Several years ago I read an article on a web site that I agreed with and placed a link to it on one of my web sites. The other day the author of that article asked me to please remove the link, thank you very much, he did not want his article mentioned on my site.
Why? Because of the dirty but not-so-secret reality of free market politics — there is no political movement outside of the various Marxist movements that is more obsessed with factionalism and divisive philosophies than what might be broadly considered the libertarian movement.
In this case, the problem was that I am a libertarian and the author of the article turned out to be an Objectivist (the philosophy espoused by Ayn Rand). Which means very little to me, but seems to matter a lot of the Objectivists.
Take an issue like gun control, which the article was about. I happen to be to the right of the NRA on the right to keep and bear arms. So was the article I linked to. But libertarians arrive at that position through a slightly different philosophical route than do Objectivists. Not only do many Objectivists seem to think that there is one and only one possible rational philosophy — anyone who fails to accept some part of that being, by definition, irrational — but they have a habit of arguing that people who otherwise agree with them, like libertarians, are just as wrong as, and in some cases even worse, than their opponents.
This sort of approach led Objectivism to descend into cult-like behavior as Michael Shermer nicely summarized in his book, Why People Believe Weird Things. As Shermer puts it,
The fallacy in Objectivism is the belief that absolute knowledge and final Truths are attainable through reason, and therefore there can be absolute right and wrong knowledge, and absolute moral and immoral thought and action. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered through reason to be True, that is the end of the discussion. If you disagree with the principle, then your reasoning is flawed. If your reasoning is flawed it can be corrected, but if it is not, you remain flawed and do not belong in the group. Excommunication is the final step for such unreformed heretics.
Unfortunately, many of Rand’s successors have chosen to follow this same path.