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I used to be a Libertarian, and for a while had the 'well they have a decent idea, they're just not very practical' opinion. What gave me the 'not very practical' part was seeing them try to actually win offices - they got on the ballot ran candidates for every office in my state as part of a drive for increased ballot access. The local candidate for the Soil and Water Conservation board was on a local messageboard, and I found a Libertarian running for that a bit surprising, so I asked how she would apply LP principles if she won, since it seems kind of out there. She couldn't come up with an answer at all, she was in a 'well we'll burn that bridge when we cross it' mindset. I think 'as a [party], what would you do differently from the others if elected' is probably the most softball question you can ask a candidate for office, and she couldn't manage that. Was a real eye opener, so I wasn't really surprised a decade or two later when 2016 elections rolled around for the "What's Aleppo?" bit. But hey, maybe they're just idealists and we can separate the decent idea from that. What got rid of the 'decent idea' part was watching the libertarian response to smoking bans and restrictions. Burning carcinogenic chemicals and releasing them in someone else's face is pretty obviously an act of aggression under the NAP, but pretty much every libertarian came down hard against the idea of any regulation of smoking, and also sneered at the idea of any kind of lawsuits for damages from such smoking. This really destroyed the idea that you could solve problems like pollution and fraud with lawsuits the way libertarians say would work. Proving damages is difficult to impossible, and the very people who should be on the side of non-aggression instead enthusiastically embraced smoking all over the place and ridiculed the very idea that it could be harmful to anyone but the smoker. It undermines all of the ideas of how to settle problems without using regulations or licensing. There's other 'this doesn't work' stuff; notably the idea of handling all crime by allowing victims to sue for damages falls flat since it's already done in the US, but poor criminals don't have any assets to sue for and rich criminals use their assets to foil suing them; but smoking is really the one that captured the problem for me. What really sealed the deal was paying attention to history and how much Libertarians like to talk up the 19th century US as a bastion of freedom. The fact is, in that time frame the US was an aggressively expansionist warmaking state that practiced genocide on a large scale, and practiced race-based slavery for part of the time period and extreme racial discrimination after abolishing slavery. This really didn't jump out at me at first since US school history tends to paint the US in a positive light - "oh we fought the Indians some when they were on our land, and the Trail of Tears was one unique really bad thing. Somehow we got a bunch of land from Mexico. Slavery was bad, then it was gone after the Civil War so we can forget about it." But with a better appreciation of actual history, 19th century US (and especially the Confederacy) should be absolute anathema to a libertarian philosophy - things like aggressive war, slavery, and the government forcibly relocating, reeducating, and starving people should be glaring violations of the NAP, but they're just treated as minor hiccups that aren't even worth noticing. It says a lot about the perception and priorities of libertarians that they would treat these major violations as something barely worth noticing and certainly not worth paying attention to. This didn't really kick in for me until later, though it's a big one now. I think it's interesting that I didn't really need outside information beyond 'non-whitewashed US History' for any of these conclusions - it's not some hate campaign by outsiders, it's all just listening to and watching what libertarians get up to and choose to say.
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Oct 26, 2023 16:54
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Panfilo posted:Thing is, a lot of those supposed contradictions just loop back to libertarian 'government bad' That doesn't work when the libertarians brought up '19th century US' as an example of an example of good government either entirely on their own or in response to 'is there an example of a real-world government you like'. It's an actual, not a 'supposed' contradiction if I ask the guy with a party name based off of liberty 'is there an example of a country or other government that comes close to your principles in action' and liberty-named guy chooses to name a country that engaged in outright slavery and aggressive war for profit as his example. You can't just handwave away 'everything bad this government does' when you offered it as an example of a good one in the first place. (It's even worse for the small-but-not-tiny portion of libertarians who will name the Confederacy as something to be admired, when that was a country founded explicitly to promote and protect slavery, but confederate-defenders are a minority while 19th-century-USsers are all over the place).
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Oct 26, 2023 18:27
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Sephyr posted:More recently, a libertarian friend from my RPG group also fell out of the nest post-Trump. According to him, 90% of his contacts and forum peers just went full MAGA and shat on him because he was the only drip going "Emmm, guys, maybe the tyrannous hand of Big Government isn't cool just because it's being used against groups we hate? And doesn't building a wall impede the free flow of people and ideas and goods we value so highly?". This one just went 'nothing matters, gently caress all politics' instead, though. Trump is by far the most libertarian president in modern times if you rank 'most libertarian' by 'implemented or attempted to implement the most pieces of the Libertarian Party platform', which I think says a lot about what libertarian ideals mean in practice.
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Oct 26, 2023 18:46
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Panfilo posted:Well, to be more specific, points in time libertarians seem to be fond of: I used to be a libertarian, I know what they say they are fond of. The point you seem to be missing is not what things they value (or say they value), it's looking at what valuing those things over other things says. The fact that they consider a general partial federal income tax (state income tax was fine before the 16th amendment) a bigger deal than the 100% tax on all property, income, and future children that slavery imposes says a lot. Similarly, 'oh, no Federal income tax' is a bigger deal than 'oh, no Federal government invading other people's land and property (a 100% tax) and killing them to annex it, then forcibly relocating them to marginal land where their culture and language is suppressed (another rather high tax)'. When you talk about liberty and make a statement like "Oh, the US was really free in the time when there was no Federal income tax but there was a 100% tax on everything for Blacks, and aggressive warfare and genocide against Natives", the part after the 'but' (which they usually keep quiet) is really damning about just what 'liberty' means to you, and what groups it counts for. If you can ignore something as gross as slavery, genocide, and profit-driven warfare as long as it's against the right people and consider only that one particular type of tax isn't allowed at one but not all levels of government, your vision of liberty is not what most people mean. Again, this isn't a 'supposed' contradiction, this is a very direct and clear one. quote:The Libertarian solution to smoking is that any business is free to have their establishment be non-smoking. If second-hand smoke was such an issue then the market would drive demand for smoke free establishments. This isn't consistent with the NAP, and therefore is damning to the idea that libertarians have good, if impractical, ideas. The government is supposed to present force or fraud, and poisoning someone qualifies as force under their definition. The fact that they actively support initiation of force when it's a thing they like (and there's profit involved, of course) is a fundamental philosophical contradiction. VitalSigns posted:But then you get into things like industrial air pollution and their solution is to sue polluters for damages for injuring you. And not just in general, you have to prove specific damages by specific people or companies. In addition to the practical problems you outlined with the system they endorse, there's a more fundamental philosophical problem in that poisoning someone is an initiation of force under libertarian philosophy, and preventing force or fraud is supposedly one of the purposes of government. They should be in favor of smoking bans and pollution controls if they're consistent with their stated principles, because those fall under one of the few things government is supposed to intervene on. While the practical problems are a reason to blow them off as real-world solutions, I think the philosophical issue really undermines the idea of 'they may not be practical, but they have some good principles' - abandoning something as core as non-aggression is a pretty big deal. Pantaloon Pontiff fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Oct 26, 2023 |
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Oct 26, 2023 19:52
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Mooseontheloose posted:I mean, Libertarians are Republicans who don't want people to know and this is part of their movement. I think the Trump time has really shaken out all of the ones who aren't. The older libertarian movement was more varied, and included a lot of people who liked the 'minimal government' idea or parts of the philosophy or other things. There wasn't nearly as strong of a Republican ideology or party split back in the day. For example Nixon would be far left by the standards of the modern Republicans, and probably wasn't especially attracitve 70s libertarians since he created the EPA, was fine with tax rates higher than AOC is called a commie for, favored a handgun ban but decided not to push it, and floated proposals for UBI and UHC though they never got off the ground. (the 1972 LP platform called for lower pollution controls, abolition of taxes, zero gun control, no government aid, and no interference in the healthcare market). Meanwhile both major parties opposed gay marriage (and were generally fine with anti-gay-existence laws) while the LP favored it. I think it wasn't really until the 1990s with the Tea Party move of the Republican party that you really see it start to move to 'republicans who like weed' or 'republicans who don't want to say THAT', and even then there were a lot of people who definitely weren't republican-lite. The 1990s also didn't yet see a strongly unified Republican party, notably Bush Sr. resigned from the NRA over their 'jackbooted thugs' comments and pushed for and signed the Assault Weapon Ban, which would be anathema to the modern party. While I haven't tracked it really closely, the move of Libertarians to be more and more purely republican-lite seems to followed the same timeline as 'Republican' becoming more than just a loose party affiliation and embraced a very unyielding set of ideals.
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Oct 26, 2023 23:12
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Jesus III posted:No Tea party in the 90s. You're right; I think of the big idealogical tightening of the Republican party that included things like the Contract With America as something that lead to the Tea Party, but TP is a group that didn't exist until the 2000s, didn't take off until around 2008, and now has mostly faded out so it's really just a side thing and not a good shorthand to use.
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Oct 26, 2023 23:56
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the moose posted:My big question for the libertarians is if there is no government then who enforces all these law suits and contracts? Traditional libertarians believe in government, it's just in the extreme case one that's limited to enforcing contracts, enforcing laws against initiation of force, and handling national defense and basic relations with other countries. Some people who call themselves libertarian don't even go that far down the path and have some other minor government functions. Anarcho Capitalists would have no 'country' structure and all contracts and laws would be handled by private arbitration and private security companies. How they'd actually function has no good answer, it pretty much relies on people not acting like people do. There was a thread on these boards (maybe buried back in this one?) where people pointed out that there's nothing in an Ancap setup that prevents you from creating "Valhalla Private Protective Services" that would run around raiding non-members who's protective service wasn't as powerful for loot.
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Oct 27, 2023 00:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:On an actual administrative organizational side of things, it might be a more complex picture. The Libertarian Party nationally isn't very unified, and a little while back there were a number of incidents of individual state parties apparently cutting ties with the national party, so while the dominant forces of the party are definitely on the far right side, there might be a number of regional differences. I know that there's that Louisiana Libertarian Party twitter that is really into furries apparently? No idea what's up with that. The Mises Caucus took over and did a hard-right shift which caused some state parties to split. I am glad you posted this, because I remembered something about the LP splitting but hadn't really looked into it, and a little googling found this gem: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/10/11/libertarian-party-loses-state-parties-donors-after-hard-right-turn I included some quotes from it below that I just can't make any funnier than they are as dry, factual reporting. splcenter posted:The Virginia Libertarian party dissolved itself after a vote on Sept. 12 over “recent statements endorsed by the national Libertarian Party, that are antithetical to our core principles including restrictions of voting rights of citizens, specifically women, reversing the LP’s 50 year history of support of non-discrimination and freedom of LGBTQ citizens, repeal of the Civil Rights Act and other statements condoning bigotry, even representative democracy itself.” splcenter posted:The Mises Caucus further pushed to delete language that condemned “bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” That plan, too, worked, though it caused controversy. Former LP candidate for vice president Spike Cohen proposed adding, “We uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity,” and that measure passed. quote:I do wonder if the Libertarian Party might get any boost of support from the business Republicans that have very clearly been pushed out of influence by feral maga-ites, but it seems more like the party is on the trajectory to fade from existence, even if a lot of the concepts will survive in one way or another. I don't see why they would. The hard-right is currently in control of the party, and 'business republicans' are the ones who don't like the racist, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion part (or at least saying it out loud). Before the hard right took over, the party was more of a clown show than a serious party (the 2016 convention was quite a spectacle, for example). If the 'business republicans' want to split from the maga crowd, they'd be better off forming a new party without the baggage the lp has, like Perot did in 1992, or moving to the Democratic party and becoming the conservative wing of it.
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Oct 27, 2023 02:06
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Your regdate implies you weren't around for this, but years ago when this first came up we invented an entire canon of lore about the fictional Valhalla DRO. I've popped in to read these forums from time to time for a long time (since way back when this forum had lots of libertarians), I just didn't tend to do more than read for a while then leave, and never made an account to post anything until recently. The Valhalla DRO canon here is what I was thinking of when I wrote that.
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Oct 27, 2023 14:43
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Panfilo posted:Because I've had libertarians insist the opposite - "we're not anarchists, we just want the government limited in the manner we think was intended by the Constitution". One of the problems with discussing libertarianism is that there isn't any central philosophy but a lot of its adherents speak as though there is. When I used to argue online more, one of the most frustrating things about arguing with libertarians is that you could make no assumptions that they followed any particular belief set whatsoever, they might be a 'well we should reduce the bloated federal bureaucracy' type or a 'we should go back to something like the articles of confederation' type or a 'all forms of the state are evil, only private protective services are moral' type and often won't acknowledge that the others even exist. They also don't hesitate to use definitions that sound like they mean something but don't really. Like "a libertarian is someone who believes government should be limited to just what is needed to do it's proper job" - it sounds slick, but it describes what pretty much everyone believes - people disagree over what the 'proper job' of government is, but essentially no one thinks government purely for the sake of having a bigger government is good. Even hardcore Keynesian economists who favor large government spending fit that definition, they aren't promoting spending for it's own sake but instead to improve the overall economy.
