The best thing about being a libertarian is that you can do it all by yourself.

Liberals need someone else to pay for all the things they promise to other people. And naturally, they need those other-people to be dependent on the government, which is just more other-people who spend most of the someone-else’s money on themselves and then let what’s left trickle down to the first group of other-people that they made dependent on them in the first place. Follow?

You need even more people than that to be a socialist. Theoretically, you need everybody, but in reality someone still has to make the money to redistribute so you need almost everybody, except a few to tax the bejeesus out of and hope they don’t leave your country. Keith Richards’ lawyers should have argued that he could not possibly have been a drug burnout since he had the presence of mind to flee England with its 90% top tax rate. And unless you think sober billionaires are less able than Keith to make correct economic choices, don’t think they will just sit there when we come at them with forks.

Conservatives come in lots of flavors, but nearly all of them need a crowd of some sort. The NeoCons need people to invade. The TheoCons need slackers and degenerates to convince the nation that they could make government be our moral compass. The FauxCons need a whole bunch of regular conservatives to dupe – preferably good-hearted folk long on principle and short on memory. All of them will need lots and lots of cops, judges, and prison guards to throw everybody in jail if they ever get their way; making the objectionable criminal is labor intensive.

Fascists need someone to order around and bully; that is not nearly as much as fun to do to yourself. Communists aren’t very good at anything, so they need a whole lot of people to build up the things they swoop in to confiscate in the name of liberation. Plus, there has to be a proletariat before you can claim the dictatorship of it. The gulags and killing fields need to be filled with intellectuals and bourgeois, and the bourgeois need communists because otherwise they do not even know who they are. So you can’t even be the enemy of the people without people.

Theocrats need a great unwashed mob to impose their Godly laws upon. Unemployed and undereducated brutes are ideal - it doesn’t take much to convince them to hide the missus under a burqa and use the wardrobe savings to buy themselves a leather club jacket. Slightly off topic, but Barney Frank’s recent casual day fashion statement made burqas for men seem like a very, very good idea, don’t you think?

Internationalists need more other-people than anybody. Can’t have a World Bank without a world. The IMF needs half a world of suckers to fleece in order to come up with the money they give to the tyrants who rule over the other half of the world. The real internationalists don’t need too many other people - a handful of central bankers to print all the money and drown us in debt will do…and somebody to polish the Bentley.

You can’t be a Democrat or a Republican by yourself; what kind of convention would it be when you are the only one there? Who do you wave your sign at? And how do you explain it to your wife when all the hookers show up? “Must be somebody’s niece” only works when there is a flock of other old goats roaming around wearing buttons.

But you can be a libertarian, or I should say be libertarian, without forcing anyone else to come along for the ride. Not initiating force or fraud is something you do all by yourself; natural rights are the ones you can exercise all on your own. Tolerance only requires a tolerator, and volition – the exercise of free will - needs only one actor. Free exchange only needs one more.

Free market capitalism is based on voluntary exchange with only two parties to the trade – one to sell and one to buy. Crony capitalism needs many more than those first two parties; add one to regulate, one to tax, one to lobby for preferences, one to sue, one to unionize the buyer, another to unionize the seller.

Libertarians do not compel, we persuade; and persuasion only needs one persuader. No one can force you to believe anything anyway; they can only force you to comply – that’s the thing that takes so many people. Good ideas are readily adopted, and popular beliefs spread quickly on their own merits. We only need to force compliance with unpopular beliefs; and government is the enforcer of choice when the belief is unpopular. Its size is inversely proportional to the merits of the ideas it imposes; the worse they are, the more government it takes to impose them.

Our present government is entirely too big and getting bigger by the day; so what does that tell you about the beliefs it is imposing upon us? Our Founding Fathers had a much different idea – a small and limited government charged with defending our rights, protecting our liberty, and insuring that each of us could live according our own conscience and beliefs. That was the original American Dream.

Self-sovereignty requires only a self. It takes a village to smother a dream.

“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D. Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment.