Shortly before I left the libertarian movement and Party five years ago, a decision which I not only have never regretted but am almost continually joyous about, I told two well-known leaders of the movement that I thought it had become infected with and permeated by egalitarianism. What? they said. Impossible. There are no egalitarians in the movement. Further, I said that a good indication of this infection was a new-found admiration for the Reverend "Doctor" Martin Luther King. Absurd, they said. Well, interestingly enough, six months later, both of these gentlemen published articles hailing "Dr." King as a "great libertarian." To call this socialist, egalitarian, coercive integrationist, and vicious opponent of private-property rights, a someone who, to boot, was long under close Communist Party control, to call that person a "great libertarian," is only one clear signal of how far the movement has decayed.
Indeed, amidst all the talk in recent years about "litmus tests," it seems to me that there is one excellent litmus test which can set up a clear dividing line between genuine conservatives and neoconservatives, and between paleolibertarians and what we can now call "left-libertarians." And that test is where one stands on "Doctor" King. And indeed, it should come as no surprise that, as we shall see, there has been an increasing coming together, almost a fusion, of neocons and left-libertarians. In fact, there is now little to distinguish them.
Throughout the Official Libertarian Movement, "civil rights" has been embraced without question, completely overriding the genuine rights of private property.
Murray N. Rothbard
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch16.html
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