“Crackpot” or “kook” will do. It doesn’t have any particular connection with libertarianism, except insofar as the specific types of crackpottery and kookitude are sometimes correlated with which political movement somebody is on the lunatic fringes of (e.g. belief in Illuminati New World Order conspiracy theories is more common among the lunatic fringe of the right than the lunatic fringe of the left).
One term that is commonly used to describe the sort of people mentioned in the OP is “sovereign citizen.” That is, they believe that each citizen is a sovereign, and no government has authority over them unless they have personally and voluntarily surrendered part of their sovereignty, typically by way of a contract. They also argue that no other citizen has any legal rights over them, unless the two citizens have entered into a contract, or unless one citizen has physically injured the other.
There are some ideological similarities to libertarianism, but in my opinion, this line of thinking is more akin to anarchism, since it really boils down to a near-complete denial of the authority of government.
Of, course, it very quickly degenerates into moonbattery…
I’ve had to deal with some of these folks professionally over the years. It’s a weird mixture of bemusement, frustration, and an underlying sense that one day, one of them might just snap.
(I’ve got to run, but I can dig up some cites later.)
Currency is what you can hold in your hand. A checkable deposit at a bank is no longer in the form of currency, but it is still money and part of any definition of the money supply.
So all currency is money but all money is not currency.
ETA: come to think of it, I don’t think anyone has ever seriously proposed a commodity-backed money supply. Basically that would mean ending fractional-reserve banking, which would be serious kook thinking.
Here, don’t tie us in with those kooks -bad enough we get the “anarcho-capitalists” trying to fifth-column us, we don’t need them too. What you’ve just described is nothing like trad. anarchism, which doesn’t have all that obsession with contracts malarkey. And as for everyone being an independent individual…
You could also pick up a woman in a bar on Halloween and tell her you are a smurf. She thinks that is cute and goes home with you. The next morning you both wake up in bed sober and she tells you to wash that silly stuff off. “Uh, it doesn’t come off” you say.
Those kooks serve to protect us from the kooks on the other end of the spectrum.
And if you pay close attention you might catch a few grains of truth from both groups.
Just to add a little spice to reality.
At least some of these people are probably suffering from full blown mental illness and are not just eccentric.
It makes you wonder how they came by theses beliefs in the first place,the bloke who started the U.K.s Flat Earth Society(Now dead)tried to start a balloon cargo carrying company afterWW1.
His idea was then that as the Earth was spherical and rotated all he had to do was put the balloon aloft and let the planet rotate beneath it and then land it when the destination approached it.
Obviously this didn’t happen and ever after he believed the world was flat despite pictures from space in later years,ships disappearing beneath the horizon etc.etc.
Once the idea was in his head he just rationalised away any proof to the contrary.
Just like these so called libertarians.
In their lights then as they are not subject to any governmental law then they are in fact Outlaws and can be killed by anyone at any time in any place without restraint.
Or is it different when it applies to them?
I expect that they dont want the U.S. armed forces paid for by the taxpayer to defend them in the event of a foreign invasion no doubt they’ll drive away the might of Russia with their rifles and pistols.
How do they get their technological hardware,guns,ammo etc if they are not part of U.S. society?
I don’t think the label anarchist can be properly applied to them. They’re fanatically opposed to our current form of government, but do have their own vision of what government ought to be. If you can stand to, read The Turner Diaries, or a least a good synopis of said, to get an idea of what they’d put in place if they could.
I would agree that those are not libertarian principles. However, many of those who espouse such extremist views are also aligned with classic liberal philosophy. Not all libertarians are wackos, but many wackos are also libertarians.
In my experience, these people are called freemen. We occasionally run across them at my office when they are in forelcosure. They submit lengthy diatribes to the court, claiming all sorts of injustices, and usually say that we owe them billions of dollars because of all of rights we’ve infringed. They also do fun things like claim our use of their name is a copyright violation, that only gold is valid currency, that we are part of a vast conspiracy…ironically, they had no objection to playing by socially accepted norms when they borrowed the money to buy the house in the first place.
Once they get in front of the judge, and open their mouths, they never get very far (it’s never helpful to appear in court and then refuse to recognize its legitimacy).
Meanwhile, Oprah had an episode with a blue man, who got that way from drinking colloidal silver. Very strange.
Had time to do some digging. The most detailed summary of the Sovereign Citizens that I’ve found is on the Anti-Defamation League website: Sovereign Citizen Movement.
That’s certainly one name that some of them use, notably in Montana and southern Alberta and south-western Saskatchewan, but there are several other terms that are used. “Sovereign citizen” seems to have become accepted as a general term, as indicated in the introduction to the ADL web-article:
I appreciate that this type of ideology is quite different from some of the classic forms of anarchism, like the ones based in syndicalism and collectivism. However, I’m not the only one who thinks that the sovereign citizens can be classified as a type of anarchism; see the ADL article:
The Wiki article on anarchism also recognises that there is a wide diversity in anarchist thought, but that the unifying thread is the idea that the state lacks legitimacy:
Hence the argument that sovereign citizens are a form of anarchists.
While there is a lot of overlap between some of these different extremist movements, The Turner Diaries is more commonly associated with neo-Nazism and anti-semitism. It was written by William Pierce, the founder and long-time leader of the National Alliance, one of the better established neo-nazi groups in the United States.
while some of the sovereign citizens may share those racist/anti-semitic views, a lot of them get involved in the sovereign citizen movement for economic reasons - bank foreclosures, tax bills, or other court judgments against them being a common catalyst. The sovereign citizens tend to focus more on those types of issues, filing bogus court papers and liens, rather than being heavily oriented towards anti-semitism or neo-nazism.
Northern Piper, “Right Wing” and “anarchism” are mutually exclusive terms, IMO. And read this Wiki article on “anarcho-capitalism” to see how other anarchists view them, as well. I know, it shapes up to look like a No True Scotsman argument, but then, I’m a “property is theft” kind of guy…
Here’s a good synopsis.
And you can read the whole thing online here:
http:// www. skrewdriver.org/ turnerintro.html
(Link broken in deference to the Board rule against linking to hate sites.)
The most telling part is the Epilogue. In the end, all Jews and all nonwhites and all “mongrels” die. Everywhere, in the whole world. So do most whites.