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Libertarians are grumpy indoor cats. They’re violently independent and want to be left alone, but their survival is also entirely dependent on the systems surrounding them, which they completely take for granted.
The grumpy indoor cat doesn’t want your attention, they just want their auto-feeder to activate like it always does. Never mind the fact that you’re the one who keeps the auto-feeder filled. They don’t care about that, they just care that the auto-feeder dispenses food.
On a TV series, a cowboy libertarian explains his being libertarian to a rich evil lady. She smiles and exclaims "you are all a bunch of toddlers! Wanting to suckle on other peoples tits and being treated as adults, while having none of the responsibility of being one".
It's funny that in the classic Libertarian novel "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" the rule free society only works because there are no guns and literally everything is controlled by a single giant computer.
Objectivism creator Ayn Rand ended up on welfare after she lacked the will power to give up smoking.
Need I say more?
I can only speak for America, but here they're all a bunch of corporate-sponsored anarchy LARPers.
I mean…that says it all.
Sure, the seemingly benevolent small business owners feature heavily at the conventions…but behind the curtains it’s really a coalition of rich guys, gun nuts, NAMBLAs, zoophiles, etc. in a stuffed cheap suit.
Hooray for me, and fuck you!
If you mean the Statesian, pro-capitalist kind, it's mostly a silly ideology pushed by small business owners and other highly individualist classes that are nonetheless pushed towards the working classes by competing against ever-growing monopolies.
The left wing version, I disagree with as you can't dismantle the state without removing the basis of the state, class, and you can't remove class without collectivizing production and distribution. Small, local cells loosely organized in a decentralist fashion would still result in class struggle and thus a form of state to hold one class over the others. That said, the leftists are valuable allies at times despite disagreements.
In Poland most libertarians are at best petty bougie failchildren thinking they would be billionaires when they grow up, those that do grow up without touching grass (or too dense to feel the grass) are usually turning into unhinged austrian cultists with monarchist and nazist inclinations. Deeply unserious people
I don't think libertarianism works, it relies naively on how the free market is omnipotent, how freedom is everything and how having a small government is somehow good. There are no countries that are entirely libertarian, that also tells a lot about the ideology's applicability in practice. A brilliant book about why libertarianism doesn't work is a book "A Libertarian Walks into a Bear". In the book, a group of libertarians decides to take over the small town of Grafton in New Hampshire en masse as part of their "Free Town Project". Of course this group cares neither about the town's original inhabitants nor their rights. What's the result? They hollow out pretty much everything from the library, to the school, the fire department and the police. No regard is given to any laws on hunting or food disposal, and that lures in bears, who turn so aggressive that they invade people's homes. In addition to bears, sex offenders and all kinds of criminals are also lured into Grafton. It's pretty entertaining book, I recommend it.
Another reason why I dislike libertarianism is that it can function as a gateway to fascism. This is a known phenomenon. Several key figures in the alt-right for example used to be libertarians. I stumbled into a clip from some American Libertarian Party convention where Richard Spencer was with Ron Paul. I had to rub my eyes a bit.
You forgot to mention that the book is nonfiction, this really happened.
Depends on how it's defined.
Current libertarianism is just rebranded reactionary conservatism.
Classically though, "libertarian" simply referred to someone who advocated for maximum individual liberty and minimum state intervention. The term first gained popularity in the US in the wake of the New Deal, when the term "liberal," which had up until then referred to that position of maximum individual liberty and minimum state intervention, was coopted by leftist authoritarians. Since the classical liberals needed a new term, they shifted to "libertarian." And notably, at that point, libertarians were at least as likely to be left-wing as right, with the two groups merely splitting on which specific government services should be counted among the minimum.
That started to go wrong when the Libertarian party was established, and finished going wrong when the Tea Party was transformed from a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts to a traveling carnival of hate.
And there's also the political compass sense of "libertarian" as simply the opposite of authoritarian, by which I'm as "libertarian" as it's possible to be. It should be noted though that in recent years, mostly through meme communities, even that conception of "libertarian" has been increasingly characterized as more of an alternate authoritarianism.
So there's a conception back behind each use of the term "libertarian" that is at least close to mine (I'm actually an anarchist). But IMO not coincidentally, the term has been in all cases warped to refer to some form of authoritarianism, which I unequivocally oppose.
I have to push back a bit that the core of the proper definition of libertarianism is freedom from the state. It’s isn’t/wasn’t. The state plays an essential role in functional libertarianism, for what should be obvious reasons: libertarianism requires a mechanism, aside from power, to resolve tension between competing freedoms.
