I am absolutely astounded by the continual onslaught of synchronicities that I've experienced within the past few months of my life. This is yet another one.

I was just thinking about this yesterday in relation to my own personal ideas. Upon reading an essay posted on Lew Rockwell.com a couple of days ago about South Park and libertarianism, I decided that I just don't want to deal with all the baggage associated with the term "libertarian" anymore. To the extent that the person who wrote that essay is a libertarian, I am not one.

Peoples' conception of what libertarianism is differs, and thus there is so much confusion out there as to what a person claiming to be a libertarian happens to advocate. I'm sick of having to explain to others that I'm not a "pot-smoking Republican" or a "corporate apologist" or any of the other conceptions associated with libertarianism that have nothing to do with my own ideas.

I began reading a book by Kerry Thornley last night titled Zenarchy. At one point within chapter 6 of the book, he wrote about a friend of liberty named George Boardman, and part of it resonated highly with me. Since I expect the whole excerpt would be of interest to fellow friends of liberty, here it is, with the portion relevant to this discussion in bold print:

" Old George Boardman was an instructor at Robert LeFevre's libertarian Freedom School in Larkspur, Colorado, where I was a student in 1964.
Most of the time Boardman lived in a ghost town called Chloride, Arizona, population: 250. No government was present there at that time, not even as a figment of its own imagination.
As for crimes against person or property, the most recent one was committed five years earlier by some Californians who were passing through. No crimes with victims occurred, said George Boardman, because there were no police to protect criminals from a watchful populace.
George wrote a regular column for the Santa Ana Register recounting his adventures in Chloride and setting forth his wise, usually slightly cranky or downright stubborn views of various issues. In 1969 he passed away and I wrote him a tribute that was published in the Register.
That man could cause an Orange County, California, Bircher to see the contradiction between "law" and "order" without ever feeling his mind had been changed about politics. In Zen, such tactful persuasion is called upaya, the "gentle method". And though Boardman's rhetoric was conservative, his philosophy was both humorous and - well, I hesitate to say "radical". For once he said, "I'm not an anarchist nor a libertarian, or anything else. I'm George Boardman - and I don't want to be held responsible for anyone's views but my own".

I'm not a libertarian. I'm freeman.

I don't oppose Scott Bieser's position at all. I'm just not real motivated to go to war over a word. That's all that "libertarian" is - a word.