I recently had a conversation with an authoritarian who made his indifference to my consent quite clear:
Me: “So, when I say ‘I don't consent to paying for NPR (National Public Radio)’ your response is ‘Tough shit. I support NPR, and I have the right to put a gun to your head and force you to pay.’"
Authoritarian: “yes that’s exactly what I’m saying…”
While I appreciated his honesty, it made me want to strangle him with his own NPR tote bag. In the grand scheme of things, the harm caused by NPR is fairly trivial. But its very triviality contributed to my anger. To my mind, the threshold for threatening other people with death should be quite high. Raising money for my favorite radio programs is not even close.
(To be clear, despite my anger, I have no intention of committing any violent acts.)
However, the incident incentivized me to mull the question: how can libertarians become powerful enough to force authoritarians to leave us alone?
IMO, as long as libertarians are a numerical minority, the authoritarians will guiltlessly treat us like tax cattle, to be harvested as they see fit.
Thankfully, progressives are reproducing well below replacement. And the populations they feed on for new recruits are getting wise to their parasitism.
With any luck, progressive ideology will go extinct in the not too distant future.
Unfortunately, libertarians aren't reproducing well either. And there aren't that many of us to begin with!
How can libertarians grow their numbers?
50 years of recruiting efforts by the Libertarian Party and other organizations have been a dismal failure. Despite our best efforts, the percentage of libertarians in the population has remained stable at between 10 - 20% of the population.
Part of the difficulty of recruiting people to libertarianism may be genetic. Based on twin studies, psychologist Cary Funk concluded that 56% of the difference in self-identified political ideology is explained by genetic factors. Therefore, efforts to recruit adults without pro-liberty genes to libertarianism are likely to be difficult, if not futile.
In addition, for most of their childhood, most US children are indoctrinated with socialist ideology in compulsory state-run schools.
So, to become a libertarian, you have to:
1. …be born with genetic proclivity towards liberty.
2. …avoid or overcome 12 - 16 years of statist indoctrination.
Therefore, if libertarians want to stop getting our faces kicked in, we need to a) systematically have more offspring with libertarian genes and b) indoctrinate our offspring with liberty values.
But how do we raise enough libertarian children to significantly outnumber the authoritarians?
Unfortunately, trying to incentivize libertarian couples to marry and have more children isn't likely to work.
Men outnumber women 2:1 in the libertarian movement. So, even if men relaxed completely every other requirement, it's mathematically impossible for half of male libertarians to find a libertarian spouse.
If the wife isn't a libertarian, the kids are less likely to have libertarian genes, and the couple will be less likely to raise the kids with libertarian values.
In addition, libertarian women tend to be independent, smart, and career-driven. Most of them wouldn't be happy raising children instead of working.
And wealth makes the opportunity cost of having children quite high. Most people don't want to give up the pleasures of modern life -- travel, fine dining, videogames, parties, ski trips -- for children.
Instead of running against the bulls of human nature, I think libertarians will have better luck creating organizations (religions, NGO's, and for profit companies) that specialize in child production. I propose one such model in my essay, Baby Momma, Inc.