Nick Gillespie on Fox Business' Freedom Watch, Plus Who's a Libertarian These Days?
Last week, I appeared on Judge Andrew Napolitano's new Fox Business Channel show to discuss estate taxes, green energy, and the BP oil spill. Here's that clip (about 11 minutes long; go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions of all staff media appearances).
As it happens, that very appearance above prompted SF writer J. Neil Schulman at his Rational Review blog to ask, "Am I a libertarian? Is Glenn Beck? Nick Gillespie? Was Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein? Are you?"
Schulman recounts various moments when he has been spurned by doctrinaire libs who have also gone on to write Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Robert Heinlein out of the movement and says, Enough already.
A lifetime of devotion to liberty isn't even close to being enough for many libertarians to think of you as being a member of their little clique.
And I do mean little.
If being a lifetime worker for liberty isn't enough for some people, evolving towards liberty from a mainstream state-approving belief system is likely to have you looked at the way a life-saving transplanted organ is regarded by blindly hostile white corpuscles — with results just as fatal to the body.
It just doesn't take much for libertarians to treat you like a Jew trying to join the Episcopalian-run country club.
It might be enough that you express a belief in God, while most radical libertarians are hostile to religion.
Being a believer in limited rather than zero government is another reason for the blackball to be dropped into the bowl.
Think the United States is historically an overall force for good in the world, or have good things to say about the Founding Fathers? Get ready for many libertarians to call you a Neocon, no matter how many wars you've demonstrated against.
And God forbid that you have anything good to say about Israel, Mormons, Jesus Christ, or Country Music.
When the hell did the libertarian movement become more exclusive than the Bohemian Grove?
Devotees of liberty are facing the strongest push towards totalitarian global statism I've seen in my lifetime. The libertarian movement is too small, too fragile, too marginalized already for anyone as potentially decisive to the cause of liberty as Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein — and yes, me, especially now when I'm working my ass off to produce a movie based on my most popular libertarian-themed novel, Alongside Night — to be treated with adolescent dismissal.
Wise up. Robust libertarian movements have historically been rerouted back onto the Road to Serfdom by far less.