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Nov 1, 2023 12:52
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Staluigi posted:so all you were left to argue with is what the principles, party, and ideology turned out to be in practice, which is the exact thing libertarians and libertarianism actually hate more than anything in the loving world more than taxes or not being allowed to own enough guns to get crushed to death under To highlight the variety of belief sets under the 'libertarian' umbrella (especially in the old days), I remember arguing on an old forum with a guy who had libertarian in his name who got offended when I talked about a guy in his hypothetical Glorious Libertarian Community owning a machine gun. He responded as though I was just randomly flaming him for insinuating that he'd be OK with something as nuts as a private individual owning a fully automatic weapon. So while 'hate taxes' is a sure bet, you couldn't even count on 'gun nut' back then. Though I'm pretty sure the field has narrowed significantly now.
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Nov 3, 2023 04:44
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Clarste posted:I feel like, just the existence of advertising as a concept already disproves the magic of capitalist efficiency, since it makes it obvious that the quality of a product or service is not the only thing driving demand. If they can get you to buy a lower quality product for more money, what's stopping them doing anything else with that power? They don't really see this as a problem, and 'the quality of a product or service is the only thing driving demand' isn't usually part of their belief set. Plus advertising is just bringing things to the purchaser's attention and it's the job of the consumer to educate themselves, if you fall for advertising that just shows that you're dumb and not doing your due diligence. (How you're supposed to hold down a full time job and do 'due diligence' on every product you might use is not really clear). If you want to dispel the magic of capitalist efficiency, I'd point to things like google search and phone calls on the practical side. Google search was absolutely amazing at finding information for while, but it's been getting harder and harder to find real information among the sponsored ads and AI-generated, SEO-optimized nonsense that it returns. Phone calls used to be a major form of casual communication, and you'd answer every call that came in if you were home. Now there's just so many spam calls that the idea of answering 'unknown number' is the punchline of a joke, and if you're expecting a call back from somewhere you have to force yourself to listen to robocalls so you don't miss the one real call. You can also point to specific more niche industries (like movies or games) where capitalistic drives leads to much worse products. Free markets do an amazing job at some things, but unrestrained capitalism actually makes products worse over time, and is something I hadn't really had experience with back in the 90s but pretty much everyone has seen first hand today.
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Nov 4, 2023 16:26
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The thing that gets me about this is that Libertarians are surprisingly consistent in stating that the only (or main) purpose of the government is preventing force and fraud. If you weren't familiar with them you'd think that claiming to serve safe food but actually serving contaminated food would count as fraud and thus be one of the few things the government should intervene in, but in real life they always oppose things like actual food safety inspections or accurate labeling (like the Panera death lemonade). It really underscores how morally and ethically bankrupt they are.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:12
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I AM GRANDO posted:This is probably a big part of why they all hate Kant so much. I Kant even.
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Jan 1, 2024 15:22
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One thing I've noticed is that secessionists tend not to have any idea of what they want beyond 'haha, those idiots in Washington can't tell us what to do,' and Libertarians are worse about unrealistic thinking than the Calexit people were. Like, if Texas leaves the US, what happens with citizenship - do they try to mass revoke US citizenship and start with their own, what happens to people who don't want to give up US citizenship but don't want to move? Have they considered how having a bunch of US citizens will make banking difficult and how they won't be able to avoid interfacing with US banking systems, which can be a pain with US citizens? How will they handle interactions between social security and whatever retirement system they implement? (Libertarians at first glance will say 'SS is socialism, ditch it!' but those voting olds will probably have a different idea). How will they handle US-government-owned land - US only owns 2% of Texas land so it's not as bad as California's 50%, but there are still 15 military bases that you have to work something out about? What currency will they use, and where will they get the starting reserves? What are they going to do about the citizens of now-independent country who work for the Federal government, including 'are in the military under contract'? There's a lot of really complicated stuff involved in a state separating from the US, there aren't any really easy answers, and 'Vote yes to secede' doesn't help with answers.
