Libertarian Poems
broadly defined
MacDonough’s song (Kipling)
The Old Issue (Kipling)
The Reeds of Runnymede (Kipling)
An Imperial Rescript (Kipling)
A Smuggler’s Song (Kipling)
The Peace of Dives (Kipling)
The Great Day (Yeats)
The Horrible History of Jones (Chesterton)
kumrads die because they're told) (Cummings)
i sing of Olaf glad and big (Cummings)
My poems from The Machinery of Freedom
Part I: A Saint Said
Part II: Paranoia
Part III: Anarchy
Part IV: Don’t write a book
Part V: Hobbes
Part VI: The Poverty of Our Circumstances
Sieg für Kommunisten (also mine)
Why can't you see?
We just want to be free
To have our homes and families
And live our lives as we please.
(Dana Rohrabacher, libertarian troubador, 1960’s)More suggestions are welcome, including song lyrics, a form of poetry I don’t know very much of.
Past posts, sorted by topic
A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing
More than a few songs by Leslie Fish qualify. Firestorm, The Arizona Sword, Rhododendron Honey, The Sun Is Also a Warrior, etc.
My go-to is Kipling's "Gods of the Copybook Headings." I take it you've found fault with it that I missed?
Then there's the corny rock song whose chorus begins, "Sign, sign, everywhere a sign..." which I use as a litmus test to distinguish the various types of real and so-called libertarians: The hearer who simply agrees with the narrator is a naive leftist and not very libertarian at all. The hearer who takes the opposite view and agrees with all the signs mentioned in the song is a shallow propertarian. But the hearer who takes a middle course, upholding the right of property owners to take the positions on the signs but saying he would shun most of them for not being nice, is what I call a real, or cultural, libertarian -- who believes being a libertarian is not just about what a state should allow but what individuals should and should not put up with.