Now that Mary Matalin and the mainstream media have mentioned the Libertarian Party as a possible alternative to the Republicrat Party, already there is misinformation about what libertarianism actually is.

For starters, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson's apparent choice for Vice President is former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld. People are actually referring to Weld as a "libertarian" because he is supposedly a "fiscal conservative/social liberal."

Sorry, folks. But "fiscal conservative/social liberal" means "Let's make the existing intrusive governmental apparatus more efficient (which is close to impossible), and let's expand private property-destroying, freedom of association-destroying Civil Rights laws even further."

Libertarianism, on the other hand, includes the non-aggression principle, self-ownership and self-determination and the right to self-defense, private property rights, voluntary association and freedom of non-association, free markets and voluntary exchange. You know, "Live and let live."

So libertarianism is about liberty, liberating the people from government's intrusions, its coercion, threats and criminal violence. As Murray Rothbard wrote in The Anatomy of the State:

The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the "organization of the political means"; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory. For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively "peaceful" the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a "social contract"; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe pausing in its time-honored method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe, to realize that the time-span of plunder would be longer and more secure, and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting a steady annual tribute.

This is why true libertarians would want to liberate the people from the State's criminality, not make reforms to the criminal State or merely rearrange the deck chairs on an inherently flawed centralized bureaucracy.

Alas, since Ron Paul's 1988 LP campaign for President, the Libertarian Party seems to have lost touch with its actual libertarian roots and has been stuck in the quagmire of statism.

A problem that the current top-polling Libertarian Party candidates for President have is that they seem to assume that the State and specifically the centralized federal government is a given like it is some natural institution that has always existed. Not only that but they seem to have the assumption that taxation exists, therefore, it is moral and legitimate. Bureaucracies exist, therefore, they should continue to exist, but should be "reformed" or "trimmed" and so on.

Nope. The libertarian view is that if an institution such as the U.S. government has power and authority over you and it isn't a voluntary arrangement, then it is an illegitimate institution.