Regular readers have probably noticed that for some time now, I've been using the term pro-freedom instead of the more common libertarian. It was a deliberate shift, as I saw while working at Free-Market.Net (and continuing since then) that some individuals and groups that self-identify as libertarian didn't consistently uphold freedom-friendly values, or offer solutions to problems that were freedom enhancing. They ranged from seemingly small things, like libertarian think tanks offering studies and opinions that further entrench state boondoggles like mass transit, to fundamentals such as supporting various flavors of victim disarmament or more restrictive abortion laws. And, of course, in the past few years the shift has escalated, to the point where libertarian can mean anything from a thoroughgoing love of liberty to a republicanesque façade that distills to Freedom for me, but not for thee at its best and quickly tails off.

That's problematic, because it's allowed many individuals who aren't libertarian to think that they are; and that further muddies the concept for others who are new to the ideas of freedom and come across a semi-libertarian individual or web site. Those people might get the idea that being anti-state in some areas means that one is a libertarian; or that if one is over 50% for freedom, one can call oneself a libertarian. (How one might perform such a calculation is beyond me.) And it's because of those problems that I chose to begin using the somewhat clunky, but much more conceptually clear term pro-freedom. It sidesteps all those questions of what, precisely, I mean; and it can be easily modified when I'm describing an entity that I'm unsure is totally pro-freedom, or is fuzzy in some areas. It also neatly sidesteps the problem of ties to electoral politics, which is really just talk about the color and length of one's leash.

Despite my preference for greater precision, I didn't think the term libertarian had become as useless as it apparently has. Reading through Jim Bovard's recent piece The Torturous Servility of Washington Think Tanks and its comments, I came across this call for clarity from Kevin Tuma:

... let's first determine what a 21st century libertarian stands for.
It's a question I don't believe many can answer.

At first I was ready to second Jim's endorsement of a debate on the subject, but then the gravity of such an exercise hit me. Have so many ostensibly liberty-loving individuals forgotten the Non-Aggression Principle and the Zero Aggression Principle and their fundamental importance to any philosophy grounded in freedom? Are so many of us mired in concretes and specifics that we're unwilling—or unable—to conceptualize abstracts and general principles that, if we stick by them, should guide our specific actions?

Someone who is pro-freedom can stand for many different things, particularly when the question is how to create greater freedom in a world almost completely filled with coercive states of varying sorts. I would hope that's the kind of debate Bovard and Tuma envisioned, but if so, it would lack some punch, focusing again on specifics rather than fundamentals. Rather, I suspect the subject of the debate in mind was deeper—which reveals the pathetic state of the concept of libertarianism. And that reinforces the need for pro-freedom individuals and groups to abandon libertarian as an identifier; it's no longer sufficiently clear, nor tied to principle.

However, I'm not calling for us to completely abandon the term. It seems to me that, by choosing to identify ourselves as pro-freedom or some other, equally precise descriptor [NAPper? ZAPper? ZAPA?], we can accomplish two things: 1] We offer an unequivocal statement of our position on what freedom is, our valuing of it, and how it is to be applied; and 2] we offer a channel for identifying the muddled state of the libertarian concept, and educating those who are interested as to its real meaning and history. Without that kind of conversation, the word is going to remain hopelessly unclear, and useless to those of us who remember what it once stood for.