The Libertarian Party

So now that we have talked a bit about the two different main political parties. I’m going to speak a bit about one last semi-major party, the Libertarian Party. As a side note, I am not a fan of the current two party system that we have in place. I think it keeps people with various ranging political beliefs locked into a party system where they feel that they are forced to vote for someone they disagree with, simply because the opposite candidate is even more extreme in their values and what they vote for. I would love to see an introduction of more political parties brought into our sphere and the Libertarian Party is one that many of you might find more along your belief system than you may have realized.

First, similar to the last two posts, lets take a quick look on their history. The Libertarian Party was founded in 1971 in Colorado. It was founded in part to help create a party for people who felt themselves economically Republican leaning while socially Democratic leaning. It has had candidates in every presidential election ever since. By 2000, it had candidates contesting for the majority of seats within House of Representatives. That is really the majority of their history in a nut shell, so now let’s take a look at their beliefs.

This Party’s belief system can be boiled down to one simple line; the less government, the better. The idea behind this is that the government is there to protect its citizens and then get out of the way. Which means that they believe a free and unregulated market is the best way to bring about economic prosperity. When it comes to personal freedom, the Libertarian Party believes that there should be no forms of censorship, the right to bear firearms should be allowed and are proponents of abortion. However, they do believe that crimes of criminal violence or fraud are crimes that violates our fundamental rights. Thus they believe the government should prosecute people who do such crimes. However, victim-less crimes such as drug-use, gambling, and prostitution are laws that should be repealed. In regards to how the US should handle their foreign affairs, they believe that we should be for the most part a non interventionist country. This simply means that we let other countries go about their business and we go about ours without getting involved.

Now understandably, the idea of such limited government has its own issues. It struggles to take into force problems such as monopolies within businesses. Also, I do not agree with some of their takes on certain drugs or abortion and even foreign intervention. But I think there is value from some of their ideals for a limited government. Especially as the two major political parties right now seem so focused on increasing governmental control within their own respective party policies. Plus there is always value in increasing diversity, even within a political parties. So that in a nut shell is what the Libertarian party is about and I would encourage you to take a closer look into them during the upcoming election cycle.