Good article, Peter. I am a bit afraid that when I tell you we do not have the freedoms we ought to have and also why we don’t have them, that you will snub your nose and declare we do have all the freedoms we need. I had to get that off my chest first.

What I like about your article is that freedom clearly points to the battle between people and how far they can take their freedoms. And that is where our system unfortunately misses the point. Our setup is unfair. Our setup has punched us in the nose already.

Our political system divides people in districts and gives a single seat to the one ending up in top.

That is not a libertarian system.
It supports divide and conquer and it promotes top and bottom.

That is the feudal system in a modern jacket.

— -

Freedom is guaranteed in proportional voting, made visible in the following example:

In this example of a city with eight seats on the board, you can see the feudal system to the left and the libertarian system to the right quite clearly.

To the left there are the winners and the losers (who also need to pick from among limited choices).

To the right most voters end up ‘winners’ (a word borrowed from our system) and losers are hardly present. If everyone is a winner, then the word winner does not mean that much anymore of course.

Something else is going on:

These images are truthful representations of how people think in both systems. To the right, green is an obvious color, not associated with the most important features like head, beak and chest but nevertheless dominant in the picture.

To the left, our system, in which we are very familiar with spin. Information is hardly ever presented as perceived, but contains rather a twist or an angle. Green in our system becomes some kind of red or blue, either to love or hate. Systematic spinning is of course not a Libertarian trait. When the leaders bend the truths toward their own agenda, then Liberty is not a central feature of that system.

Here is the weird part:

American Libertarians are spinning our system as if it were Libertarian because they want to feel good about themselves. When asked if we should have proportional voting in place, they seem to forget the word liberty all of a sudden. They are fine with large groups of people not being represented by their choices.

So, yes, thank you for your article. But I hope you can accept that if we look at this in full-color and not just in red-and-blue that Libertarians are not really Libertarians here. If they were, they would be standing on the barricades for political freedom, but they are not. They are standing on the sideline. And they do so in small numbers.

The right-wing Libertarians are happy that the Republican Party is so powerful. The left-wing Libertarians are not even found within the Libertarian Party. The Party itself is nothing but a shell, condoning third-parties to not play any important roles. They are political stand-ins, props, occupying the Libertarian Party because red-and-blue don’t want a real Libertarian Party. They populated that party with puppets.

Here is what a true Libertarian had to say in 1861:

“Two very different ideas are usually confounded under the name democracy. The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented. Democracy as commonly conceived and hitherto practiced is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people, exclusively represented. The former is synonymous with the equality of all citizens; the latter, strangely confounded with it, is a government of privilege, in favor of the numerical majority, who alone possess practically any voice in the State. This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the votes are now taken, to the complete disfranchisement of minorities.”

— John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, 1861

(P.S. He was British, so the word for him there and in most of the world is that he was a Liberal, a word that ended up having a different meaning here, but correctly translated into our vernacular as Libertarian.)

My hope is that you can recognize that your article describes a number of spun positions, and I can see you partially did that on purpose. It is unavoidable when living in a red-and-blue diktat, but my hope is that you can liberate yourself from the red-and-blue thoughts in which you appear to be thinking (yes, with a good heart, I like that).

My two cents for your otherwise well-written article.