I’m not sure how well-known Kurt Bills is outside of Minnesota but here the man’s name is a vernacular in the liberty movement. Ron Paul himself endorsed Kurt Bills so it was believed by many that Bills would be the next savior of liberty. His campaign was based on the fact he was an economics teacher and he garnered some fame within the liberty movement for using Ron Paul’s book End the Fed (of course nobody knows to what extent the book was used). Many of my friends donated a great deal of time and money to Bill’s campaign and often tried to get me involved.
I never involved myself with Bills’s campaign because the man never sat right with me (and I had to maintain my sweet anarchist street creds). My politician detector is very finely tuned and even though many of my friends said I had to support Bills because he was a true proponent of liberty I had a feeling that he was merely another player of the political game. What likely set my detector off was is willingness to let people believe he was a proponent of Austrian economics but his unwillingness to actually say he was publicly. A handful of my friends claimed that Bills called himself a proponent of Austrian economics behind closed doors but that was entirely hearsay. As it turns out my politician detector is still property calibrated because Kurt Bills, the supposed savior of the liberty movement, the man of unwavering principles, the one person who will deliver us from the darkness of statism… has endorsed Mitt Romney:
State Rep. Kurt Bills, who won the Republican Party’s endorsement for U.S. Senate, switched his presidential support Thursday from Ron Paul to Mitt Romney.
[…]
Bills said in a statement that Romney and his running mate, Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, “alone have the ability to beat Barack Obama in November and help America rediscover its conservative principles.”
I’m going to assume Bills was just playing politics when he said Romney is the best chance America has to “rediscover its conservative principles.” If Bills honestly believes that then he’s not only a fool but completely ignorant of Romney’s voting record and I would have to believe he was entirely stupid. As with Rand Paul’s betrayal of the liberty movement, Bills betrayal is being justified by those who don’t want to face reality. They’re claiming this was a necessary political move for Bills and once Bills is elected he’ll toss off the neoconservative facade and turn into a true libertarian. Sadly that won’t be the case. By endorsing Romney, Bills has demonstrated a willingness to ignore principle for political gain. Once somebody is willing to do that you cannot trust them. If he’s willing to endorse Mitt Romney, before the man even has the nomination, what else will he be willing to do once in office? Will he bend on the Federal Reserve issue to make a small gain elsewhere? Probably. Will he sign off on a piece of statist legislation to make another small gain? It’s likely.
I feel bad for my friends still working within the political machinery. First Rand Paul betrayed them then Kurt Bills. If any of you are reading this and aren’t already furious because of my disbelief in Bills secretly being a libertarian let me inform you that there are other options. You don’t have to sully yourselves by working within dangerous political machinery. Step out of the soul crushing political world and come to the wonderful world of agorism. Through counter-economics we can fight the state without having to work with the state. Instead of betraying your principles in the hope that your masters will give you a few table scraps of liberty you can actively take your liberty back. All of it. No compromising, no begging, and no underhanded deals with sociopaths are who merely using you to secure their chance to rule.