Headline: Libertarians be like Picture of disugested women next to "Tyranny.gov" Picture of intressted women next to "Tyranny.com"
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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I've never understood the hate for libertarians. It seems to me some of the biggest injustices in the world never could have happened if governments weren't allowed to have the authority to control those aspects of individuals lives. Such as the legalization of slavery, manifest destiny and illegalization of drug use, gay marriage, gender affirming care, birth control, abortion were all aspects of government controll in our lives that they had no business dictating IMHO. Edit - missed a word
Because Libertarians don't care about people's rights (in the modern US usage at least). For example, without government legalization of slavery would be the default since nothing is stopping it. Libertarianism would say if you can afford to buy a person, and they ended up in slavery because they weren't good enough or whatever, then it's fair that you should be able to purchase them.
Libertarianism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand. They're the people who want to remove government so they can fuck children and exploit people. They don't want liberty. They want authority, but by rich people not voters.
What you are talking about is Anarchism. Government shouldn't be telling people how to live their lives but should provide protections and assistance to allow them to live the best they can.
I don't agree with the assessment on slavery because in that system nobody would have the authority to sell another person in the first place. Although I suppose you could sell yourself and have indentured servitude.
Edit and I guess I'm going to get all "no true scottsman" over here and say a libertarian that doesn't believe in liberty and freedom isn't a libertarian at all. But thanks for explaining it a bit.
The issue is that, without protections, do people really get a choice? If all land is owned by the owner class and you need food, water, and shelter for you and your family to survive, and there is authority ensuring you can't make use of things you don't own, what choice do you have? You can die or you can work for the owners.
It's really not that different to today (what many will call wage slavery), except without protections they'll force you to sign a contract ensuring you can't work anywhere else without their permission. Without competition, they can force you to do whatever they want. You will "willingly" sign away your right to bodily autonomy because they won't give you necessities unless you do.
They believe in certain liberties and freedoms. You can't believe in all of them because some are exclusive. Do you have the liberty to own slaves or does someone else have the liberty to never be owned? Do you have the liberty to rape a minor or do they have liberty to not have them happen to them?
The name sounds great. However, liberty for some comes at the cost of liberty for others. If someone has the liberty to have authority of others, they're depriving those others of their own liberty.
It's because the good libertarians just call themselves anarchists or maybe even syndicalists.
Your typical online libertarian is like the stereotype of the "parasitic socialist" who doesn't want to work and just wants free stuff.
To continue my gross simplification: libertarians want to be able to boss around poor people using their wealth, but don't want poor people to be able to band together to stop them from doing so. And they definitely don't want to share their wealth.
I see. It sounds like "liberty for me, not for thee". Not cool.
Sounds like fascism with extra steps.. Oh wait!
Just because you are not familiar with any other word doesn't mean that every bad ideology is fascism.
Liberals, lul
Modern, specifically American libertarians are imposters. Rejecting basic concepts of actual libertarianism like public ownership of natural resources. And are ideologically at least (economic) liberals. Not libertarians. Who chant weird self defeating tautologies that have nothing to do with libertarianism like the Non Aggression Principle.
Basically they're Libertarians in the same fashion Marxist Leninist are communist. Not.
I used to consider myself a libertarian because I believe, as you say, that government authority is responsible for all these things and we are better off without it. I never went to the extreme of saying we should get rid of it (I can elaborate, but that'd be digressing). But I still believe in the core values of libertarianism.
Thing is - in all the libertarian communities I've visited/joined online, I've noticed that the other libertarians treat these values not as principles but as aesthetics. Half of the activity there (the other half was criticizing everything the government does, whether it's good or bad) was about using the NAP as a creative limitation - how do we control the populace without technically infringing on individual freedom?
And these are the relatively reasonable things. At some point I had to conclude that either none of them was a true ~~Scotsman~~ libertarian - or that maybe I should just abandon libertarianism itself (though not necessary all its teachings)
I'm sorry but do you think private commerce had zero interest in the trade of flesh?
A government is not some magic special construct. Am authoritarian governance system is the same whether it's enacted by something with a national moniker or a corporate one.
What no I'm not saying that, of course they did. I'm saying slavery was allowed under the authority of the government and backed by state sanctioned violence. Corporations don't have that same authority over our lives the way governments do. Under an actual libertarian system it's impossible to to have slavery without violating a persons liberty.
Under the extremes of libertarianism the logic for why slavery would not happen isn't that "it wouldn't be allowed", remember, they view a government system as bad, there's not strictly a government to enforce a lack of slavery.
The extreme libertarian position is that the market will self regulate moral bads, so slavery would only be disallowed inasmuch as it was uneconomical to forcefully enslave people. This, under their reasoning, might be true because you're under contract with a security company who keeps you from getting enslaved, among other services, and will actively go to corporate war to protect the sanctity of their contracts for fear of losing business in the future.
This is obviously a fantasy.
Libertarians generally have no qualms with slavery, not in a strict sense. Some libertarians certainly dislike it, but don't have a strict philosophical backing for why it wouldn't be allowed under true zero government systems.
I can see why that kind of libertarianism is unpopular. Thanks for the explanation. I'm coming from the "every person has freedom to do all that they will, provided they infringe not the equal freedom of any other person" school of thought where slavery is absolutely not allowed and there's government to protect people's liberty and freedom.
That's not ancap libertarianism nor effectively even mundane libertarianism, ultimately. In a practical sense that libertarianism is only opposed to strictly chattel slavery (at best! Get many libertarians behind closed doors they may not even go that far!), not things like debt slavery, wage slavery, company scrip, etc.
Because they ultimately don't generally care about market freedom, they want the unrestricted power to be feudal lords of their polities.