Jeffrey Tucker asks, “Why is this happening?” Liberty languishes because libertarians don’t reproduce.

Pictured at the right is a tweet I saw yesterday from Jeffrey Tucker, a big-shoe libertarian. Why, he wonders, is human liberty being Trumped by an obvious thug? He names six reasons, none of which are wrong, but he omits the reason that matters most:

The future belongs to the people who show up for it – and libertarians preferred not to.

The universe of your experience emerges from the inside out. Accordingly, when you are confronted with an unhappy outcome, it is wise to ask yourself these three questions:

1. What did I do wrong?

2. What should I have done instead?

3. What can I do differently, going forward, to attain my values?

Democracy is mob-rule made dainty. A republic is mob-rule by proxy. Where people live near each other, there is no alternative to mob-rule, just better and worse compromises with the problem posed when two or more people ‘elect’ to turn on an individual who looks to them like an enemy – or like prey. The Hoplite solution was the best-ever compromise with brutality, and every society we would call civil was modeled on that Hoplite ideal: Each father is a worthy – and well-armed – adversary to each one of his neighbors, and all of those fathers, banded together, are more powerful than any would-be king.

Why does it matter that a Hoplite is a father? Because, despite the lies we like to tell ourselves, women can’t fight proficiently – and, of course, children can’t fight at all. Childless men have nothing they will risk death to defend, and, accordingly, in the by-now too-much-underfathered West, there are no Hoplites left to fight to the death, if necessary, for human liberty.

What is missing from Tucker’s list is this: Libertarians don’t reproduce. Even if they do accidentally spawn a child, if they hew to Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard, they exterminate their own young. There are no vast armies of outraged libertarian Hoplites because there are almost no libertarian fathers.

It’s that simple. Amidst the mob-rule for which there is no alternative, we are a movement without a membership – fewer and fewer of us with each day’s funeral notices. We are pedantic and obnoxious and so very twee, but it would not matter if we were actually good at recruitment. The only kind of recruitment that matters, in the long run, is recruitment through the womb – and this libertarians refuse to do. We may never be out-argued, but we all-but-entirely out-bred. Ask the Greeks how that story ends. Ask the Romans. Ask the Germans and Scandinavians right now.

Do you really want to fight for human liberty? Stop blaming everyone but the actual cause of your troubles – yourself – and look out for your own. The Clan Testudo is the appropriate expression of the Hoplite ideal in a hostile environment – and the best recruits you can ever bring to civil society will be there, someday, to post your funeral notice.

Meanwhile, so long as libertarians insist on eating their own future, they will continue to get what they have coming to them. As history’s most-strident champion of infanticide reminds us: “Brother, you asked for it!”