberals and self-defense advocates argue that personal weapons are the last defense against tyranny by government. In reality, these two issues are not the sources of motivation to uphold the second amendment. They are simply symptoms of a greater need: that need is personal power. A gun provides an instant source of power to the individual who bears it. Suddenly, with gun in hand or armed with the thought of access to a gun, the individual feels instantly empowered. He has at least the illusion of power over life and death. He can choose to kill, or he can choose not to kill. That notion is about as powerful as an individual can obtain under any circumstances, but particularly in modern America in the 21st Century.
America was built on rugged individualism, or so we have taught ourselves to believe. The self-made man is our generic mythical hero, as are specific iterations such as Natty Bumppo, the Lone Ranger, Rambo, and The Terminator, depending on personal taste and generation. We believe in the power of the individual and his Emersonian self-reliance.
Today, powerful, impersonal corporations dominate commerce, agriculture, industry, retail, and finance. When you call a private or public agency, a person, a doctor, a merchant, or your mother, most often you get a voicemail with all kinds of options that leave you unable to speak to an actual person. You have your job at the will of people far removed from your personal world. If something goes wrong, you have to hire a lawyer to intervene on your behalf, but often the cost of the lawyer is greater than the benefit you will receive from having the wrong righted. The average American is powerless over most aspects of his or her life. It is tempting, therefore, to listen to the advice of the NRA and purchase a weapon. After all, it is a one-time purchase, you may never need it, but it instills an instant feeling of power that you never had before.
Yes, you have to buy ammunition, and it costs a bit to maintain a supply, especially if you target practice regularly. But most gun owners never shoot their guns after a few rounds at the target range, if ever. So keeping a gun is rather inexpensive after the initial purchase. It certainly is cheaper than Viagra, which costs about $14 per round and makes you feel powerful for only an hour or so.
The self-defense and hunting arguments are mere surface issues that mask the underlying need for personal power in an increasingly complex, regulated, overwhelming world. Today the powerless American wants a piece of tradition that exudes power: the gun that won the West. The vote seems impotent by comparison. It really doesn’t count for much. By itself it is a drop of oil in a supertanker. The prairie schooner was a personal, human-scale vessel, a self-contained microcosm carrying a family to a new life. The ship of state today is a supertanker that shifts direction a degree or two over seemingly endless spans of time while talking heads shout of egregious tacks in wrong directions as if they were discussing a toy sailboat on a pond.
The gun, after all, is seen by its advocates as a talisman of future triumph, of individual virility in a world that is run by forces far removed from the personal habitat of the individual American who seeks a sense of selfhood against the perceived armada of multinational corporate and government indifference.