(From the Intellectual Ammunition section in Volume 19, No. 7 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!)
Renowned TV and film star Rob Lowe is promoting his new 
autobiography Love Life. And he’s been making some very libertarian-ish statements along the way.
In an interview with the New York Times, he described his politics this way:
“My thing is personal freedoms, freedoms for the individual to love whom they want, do with what they want. In fact, I want the government out of almost everything.”
He sounded even more libertarian during an April interview with Bill O’Reilly, though he seemed determined not to let O’Reilly stick a label on his views. Here is the relevant portion:
BILL O’REILLY: You also have said in your promoting of this book that you want less government intrusion. Is that correct?
ROB LOWE: I do. Yeah.
O’REILLY: But your pinhead friends in Hollywood, they don’t want, they want equality for everyone, which takes a massive government.
LOWE: Well, I’m — equality for everybody is great. That would be amazing. I just think that individuals usually do a better job than collective big government.
O’REILLY: So you don’t want the government to be telling you how to live, that’s kind of a libertarian position.
LOWE: Well, that’s funny, does that make me a libertarian? I’m a Hollywood pinhead, Bill, I don’t know about political labels.
O’REILLY: The libertarians want less government and more personal freedom, which I think is what you are saying.
LOWE: That is what I’m saying.
O’REILLY: So now you’re a libertarian?
LOWE: So all this time shedding the dogma of political labels and you’re telling me now I have to go back to living under political labels.
O’REILLY: No, no, it’s not bad. You just have to hang out with Stossel which is very, very difficult.
LOWE: Well then I take it back.
O’REILLY: You know, I think, look, I’m not a libertarian but I don’t think that the government can solve the problems that the government purports to be able to solve.
LOWE: And just for the record we do need government for a lot of big ticket items. Not total.
Libertarian, or libertarianish, positions aren’t new to Lowe. In 2012 he defended Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged on Twitter, tweeting: “Can someone explain the vitriol whenever Ayn Rand comes up? ‘Atlas’ is the greatest motivator for the individual that I can imagine.”
