by Gene Healy

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.

Added to cato.org on May 8, 2012

This article appeared in The DC Examiner on May 8, 2012.

As a small-"l" libertarian, it's not often I can say that National Public Radio cheers me up on my way into work. But it did the trick yesterday morning with an All Things Considered feature titled "Libertarians Find Their Voice in 2012 Race."

"Somewhere on the path to the White House this year," the announcer declared, "a powerful set of ideas began to creep into the mainstream debate over which direction the country will take. ... free and open markets and extremely limited government. Those ideals are now becoming more mainstream." Case in point, according to NPR, was the Libertarian Party's decision Saturday to make former Republican Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico its nominee for president.

When the federally funded voice of urbane, upper-middle class liberalism says we're on the verge of a "libertarian moment," that's what the lawyers call an "admission against interest," and it's worth paying attention.

[T]o be a libertarian is to be eternally fractious and dissatisfied, refusing to take yes for an answer.

Watching the Libertarian Party over the years, I've sometimes had the feeling that, as George Bernard Shaw once snarked about socialism, "we should have had libertarianism already, but for the Libertarians."

In 2004, the LP's presidential standard-bearer was Michael Badnarik, a freelance constitutional lecturer who taught that the federal income tax was optional and refused to obtain a drivers' license despite campaigning by car. In 2006, the Montana LP nominated 67-year-old Stan Jones for the U.S. Senate. Because of his odd pallor, Jones quickly became known as "the blue guy." A survivalist who in the 1990s was worried about the impending Y2K crisis, Jones began taking a homemade antibiotic laced with collodial silver that permanently changed his complexion ("a true blue libertarian," the Washington Post called him). This weekend's LP convention, televised on C-Span, was a relatively buttoned-down affair, with most of the delegates in suits (though the irrepressible, omnipresent Starchild, libertarian activist and male exotic dancer, opted for a bare-midriff miniskirt number).

Link:

Libertarian Gary Johnson: Spoiler Alert?