Previous

Contents

Next

A Warning to the Public
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Distribute Freely—Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

The government should use its rightful authority over the border to control entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a threat to our health by spreading the virus into areas where it does not exist.
—Donny Ferguson
Libertarian National Committee
Communications Director

With the notation, "I don't know whether to laugh or cry," friend and fellow conspirator Jim Lesczynski ("our man in Manhattan") just sent me a press release from the national Libertarian Party that not only misrepresents the consistent libertarian position on an important issue of the day—the freedom to travel—but shamelessly sucks up to a renegade federal government toward which it was intended to be adversarial.

The release quotes—and was no doubt written by—one Donny Ferguson, styling himself as the "Libertarian National Committee Communications Director". I don't know where they find these stiffs, but the supply seems endless. They're all the same in Republicanoid timidity and convictionlessness, their complete lack of vision—"tinythink", I used to call it, and believe I'll start doing it again—and their inappropriate and pathetic yearning for respectability, at the expense of the entire reason the LP was created in the first place.

This, I have no doubt at all, reflects the mindset of the current LP leadership. Junior Republicans, for the most part (the exceptions know who they are), they have yet to escape the deadly embrace of socialism.

The document can be seen here. But before I start hearing from Nerfies, LINOs, platform buggerers, and others of that pale stripe who have forgotten history—assuming they ever knew it—let's examine some of this mess a little more closely.

"Libertarians urge Obama to control border to stem 'swine flu'." That's the title of the thing, and I've never seen moe idiocy crammed into a single brief sentence. Just for starters, libertarians do no such thing. Little Donny Ferguson might, his backers on the national committee might, but there's plenty of evidence right here he's no libertarian.

Why, for example, does he urge Obama to do anything? He's not my President, nor "our" President. Depending on how the whole citizenship thing shakes out, he may not be President of anything, at all. There is nothing any libertarian should urge Obama to do—certainly not "more closely monitor crossings at the United States' border with Mexico, and keep out persons infected with 'swine flu'"—except resign.

Nowhere in this release is there any mention of the possibility—rated fairly high by many genuine libertarians—that the swine flu is essentially a hoax, another attempt by the government to seize even more illegitimate power than it has since September 11, 2001. Some believe it might even be synthetic, the product of germ warfare experimentation. I don't know enough about that to say, one way or another.

Even accepting the Mexican government's claim to 200 fatalities (disputed by the equally evil World Health Organization), swine flu is a poor, pitiful thing, compared not only to the Spanish Influenza of 1918, which killed half a million Americans, including my grandfather, but to ordinary seasonal flu, as well, which kills thirty or forty thousand.

Every year, supposedly.

Such a message, urging that the government attempt to control the right of individuals to travel, is not only impractical—how long does each virus test take, as the traffic backs up to Durango and Baja California Sur while Americans are allegedly already spreading the virus among themselves?—it is wholly inconsistent with the Zero Aggression Principle which is the heart and soul, the very definition of libertarianism, but which the current LP leadership rejects because (quite properly) it ties their hands and hampers them in their desire to surrender principle for what they sadly and mistakenly imagine is electability.

Jim Lesczynski points out in a later message that keeping folks out with viruses could get really complicated if those "caught" crossing the border are Americans, returning from business trips or vacations.

For me, the undue respect this document's author pays to authority in general, and to Obama and to "Jackboot Janet" Napolitano (who would round poor Donny up in the very first "domestic terrorist" sweeps and boxcar him straight to a concentration camp in Darkest Arkansas) is the second or third most nauseating act I've seen the LP commit since it abased and humiliated itself by nominating (one can hardly say "running") Backdoor Bob Barr for President. Its low, crawling, abject overuse of the word "our" where it doesn't belong is just the sewage- flavored topping on the cake, typical of the LP's brand of clip-on libertarianism.

Donny, I suggest strongly that you resign from your phony-baloney position and find someplace quiet and dark where you can grow a pair. But I'm afraid Marcus Lycus was right: "You'll be a eunuch all your life."

Award-winning author L. Neil Smith is Publisher and Senior Columnist of The Libertarian Enterprise.

Help Support TLE by patronizing our advertisers and affiliates.
We cheerfully accept donations!