Muse website, and right wing libertarians

I was searching the website about a band called Muse and what their political persuasions were. An interesting task given that they are foreign and US and European political terms don’t exactly match up. Their recent songs though seem very libertarian to me. On their forum, they used the term Liberal which is generally the european way of saying Libertarian, and to them is tied closely to anarchists. 

One of the posters on their forum though expressed disbelief at the american concept of Right wing Libertarians. They said that Right Wing generally means trying to uphold a social order from the past. 

I would argue that it’s actually easier to convince people on the right about libertarianism than it is to convince left wing people about libertarianism. Libertarians are really the true big tent ideology, because pretty much everyone can join it by merely believing one simple thing. It is not the place of anyone, or any government, to force anyone to do anything. For a right wing person to be libertarian, they can still hold all of their religious beliefs and all of their stances on how society should be, and just advocate it themselves, in their organizations in a non-violent, non-forceful manner. Basically, preaching the word to others. That’s a familiar concept to most church goers, for example. With a government generally cutting against them in most of these issues for decades, they’re familiar with trying to convince people to see it their way rather than using the government to take guns out to force people to see it their way. It’s only recently that they re-lost their way and started using government to do this anyway. 

The left wing people say they are all about freedom, and they back it up with certain things like abortion and sexual preference, but their other goals go significantly away from freedom. Social Justice, redistribution of wealth, “Fair” distribution of wages, the green movement. All of these goals are impossible to achieve without forcing people to do it. You can ask people nicely to give their money to charity, but it doesn’t manage an overarching redistribution of the kind they desire. The green movement is possible without it, but they have this false sense of urgency around it and believe that they can’t wait for green technology to catch up, they have to force people to stop using the old technologies and go to the green technologies right now. 

All in all, it’s much harder to get left wing people to abandon or delay their core principles than to convince right wing people to use persuasion instead of force. 

I also found this, a nice justification of the philosophy of liberty.