During his HBO show last Friday, Bill Maher dedicated four minutes to bashing libertarians for having ruined libertarianism. The comedian lamented that even though he himself once identified as a libertarian, the movement has morphed into this creepy obsession with free-market capitalism based on an Ayn Rand novel called Atlas Shrugged.

I didnt go nuts; this movement did, he concluded before launching into a series of cartoonishly reductive descriptions of what he thinks are the ultimate libertarian ends.

All in all, Mahers rant was actually pretty funny. Despite stereotypes to the contrary, we libertarians do love a good send-up from Parks and Recreations parodic anti-government hero Ron Swanson to a mock tourism advertisement for Somalia, the libertarian paradise. But throughout all the libertarian bashing, Maher showed his hand a bit: Despite once calling himself a libertarian, he revealed that he really does not have a grasp on what the movement/ideology actually represents.

For starters, the fact that he somehow believes libertarianism was ever a movement not predicated on a belief in free market economics is astonishing. The ideology never morphed into a free-market obsession, as he believes. In fact, the study of markets has always been a fundamental part of the movement, from the Austrian school of economics (F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises) to the Chicago school (Milton Friedman, Gary Becker).

When Maher declared himself a libertarian back in 2001, Salon declared it a joke, noting that only a handful of his beliefs (specifically in the social issues realm) overlapped with libertarian ideology. His staunch support for the expansion of government over guns, education, business, etc., were all in direct opposition to what libertarians generally believe and yet, somehow, he bizarrely believes to this day that the movement left him.

Ultimately, it seems what Maher thought libertarian meant is actually what liberal is supposed to mean. American liberals are supposed to support the social issues and civil liberties causes he extols, yet they never fully commit when in power. Maher was never a libertarian; just a staunch liberal. As Reasons Nick Gillespie notes: For better or worse, a Venn diagram of Maher and libertarianism is going to show a huge amount of overlap on things. And thats a welcome fact. Libertarians and honest liberals will always get along on civil liberties; but well just have to respectfully disagree on economics.

As for the Ayn Rand jokes: What a cheap, easy way to broadstroke a whole movement. But Maher should know better: Ayn Rand is not the be-all-end-all for libertarians. Even she hated libertarians, describing them as hippies and anarchists, while blasting the movements inability to stick to her absolutist mentality on a variety of issues. Today, many of her most devoted acolytes are war-hawks who shrug the libertarian association.

While its safe to say a plurality of libertarians read Atlas Shrugged and became introduced to the concept of limited government via her awful prose, there are plenty of us who dont invoke her name in every conversation and arent the biggest fans of her obsession with the ubermensch. Her work is a decent introduction, but by no means a bible.

On a related note, another misunderstanding of Mahers: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is not and never has been a part of the libertarian movement. Reason magazine regularly pans his budget proposals that pay lip service to fiscal restraint, but really only cut the rate of increase and dont balance the budget anywhere in the near future. He is also an outspoken social conservative, unafraid to use legislation to back that up. And during the Bush years, Ryan was a proponent of the bailouts, TARP, an expanded warfare state, and Medicare Part D.

At one point during his monologue, Maher painted a dystopian vision in which entitlements are eviscerated, human skeletons shit in the river, and pollution is rampant. What a goofy way to invoke the most extreme possible goals for his strawman version of libertarianism. Opposition to expansive government social programs does not mean total anarchy or zero regulations. The lefts favorite strawman is to paint libertarians as people who want the poor to suffer, the air to fill with smog, and the wealthy to cackle their way to bank but, in reality, we just believe the economy functions better with a lighter touch.

Continued here:

No, The Actual Libertarian Movement Didn’t ‘Go Nuts’ — It’s Just The One Inside Bill Maher’s Head