Would you hire a fat personal trainer? Let’s say you wanted to lose weight, and are in the market for hiring someone to help you out. All else being equal, would you choose one who is in shape, or is way too large around the middle-section, has a stoma in their neck, and smells a bit off?
Maybe the fat trainer has all the right knowledge. Maybe they’ve studied for years and years, just never bothered putting any of the ideas into practice. Maybe the idea of being healthy is something they find interesting, but not something that they care to experience. To them, it’s an academic and intellectual pursuit. They enjoy researching, studying, and debating what makes a person healthy. They know all about how various diets can affect the body, they know the proper form for exercises, they know the right mentality to have to pursue excellent health. They can tell you all about it, but they don’t bother actually implementing it for themselves. Would you trust that personal trainer? I’m going to go out on a limb and say I wouldn’t. I’d probably go with the guy that seems healthier.
It seems to me that a lot of libertarians are the fat personal trainer. They love the ideas of liberty, they think those are awesome. They read Rothbard and Mises and can tell you all about business cycle theory. They will wax poetic about what the “Proper Opinion” is, whether such-and-such violates the nap, they’re evictionist, have theories about age of majority and contract laws, and are “in” the community, but they don’t actually do anything to push for liberty.
What they will do, however, is express themselves. They’ll write long papers about how they feel about a certain policy. They’ll talk about how democracy is rigged and they could never win. They’ll talk about how they think bitcoin will save us and decentralization is the path to liberty. They’ll talk about how we’re all going to live on Mars someday so just hold tight for that future life in the sky.
But they won’t bother clogging the gears of the democratic system, or building technology on a blockchain, or building spaceships. No no no, that would require effort. They’re only interested in the concepts of liberty in an academic sense, and enjoy speculating on the future.
That is why liberty is losing all over the world. The greatest champions of liberty are armchair warriors who don’t do anything of any value to the liberty movement other than write books and share ideas with people who already agree with them. It’s not about the fight for the future of humanity, no no no, it’s about the joys of self expression.
Will they try to win a debate? Sure, so long as the debate comes to them on the internet. They’re not going to bother going out of their way to do so. Hell, they might even try to win debates on strategy, because those are the fun ones. But you’ll never see them actually implementing the strategy. They just provide a quick, “See, what someone oughta do is…”
Then, we have Free-Staters. A veritable tour de-force of the liberty movement, with no one even coming close. They’ve basically flipped the GOP in the state, passed countless laws to fight back against the state, lowered taxes, legalized guns, attacked leftist propaganda outlets, got kids out of public school, put car tint back on windows, got the state off the asses of cryptocurrency businesses, I could go on. It’s genuinely difficult to even establish a list of the accomplishments of free-staters because there’s so many of them.
Why is that?
Simple.
“Free Stater” is a self-selecting sample of libertarians who are passionate enough to actually do something to fight for liberty.
No useless distractions. No Honduran real-estate scams. No “Well if you wait 50 years you might be able to be free if you can survive on a diet of fish or mars-lettuce”. In NH, if someone says, “See, what someone oughta do is…” they’re immediately hit with, “So why don’t you do that?” That alone cuts down on the bullshitter ratio.
“But it’s cold in New Hampshire!”
Free staters love liberty enough to put on a coat for the cause.
“But it’s still a democracy!”
Free staters are willing to play by the rules or break them, and therefore actually win despite people saying it’s impossible.
You might be thinking, “Am I one of those useless libertarians who think the mere fact that I have the proper opinions validates my club membership?”
It’s possible you are. I’m not going to make that decision for you, you are going to have to make that assessment on your own. If you are strong enough to admit to yourself that you are, I might recommend that you go do something for the cause of liberty.
A half-drunk republican who takes a stand for liberty is more valuable to the cause of liberty than a dude who has read Human Action 15 times but otherwise does nothing.