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Jan 6, 2024 06:38
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I'm talking about a level or two above that. Practically secession from the US for any of the core states would start a disaster, since I'm pretty sure the US would cease to be a functional country once it starts letting pieces unilaterally leave and minorities vote to take US citizens out of the United States. But even if you let them handwave the practical disasters like 'what about the people in-state who don't like it' and 'what happens to the US once it allows it' with 'magic of the free market' or 'non-aggression principle', people talking about a US state seceding don't have a coherent picture of the basics of how their independent state would function. Citizenship and currency are pretty fundamental to even being a country, but there's usually no real idea of how they'd want those to work (much less a practical path to get there). Contrast something like Scottish secession advocacy, where the idea is that they'd split off, have their own citizenship (and no problem with anyone keeping dual citizenship), and become an EU member state using the Euro. There are still a ton of issues with how it would work in practice, and the time and path between 'secede' and 'become a full EU member' is a really large handwave to grant, but they have a pretty clear picture of how they'd like for things to function after independence beyond simple 'London doesn't tell us what to do any more'.
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Jan 6, 2024 18:04
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One problem with their exports is that even if they successfully leave without a collapse or the US military saying 'lolno' they'll be negotiating fresh trade agreements as a small country with no established diplomatic history. The US can push a lot of trade deals that 'just one state' wouldn't be able to get, and IndeTexas is not going to have the economy, military, or diplomacy that the US as a whole does. I know the libertarian solution is just to handwave 'our free markets will handle trade just fine', but realistically I think it would be a major hurdle to overcome, especially since they're almost certainly going to have released a lot of rhetoric against their two large adjacent trading partners (Mexico and US) during the splitting process.
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Jan 7, 2024 13:24
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quote:5. You have limited recourse to ban or otherwise deter vagrancy, littering, and crime in your immediate, developed vicinity. "Vagrancy" is an interesting choice of words, since it's fundamentally a statist crime in theory, and in practice even more so. I wonder how he can justify doing anything about 'vagrancy' under the non-aggression principle, is simply existing somehow initiation of force? (The actual answer is 'yes, if you're an undesirable type', but that kind of undermines the liberty). Littering is also an interesting choice, since Libertarians are generally against taking any action against pollution. They normally oppose smoking and emissions restrictions and rules about dumping waste, so it's interesting to see that a low-level form of pollution makes his list.
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Jan 27, 2024 01:25
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Liquid Communism posted:Remember, in the Libertarian conception of how the world functions, there's no such thing as public property. Therefore vagrancy is the crime of existing on someone else's property, and they consider themselves within their rights to defend that property without it breaking the NAP. Except that being on private property without permission is "trespassing" which is already illegal and which people can use force to deal with (and call on the police to use force on their behalf) in the US today, so it doesn't make sense to use "vagrancy" for that, or to complain that you can't do anything about it now. Also traditional "vagrancy" laws generally don't care who's property you're on, just whether you seem like you are wandering around without looking like you're well-off, so you can get arrested for "vagrancy" even if you're somewhere you aren't barred from or even have explicit permission to be in. I think self-styled Libertarians complaining about 'vagrancy' is really telling on themselves, 'vagrancy' laws are traditionally state tools for dealing with unwanted minorities and poors without actually saying that, and directly run counter to what people say is the philosophical framework of Libertarianism.
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Jan 27, 2024 19:31
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I like that Libertarians pushed Penn Jilette away by going both literally and metaphorically mask off, it's pretty fitting. I AM GRANDO posted:Do maga people have a position on the age of consent? They're working on and have succeeded in lowering the age for marriage (and thus consent if you go through that process) to as low as 12 in some states.
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Jan 29, 2024 17:23
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:t's not even about Israel specifically and somehow it leads to concerns that support for the existence of a Jewish state could provide ideological justification for slavery reparations in America (the ultimate worst-case scenario)? Libertarian stance on slavery was for me what the masks were for Penn. They claim to be opposed to use of force, in favor of money for damages, and in favor of lawsuits to right wrongs, but they don't treat slavery as abhorrent and consider people who profited from slavery having to pay damages to people who suffered from it as 'ultimate worst-case scenario' material. If you're going to name your philosophy or political affiliation after "Liberty", enslaving other people should be absolute anathema, as should letting someone keep the profits of such gross and blatant violation of the non-aggression principle.
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Jan 31, 2024 21:45
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Rappaport posted:There's slavery (historically) of varying degrees of brutality, but partial slavery seems novel. Is it like, part-time slavery? Has that existed? There are lots of setups of partial slavery in history. Slavery for a set amount of time as punishment for a crime still exists today, though in the US people avoid the term 'slavery' for prison labor and it's explicitly allowed under the amendment that banned chattel slavery. Serfdom was a form of slavery where the slave was bound to a piece of land instead of being directly bought or sold, but still is owned by someone and can't simply leave.
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Apr 10, 2024 04:52
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