Libertarianism is a lie for people that want a high trust society without putting in any of the effort and cooperation that it requires. For people who expect things to naturally work while still saying "fuck you got mine".
Naive idiots at best genocidal Maniacs at worst.
Left libertarianism is great and serves as an effective counterbalance to many issues. Right libertarianism is often foolish at best and rarely includes the freedom to do things like live your life as you please
Left wing (actual OG) Libertarianism is great. Right wing Libertarianism is basically a bunch of antisocial/intellectually lazy people who think the ideal society is one where everybody has a few acres of land with a little shack that they built themselves where they subsist on potatoes, carrots, and chicken eggs and stockpile gold and silver to trade with another libertarian twice a year.
I consider myself pretty left (at least in comparison to the average German), but that lifestyle sounds quite tempting to me. I'd skip chicken though.
I've known a bunch of them and I think their ideology is fine on the surface, but full of small contraddictions, for example:
That's my experience with a few tens of people, so I don't know if that's representative of the whole community, bu my own little consipracy theory is that libertarianism as I know it was crafted by the US alt-right to subtly manipulate people into fascism, the premises are all there: hatred for the current state, bigotry, extreme victimism, a willingness to strip down thenselves of hard-fought rights and a hustle/grinding mentality to slave yourself down to work and enrich other people
The DSA libertarian socialist caucus has reinvented itself the last year or so, they put out some good solid analysis prior to convention, and is doing a lot of work to build a libertarian socialist plurality within the org.
Right libertarians arent politically coherent, their lack of coherence means they are shot through with Nazis who exploit unprincipled movements yo plant the seeds of hate. A libertarian could be your uncle who smokes weed but listens to Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan podcast, or it could be a school shooter, a transhumanist tech accellerationist who always brings up Rokos basilisk after a couple Busch lights, or a neo-Randian objectivist.
As a left-Hegelian, I like discourse around human freedom, but people never concretize what they mean by freedom, and we always end up back to Marx:
Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.
"libertarians generally advocate for minimal government regulation, believing that businesses should operate freely and regulate themselves through voluntary exchange and competition. They argue that over-regulation can stifle innovation and economic growth."
So in my opinion, they are dumbasses. Yeah let's get the Nestles and Monsanto's of the world to regulate themselves. Honestly just unserious people with no critical thinking skills in my opinion.
The “I can’t bring myself low enough to identify as republican anymore”. Still a conservative if not even now leaning harder to the right. They are petulant house cats. Utterly reliant and totally dependent upon a system that they have absolutely no appreciation or respect for.
It's something you either grow out of by 14, or you grow into a guy with a cheap suit, who takes himself way too seriously, and happens to knows the age of consent in every state by heart while having some very creepy opinions on it.
I share most of the opinions expressed about it already expressed in this thread, so I’ll add one: whenever I’m exposed to libertarian media (podcasts, articles, etc), I’m really struck by just how surface-level the analysis is. It’s like, for anything going on in the world, they simply try to tie it back to “biG gOvErNmENt” and shoehorn everything into that. They won’t even show their work of how they get from A to B. I get that once you start applying dialectical materialism to your analysis of the world around you, other analyses can seem vulgar. But tbh even your typical liberal worldview seems more thought out than libertarians.
As an example, a libertarian I know was complaining about how California is going eliminate plastic carrier bags at supermarkets. I just asked “ok, then how else are we going solve the problem of plastic bags everywhere?” They just sorta shrugged off the question and said the government has no business banning bags.
I actually was a libertarian briefly a long time ago. It was the fact that it offers no real solutions for the biggest problems we face as a species was why I eventually abandoned it.
It’s depends on what you mean…it’s a fraught term, to say the least.
Actual definition of the word…or the Ron Paul (etc) nuts?
The most virtuous profession to be, in libertarian logic, is scammer. Big money gain for little effort, therefore good.
Working together is not allowed in individualism. Everyone must be a untrustworthy scammer out for the other's money, as that's what libertarians think everyone aspires to be.
Pedophiles trick children into thinking they're libertarians because cops are bad and weed is good
I think Libertarianism is incompatible with the way that humans operate as a society. Almost all flavors of libertarianism puts an individual's right to live as they choose as long as that doesn't violate the rights of others through force or fraud. Humans like to associate themselves into groups, and in almost any group there will be an imbalance in power, whether that's economic power, physical power (strength), or even something as abstract as eloquence or how outgoing you are. The issue then becomes that someone somewhere has to enforce the right to not be forced into giving up rights. In the classical construction of how libertarians view government, it is very easy to become more powerful than those meant to enforce limits on power. Even in our current political system, you see this when companies will spend more on their anti-trust court cases than the entire FTC spends total in a decade. Libertarianism has no mechanism to keep the enforcer the most powerful party involved
Sounds great on paper, in practice it’s almost entirely old white men who want to get rid of age of consent laws or people who want to be able to do insane, dangerous to others shit like feeding bears without anyone being able to stop them.
