A Real "Libertarian" Bozo

In the Dallas Libertarian Examiner, writer Garry Reed responded to the news of the recent founding of a Danish group calling itself Libertaere Socialister, or Libertarian Socialists, with a column entitled "Calling all Stalinist-Jeffersonian-Bozoian Libertarians", claiming that the Danes had stolen the term "libertarian" from the Libertarian Right in America, and that combining libertarianism with socialism made as much sense as combining the politics of Joseph Stalin, Thomas Jefferson, and Bozo the Clown. Several libertarian socialists responded, pointing out (sometimes somewhat rudely) that traditional anarchists, on the Libertarian Left, had used the label "libertarian" for over a century before the Libertarian Right adopted it...

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A Real "Libertarian" Bozo

by Dan Clore

In the Dallas Libertarian Examiner, writer Garry Reed responded to the news of the recent founding of a Danish group calling itself Libertaere Socialister, or Libertarian Socialists, with a column entitled "Calling all Stalinist-Jeffersonian-Bozoian Libertarians", claiming that the Danes had stolen the term "libertarian" from the Libertarian Right in America, and that combining libertarianism with socialism made as much sense as combining the politics of Joseph Stalin, Thomas Jefferson, and Bozo the Clown. Several libertarian socialists responded, pointing out (sometimes somewhat rudely) that traditional anarchists, on the Libertarian Left, had used the label "libertarian" for over a century before the Libertarian Right adopted it.

Thus beleagured, Reed wrote another column, this time entitled "Calling all laissez-faire sovereign individual Libertarians". There, instead of facing the facts, Reed accuses his critics of ignorance of the history of the Libertarian Right, and briefly rehearses its roots in classical liberalism. This is, of course, irrelevant, since no one denied that there were precursors to the modern Libertarian Right; the point at issue was the history of the term "libertarian". None of the forerunners that Reed mentions used the label "libertarian" (though one of them, John Stuart Mill, was in fact a libertarian socialist). Thus besieged by evil liberals/progressives/socialists, Reed called on right-libertarians to come to his aid. continued: http://www.nolanchart.com/article7119.html

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