Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Reprinted from Issue Number 539, October 4, 2009 of this magazine.

Like you—and apparently everybody else on our side of today’s struggle for individual liberty—I have been ominously warned that if I oppose the fascist policies of the great Barack Obama, I am a racist.

Do tell.

Does that mean that if I oppose the fascist policies of Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, I am a sexist? Does it mean that if I oppose the fascist policies of Congressman Barney Frank, then I’m homophobic?

No, it means that I oppose fascist policies regardless of the race, sex, or sexual preference of whoever happens to be promoting them.

It means that I’m an equal opportunity anti-fascist.

Fascism is a theory of political economy—a direct, lineal descendant of socialism—with a solid definition and hard edges. It was invented back in the 1920s by German theorists who realized that socialism—under which the government owns and operates the “means of production”—was and always would be a failure. Fascism was their attempt to get around that reality by creating the illusion that the means of production are owned by private individuals, while allowing the state to control them through regulation and collect the profits through taxation, leaving the “owners” to bear all of the burdens and liabilities.

Exactly like its predecessor socialism, fascism holds that the individual is of little or no importance to society except as a resource to be exploited, and that everything must always be done in the name, and for the benefit, of the group. Its unspoken motto is, “From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his pull.”

I opposed the fascist policies of George W. Bush (as I did the fascist policies of Lyndon Johnson), and I am definitely not an anti-Texican.

A long, long time ago, I wrote, “When the enemy screams ’Foul!’ the loudest, you know you’re doing him the most damage”. When the socialists who call themselves liberals have run out of ideas (they never had that many to begin with, and they’re all at least a century out of date), when the failure of their ideas is becoming a public embarrassment to them, and especially when they have no more arguments or excuses left, they scream “Foul!” by calling their opponents racists.

A few well-timed “tea parties” and “town hall” meetings appear to have helped the process along. I don’t believe that the Democrats will ever recover from what will probably be called the “Humiliations of 2009”.

I said too, “Remain the judge of your own actions. Never surrender that position by default”. The wheels are coming off Obama’s wagon more rapidly than anyone expected. Even more importantly, our species is about to experience an epochal change—one that will make the shift from stone tools to copper, bronze, iron, and steel seem trivial by comparison—as the 8000-year old Age of Authority draws to a close.

The fascists who call themselves liberals (or, more ironically, progressives) will do or say anything to keep this change from happening. (So will the fascists who call themselves conservatives, so watch your back.) In the end, no matter how many lives they destroy in the process, they will be defeated by history, and a new era will open.

The change is being driven by the Internet, thanks to which people all over the world can communicate laterally, without the “help” of governments or the established media. Thanks to this phenomenon, they can see, among other things, that their leaders—to whom hundreds of generations have paid entirely undue respect—are not only no better than they are, but in most instances, in any context, considerably worse.

If these leaders could shut the Internet down tomorrow—and how they’d love to do it—it would be too late. Something else just like it would spring up the day after tomorrow. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora’s box has been emptied, and the people of this planet are now accustomed to the freedom of a quintessentially libertarian regime in which the initiation of force is impossible but nothing else is.

Unless socialists of both kinds manage to blow it to pieces, our grandchildren will grow up in a very different world than we did, a world—a universe—in which the individual comes first and there are no groups in any ethical context. And with the application of technology—and a bit of luck that will keep Obama and his minions from screwing up medical progress—we’ll be able to share it with them.

So am I a racist? You bet I am.

I’m a human racist.

And so are you.