This is in response to this article, so please read it first.

There’s no excuse for this level of ignorance – he could have cured it with a ten-minute Google search or a fifteen-minute conversation with an actual libertarian. Even the URL, which contains the phrase “libertarian-tea-party,” is wrong. (Most likely, it’s an attempt to manipulate SEO.) Pointing out all the errors Mr. Sanghoee’s article contains would require an article at least three times a long as his, so I’ll just point out a few of them.

Libertarians never took pages from the progressive playbook, nor from any playbook other than their own. We seek individual liberty, which naturally includes things like gay rights and ending the drug war. Libertarianism also lines up with some conservative causes, like gun rights and smaller government, but that too is happenstance. When you start from the principle that people own themselves (the core principle of the philosophy) and work up from it, some conclusions come out on the right side of the political spectrum, some on the left. This confuses people like Mr. Sanghoee, who evidently can only understand the false dichotomies of Left v. Right or Republicans v. Democrats. Libertarians reject that inaccurate two-dimensional view of politics. Our view includes the third dimension of liberty v. tyranny.

Libertarians are strongly in favor of free trade, and are opposed to military interventions and war.  A few minutes of research would have saved Sanjay from the embarrassment of making the uninformed claim that libertarian foreign policy would, “would hurt us in every way imaginable.” Libertarians would like a world where nations trade and cooperate with each other instead of using bombs and robot death planes to murder people.

Sanjay’s insistence that Rand Paul and the Tea Party are libertarian proves he has no clue what Libertarianism is. He doesn’t hate libertarians; he hates what he imagines them to be, which isn’t even close to reality. It’s like someone saying they hate Justin Bieber because they can’t stand progressive jazz. And while lefties will read his nonsense and nod in agreement like a Michael Moore bobble-head doll, anyone with a clue will just shake their head in disgust and write off Mr. Sanghoee as just one more ignorant lefty who has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.