Just say "no" to Che'

Reason.tv and their horrible set designs and even more-horrible wardrobes are back talking about the appeal (or lack thereof) of libertarianism and its future both here in California and the nation.

Here, Tim Kavanaugh talks to some dude named Starchild.



During the run-up to the '08 Presidential election, we recall the liberal-Left attempting to fashion some sort of fusionism of their own with libertarians. Obviously, this didn't pan out. As with Bill Maher attempting to rationalize being a "libertarian" while voting for Ralph Nader back in 2000, the nanny state kids desperately want to look cool and to be able to hang with the rockers in the slicked-back hair and leather jackets. Life just doesn't work that way.

But Kavanaugh does ask Starboy, "Why does the Left constantly provide less welcoming ground than the right?"

'child blames Ayn Rand's fascination with big business and her brand of scorched earth individualism for not providing the rounded edges that might be appealing to liberals.

Not sure that is going to work either. John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods, is a "soft-core libertarian" and after a buy-cott of the Whole Foods in LaJolla in October of '09 to support Mackey's rejection of ObamaCare here is what we wrote:

One of his criticisms of the freedom movement is that he believes it to be overly-provocative and he goes all the way back to Ayn Rand’s seminal Atlas Shrugged for deliberately conflating selfishness and self-interest and fast forwards to the 80s movie Wall Street and Gordon Gekko’s famous line, “Greed is Good”. He believes the freedom movement has allowed themselves to be painted into a corner as evil corporatists because of Rand’s original sin which was manifested in popular culture by Oliver Stone’s movie 30 years later.

We have used Gekko’s term on several occasions on these pages with relish. When we have used it, we hope that we have left a clear signal that our tongue is somewhat in cheek because our use of the term is more a reaction to the general disdain the liberal-Left has for anything worthwhile resulting from the “profit motive” rather than an actual belief in the “virtue of selfishness” that Rand believed. We understand Mackey’s point, though we aren’t dropping usage of the phrase solely because it’s so fun to say and it just totally cheeses-off the right people.

We linked to a paper written by Mackey where there is some touchy-feely sentiments that might appeal to libs but at his core, Mackey is a small government, free-market capitalist... who opposes ObamaCare. There are only so many gaps that can be bridged.

Reformed libertarian, B-Daddy had his thoughts on the matter, here.

While Starchild believes the libertarian movement could benefit from their own Che' Guevara (please, no), we'd simply start with libertarians not acting like the humourless and pretentious political snobs we find many of them to be.