How Libertarians Should Run Gulags and Concentration Camps
THEY SHOULDN’T!
It’s as simple as that. Libertarians should not run gulags or concentration camps. If they exist, libertarians should shut them down!
This may seem obvious, but after some time, I doubt it would be among certain libertarian circles if the government had a concentration camp program as extensive as the US Military.
Now that that’s out of the way, this article was inspired by a conversation I had with Tom Woods at Mises University. Tom, thank you for all you do for liberty, and happy birthday! And thank you for this idea. I hope I do it justice.
The latest controversy regarding Liberty Hangout has been our endorsement of Trump’s ban on transgender individuals joining the military (do not mistake this as an endorsement for Trump). For some reason, there are groups of libertarians, especially left-libertarians and tragically libertarians in my own party, who are construing equal rights to mean the equal right to go overseas at the expense of the victims of taxation to kill and perhaps be killed. Although the article doesn’t address my reasoning for banning transgender individuals from the military, my reasoning should be pretty obvious.
Libertarians should support banning transgender individuals from the military. They should support banning homosexuals from the military. They should support banning women, minorities, men, white people, etc. Ultimately, libertarians should ban people from the military until there’s no one left to ban! In the end, I want to ban military service entirely.
Which brings me to my analogy. If the United States ran gulags or concentration camps, would you be outraged if the US banned certain groups from running these camps? Would it be unlibertarian to ban certain groups from joining the security team of the concentration camp? No! It would be unlibertarian to not advocate for shutting down the concentration camps. These people who argue against the transgender military ban are basically claiming that we should all be able to murder until absolutely no one can. This is about as absurd as calling Harriet Tubman a tyrant because she wasn’t able to free every slave. This shouldn’t even be a debate.
Unfortunately it is. Left-Libertarians and libertines have made it their mission to promote equality over liberty. My own party’s chairman, Nicholas Sarwark, wrote in a post, “Libertarians stand for all freedoms, for all people, all of the time. Even if they are a tiny minority. Even if they are hated by social conservatives. Even if the president thinks it’s good political strategy to deny them the opportunity to serve their country in the military.” I guess he thinks we all have the right to murder people whom we have never met. I guess he thinks we all have the right to live and travel at the expense of victims of taxation.
I don’t hate transgender individuals. I hate war. I hate interventionism. If I can exclude a group from that atrocity, best believe I would do it. Honestly, it is astounding how quickly some self-proclaimed libertarians became pro-war. Attempting to reconcile government services with the Non-Aggression Principle is impossible, and will only lead to a tragedy of the commons.
With this in mind, there are some topics with no libertarian answer. These topics include everything that the government does. The answer to these “hard questions” can be answered with one word: Privatization. As Walter Block likes to say: “If it moves, privatize it. If it doesn’t move, privatize it. Since everything either moves or doesn’t move, then we should privatize everything!”
This includes security. If the libertarian solution to military is the privatization of security, then why should we be expanding the opportunity to kill and be killed to other people? We should restrict that opportunity as much as humanly possible!
Equal rights do not apply to the right to murder. If transgender individuals shouldn’t be a guard at a concentration camp, why should they be able to work for an organization that has killed millions and has cost trillions?
