by Bob Newland

While George Will cranks out cutely-worded thought about policy from a keyboard on the Potomac, we watch the local U.S. Attorney lead a SWAT-attack on peaceful businesspeople, illegally engaging the National Guard in the process of violating the fourth amendment to the Constitution.

We watch state government attempt to override decades-old land pacts and deny landowners access to their property in the "rails to trails" fiasco.

We watch federal, state, and local governments attempt to redefine or simply negate the second amendment. But then, when one thinks about it, there is only one of the first ten amendments to which government still adheres (so far, anyway)--the one about quartering soldiers in private homes during peacetime.

We watch local small-businesspeople suffer a barbaric and systematic assault by the IRS, which would just as soon we all (everybody in the world) worked for one of five U.S. corporations which would withhold our taxes, rather than let all us entrepreneurs figure it out on our own . That would make things so much neater.
While we watch these things affect our friends and neighbors, we open the paper to George Will.

George Will is a nationally syndicated columnist. That begs the presumption that some folks actually take him seriously. He makes over a million dollars a year for writing a few hundred words a week and for perching pensively Sunday mornings in a This Week With David Brinkley chair, legs gracefully crossed, lips perfectly pursed in contemplation at the gaggle of words falling from the mouth of another Washington commentator.

All one really needs to know about George Will is that he cheered at Ronald Reagan's nomination. But there's more. He absolutely beamed, grinning so widely his cheeks actually changed position on election night, 1980. That was the night that set off twelve years of the most corrupt presidential administrations in this country's history.

George Will even smiled at Reagan's reelection, although even he couldn't hide his distaste at the publicness of the wild looting of public and private treasuries by "the great communicator" and his friends and appointees.

Now, sensing a possibility that Ron's heir, the (pick one) [a] education president [b] environmental president [c] budget-balancing president [d] sell-weapons-to-Iraq-so-we-can-have-some-fun president, is in trouble (George Will is sharp, no doubt about it), Will has chosen to toss a few words of disdain at the Libertarian Party in general, and at its presidential nominee, Andre Marrou, in particular (Opinion, July 9).

In the course of his disjointed rambling diatribe against Libertarianism, George Will managed to score several direct inaccuracies and hint at many more, providing considerable collateral damage to the heretical premise that anyone besides the Democratic (George purports to think Democrats are silly, but what pleases him about them is that they play fair--they're predictable in their flitting) or Republican national committees could possibly know what's best for us. That is, if anyone besides me actually read his non-experience-based opinion. What I'm trying to say is that George Will doesn't know what he's talking about.

For example, Will states that the ideology of Libertarianism provides a "well-lit prison of one idea..., 'government power is opposed to individual liberty,'" and sighs and rolls his eyes at the fact that we "still must debate such sophomoric notions." Will then refutes what he wants us to believe are Libertarian planks (they aren't)--that Libertarians believe we shouldn't have armies, police, roads, or education.

I may be stuck in a prison of ideology, but George Will is stuck in the Washington beltway, in thought and in fact. He hasn't the foggiest idea what we folks in the hinterlands go through. He and Sam Donaldson debate theory and Murphy Brown while all around us we see people going under because, primarily, of one factor--taxes, all kinds of 'em, unfairly applied and brutally enforced. When applied on a personal level, when someone we know is affected, those words, "government power is opposed to individual liberty" don't seem so "sophomoric."

In his parting remarks, having mentioned a few things about the current state of affairs which trouble him (the number of government employees--in which he actually finds a way to defend the Republicans, and the recently-quadrupled national debt, along with the Democrats' disposal towards welfare) Will says, "All of which makes the Libertarians' frivolousness especially regrettable. Once upon a time there were politically serious third parties ...."

The only way I can give that remark any meaning is to assume that by "politically serious" George Will means "committed to being (re)elected at any price, by means of any promise to the electorate." From which I am (and, I believe, most Libertarians are) happy to be excluded.

One only needs to look around himself to see the results of the thinking George Will endorses. His is the prison of "If this is where we are, more of the same, better-enforced, will get us out of it (assuming George even realizes we're in trouble)."

The Libertarian statement of principles and national platform contains a well-reasoned, step-by-step process for dealing with our most prevalent national problems (budget deficit, unemployment, infrastructure deterioration, crime) while promoting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After reading these thirty-some pages, one might conclude that the Republican and Democratic parties' platforms are ... uh ... well, frivolous.

"Isn't there a fourth choice?" George Will asks. There is, and it's a viable choice for those who see the folly of the status quo and the danger of Ross Perot. Admittedly however, that choice, the Libertarian option, uses as the basis for its platform the frivolous Constitution of the United States.

That should cause George Will to purse his lips.