In summary, the ideology of selfish jackasses at best and pedophiles at worst.
I see it as an unstable economic model; it will either devolve to capitalism with monopolies capturing most if not all sectors; or devolve into communism with a single state-like entity controlling everything. At which point; no matter which way it went; it will collapse under its own weight.
The way it swings will depend on the people who are there at the start.
The modern version of libertarianism that we see most of; is based off some really bad assumptions:
(1) The market is perfect:
This leads to the assumption that all regulation is bad; and that it merely works to reduce personal freedoms and the ability of the market to produce things in the most efficient way possible.
It completely ignores history and the reason regulatory bodies were created. It also ignores that the market is not a thing unto itself; but is composed of people (see 4).
(2) Barriers to entry are irrelevant:
This follows directly from (1); even the simplest business has some barrier to entry. You have to buy somethings that your business needs to run. These are real costs, and will provide a barrier. Obviously, the bigger the barrier then more entrenched players have an advantage (see 3)
(3) Monopoly is not bad:
This is a subtle acknowledgment that (1 & 2) are completely false. Basically it is a cope, that even if monopolies form; clearly this is the market producing the most efficient production framework.
This ignores history; the major monopolies that were broken up. The crazy shit that went on to protect their monopoly status.
(4) Humans are rational actors:
Most economic models assume that consumers will make rational choices; they will make the most economically rational choices. Libertarians (in my experience) love this.
This ignores so much of reality; it also assumes that the values of all are the same as their own.
There is really too much in this point to cover here. So many things that we actually do make no sense if you were a rational actor, such as brand loyalty.
(5) If the market can't address the issue, it is irrelevant:
There are many things that the market cannot address; but in the libertarian model these things are ignored.
e.g. fire fighting; this is the classic example where a market solution didn't work.
But equally; policing; education; major infrastructure; functional health systems. There are so many examples; where if left to a purely market solution, simply would not get done.
Crikey, very well-written and well-reasoned! I would just add:
(4)(b) Human have perfect information about the world.
In order to make rational choices, producers and consumers need perfect information. This also ignores so much of reality. Again, there are so many examples, but even in a simplified model transaction of buying a loaf of bread includes so many variables that it would be impossible to know them all: All of the bakeries offering bread, the prices they ask for their loaves, the sensory quality of the bread, the nutritional quality, the bakeries' food safety standards, and so on. Imagine trying to investigate the food safety record for the producer of each item in your typical grocery cart—an impossibility.
The only Libertarians I fuck with are Libertarian Socialists. Otherwise, Ayn Rand types are cringe as hell
It's a wolf and a flock of sheep all inside a fenced-off meadow, thinking that everyone can do whatever they want and it will all work out to everyone's favor.
Awesome, let everyone freely enter into any contract they'll agree to, instead of a government enforcing rules at gunpoint!
Except the contract is written by a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, and the one "agreeing" to it is a single mom who will lose her income, apartment and access to child care if she "freely" refuses.
if you know someone who calls themself a libertarian, ask them how they feel about the age of consent then immediately seize their hard drive
An end result of liberalist idealism. (plus what others have said)
In this thread.... People arguing about multiple strawman definitions of Libertarianism.
My opinion is that it's a useless term because nobody agrees on what it means.
Either incredibly selfish /self centered people, incredibly uninformed on the real world, or a combination of both.
Works wonderfully if you're profit. The free markets love you and will do anything for you.
Oh, you're a people? Have you heard of our Lord and Savior profit? If you're not helping profit then you must be hurting it, therefore hurting the market. We don't take kindly to the likes of you.
I think it's nonsense.
The "free market" is never truly free, and if there isn't something holding the capitalist class back, they will always dominate the working class until the system just breaks. The only way for a stable society to exist is for checks and balances.
Anyone I've ever heard talking about the non-aggression principle spat red flags faster than a machine gun.
At best, they're truly so dense and unsympathetic they don't recognize actions that aren't directly or intentionally causing harm do still cause harm (example, the free state project people leaving food out for black bears "because they can" without thought for their neighbors who then have to deal with more bears). At worst, it's rape apologia (crap like statutory rape doesn't exist because that minor "totally asked for it" and the rape didn't cause physical damage).