2. “They want to smash down American education, but they call themselves patriots. They want to smash down American unions, but they call themselves patriots. They consciously say they want to defund America’s government… Grover Norquist, their great leader, says he wants to shrink America’s government to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. That’s their great leader.”
Most of us libertarians want to abolish the federal department of education which has given us programs like No Child Left Behind, which made our failing high schools even worse; and government guaranteed student loans, which is the primary driver behind the massive student debt and the astonishingly high college tuition. Many of us would like to reform or mostly eliminate public schooling. But as for education, I know I very highly value education. Education can come from family and friends, every day encounters, and apprenticeships and on the job training. That is where education came from for most of world history. Schooling can be very beneficial for some, and a waste of time for others. Although schooling can produce positive results, schooling has also produced government-obedient drones (do some research on how kindergarten started) who have sat by while their own government commits murder and genocide. Schooling has also destroyed the self-esteems of those who might have otherwise been successful but were not cut out for schooling. So maybe we libertarians want to smash down the modern concept of the American educational system, but most of us value education. In fact, I believe that it’s only through education that people will support individual liberty over all other values when it comes to government action.
In spite of the fact that before unions, American workers were safer than any workers had ever been in world history by the early 1900s, I still think American unions served beneficial means at that time. There were dangerous and unsanitary working conditions that eventually would have gotten better without unions, but it is likely that those unions did help in speeding up those changes. And as far as the concept of unions, I support any VOLUNTARY association between individuals. If workers want to join a group of others working toward some end, that’s great. I would be opposed to government force to smash unions. But I want to smash down what perhaps some people believe unions should be – that they should have government granted power to force other workers to join and prohibit employers from voluntary associations with their workers.
And although I do think a characteristic of patriotism is the willing to dissent against government, I do not call myself a patriot for doing this. I think the word patriotism has lost its meaning and I think it’s a completely empty word.
The ONE thing that Van Jones gets right in his otherwise ignorant diatribe is that we libertarians “want to defund America’s government.” If mostly defunding the government means an end to the wars and an end to the regulations and government spending which take away from the life-enhancing productivity of the American worker, I sure do want to mostly defund the government.
I’ve been in the libertarian movement since October 2008 (after the bank bailouts) – and in over three and one half years, I never knew that Grover Norquist was our great leader. I knew he didn’t like taxes and that he was with Americans for Tax Reform, but I never heard him talking about ending the wars or about restoring our civil liberties here at home. I would say that since 2007, Congressman Ron Paul has been the leader of the libertarian movement. Followed in no order by individuals such as Judge Andrew Napolitano, Thomas E Woods, Peter Schiff, Lew Rockwell and countless other writers, economists, and lecturers. Grover Norquist isn’t even on my radar screen when it comes to great libertarian leaders.
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