I left the Libertarian Party today. It was a long time coming. There wasn't much to it, really, I just went online and changed my voter registration to NPA. Nothing will really change for me during the primary elections. It was more of a symbolic thing. I am no longer affiliated with a party whose ideals are a corrupted form of true libertarianism.
About twenty years ago, I joined the Libertarian Party because I believed in its stated ideals of personal freedom and limited government. I took their political quiz, and its cleverly worded questions placed me nearly as far "libertarian" on the grid as I could go. I listened to voices in the media that claimed to be libertarian, absorbing all of their information as an eager student. In time I came to believe that free markets were the magical cure for all of the world's ailments. I came to believe that anything remotely socialist was antithetical to freedom. I did not realize at the time, that what I was being sold was actually anarcho-capitalism.
Oddly enough, the catalyst for this change was in studying the origins of libertarianism. The libertarian philosophy is rooted in socialism, not laissez-faire capitalism. The classic and modern forms of libertarianism are very similar except for that one difference. It's a fundamental difference, though. Libertarianism begins with personal autonomy. You cannot have personal autonomy when capital is unevenly distributed, as those who control more capital have at least some influence over the lives of those who control less. Capital always becomes unevenly distributed. A libertarian platform must contain a socialist economic policy.
I'm sure some of you are ready to respond with China or some other "socialist" government not allowing personal autonomy. Well, you're right, except those countries are not socialist. In fact, there are no socialist countries. These countries engage in a form of state capitalism. The state controls the capital and therefore controls the people. A socialist country would have no capital to control, and no top-down form of government. I don't want to turn this into a lecture on the benefits of a socialist society, but you get the picture.
What bothers me most about the Libertarian party, is the way they try to deceive. You will hear the mantra of "taxation is theft" repeated over and over. Now, I can understand the reluctance to pay taxes, but relatively speaking, the taxes we pay are nothing. You pay a small portion of your income in taxes, however, your income is a small portion of what the total value of your labor is worth to your employer. Why are you mad about paying a small amount to the government to keep everything running, but not about the fruits of your labor being withheld and used so that a CEO can afford a life of luxury? They want us to blame the government instead of capitalist exploitation. It is dishonest.
The libertarian ideal of individual liberty has been distorted into something of a cult of the individual. It's a blind reverence to the idea that anything recognizing that a person is part of some larger body is an act of aggression. We live in a society. We are each a part of a larger body and thus bear some responsibility to ensure the well-being of that body whether we like it or not. With a population as massive as the human population in this limited amount of space, the 100% autonomous individual simply cannot exist. "We the people" means just that; we are a collective body that must take each part into consideration. If any part of "the people" gets left behind, that is a failure of our society, and by extension, a failure of each individual. Libertarianism does not see that, it leaves those people to their own devices and says "that's not my problem". While not a perfect solution, there must be systems in place such as progressive taxation funding public services in order to help some of us survive.
So while I still believe in many libertarian ideals such as personal autonomy, individual liberty, and things of that nature, I can no longer align myself with a philosophy that is, at its core, a cult of capitalism. For a long time I have thought of myself as a lowercase-l libertarian as opposed to a capital-L Libertarian for that very reason, but I feel that I have to disassociate myself from that term, regardless of capitalization. There is a certain stigma attached to that word now. By today's definitions, I would probably need to hyphenate and call myself a socialist-libertarian or perhaps a libertarian-socialist. It doesn't matter what I call myself, though, what's right is what's right regardless of what it's called. Putting profit ahead of people is always wrong; it hurts people and it hurts the planet. The free market won't fix that. That is why I left the Libertarian Party today.