this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Honest question? Are libertarians that bad? I don't agree with their ideology but are they that bad at a personal level too?
When your movement centers around not having "society" tell you whats right and wrong and you can do whatever you want, people who don't like being told the things they like are bad will be drawn to it.
Nah, libertarians are just a fascist co-option of an old anarchist movement which distorted into pure capitalist totalitarianism. Exactly the same as ancaps.
Pretty much any legit group that's against capitalism will be distorted to be pro-capitalism and a few suckers will participate.
Most so-called "Libertarians" are Republicans who want to smoke weed
Ftfy
And employ people, even children, for the lowest wages possible.
But but but, those children should be able to choose whether or not they work for slave wages! If they were worth more than that the free market would pay them better anyway! It's an infringement of my sovereign citizenship to tell me I'm not allowed to scam and/or scare vulnerable minors into selling me their time and/or bodies!
That last bit very much grossed me out, and I'm confident you added it for a reason.
Probably because its accurate. They "think of the children", alright. Every. Damn. Night.
Not sure if this has anything to do with it, but Lemmy.ml is moderated by communists, and I don’t think they get along with libertarians.
To be clear, "libertarian" originally referred to what we would now call anarchists, or anarcho-communists. But at this point, the word has been pretty completely coopted by those on the right tending toward the very different ideology of anarcho-capitalism. Statist communists and anarchist communists have their own internecine conflicts, but both hate the current right wing libertarians.
They're pretty much polar opposite ideologies.
Yeah that would definitely cause an issue lol
Eh, fuck them too
There are different ideologies that fall within the broad spectrum of "Libertarianism" as it is used in America. They are all bad, but some are "misguided but good at heart" (and better than, say, a Democratic-establishment Liberal) while others are "you have to be a literal sociopath to believe this". The latter tend to get signal-boosted more because they get funding from right-wing foundations and think-tanks.
Most ordinary people who identify as "Libertarians" would be Socialists of some sort but have been brainwashed by Capitalist propaganda that Socialism is bad and evil and is also when the government does stuff, and the government is bad, so Socialism is bad.
The logical extreme of Libertarian thought is Anarcho-Capitalism: the belief in the Non-Aggression Principle (that no-one should ever restrict another's freedoms, including their freedom to use their private property as they see fit), that coercion does not exist, contracts are sacrosanct, and that people have an absolute right to control what happens with the things that they own. This of course runs contrary to things like "Worker's Rights" or "Anti-Discrimination Laws"; and is also where a lot of the Pedophilia stuff comes from, since children are either (1). property of their parents (in which case the parents, as their owners, should be allowed to abuse or prostitute them) or (2). free actors in society (in which case they should be allowed to give consent or prostitute themselves). The ultimate issue with Anarcho-Capitalism is that its logical endpoint is Neo-Feudalism: if you own land, you have the right to dictate what the people living on that land are allowed to do while living there; there are no Tenant's Rights (in fact, like I said before, the only right you have under Anarcho-Capitalism is your freedom to act as you please on your own property, with your own property, without interference from others). Thus, Landlords become a new sort of feudal government, with complete power over their fiefdoms.
There's also Randian Objectivism, which is a rationalist philosophy whose main influence on modern Libertarianism is the Randian Ubermensch: living your life independently, to the pursuit of your own happiness (and only your own happiness), without care for the social rules of society at large. Batman's creators have cited Randian Objectivism as a major influence; Batman is the archetypical Randian Ubermensch: wealthy, white, egotistical, and living outside of society and its rules and laws (while benefiting from them).
There are more moderate forms of Libertarianism that believe in things like Net Neutrality (that the internet, like a public service, should treat all traffic through it equally, not giving preference to certain sites or companies) or the Right to Repair (the right to repair something you own personally, rather than having to take it to a licensed repairman). It's important to note that both of these run contrary to Anarcho-Capitalism: under Anarcho-Capitalism, an ISP has a right to treat traffic through its tubes however it sees fit; and a company can lease its products with whatever anti-repair clauses it wishes. There's also Right to Roam, which is very popular in Europe (but less so in the states), the idea that you should be allowed to travel through private land, as long as you do not mistreat it.
I'm an anarchist(which used to be called libertarians) and hate to see ancaps assosciated with anarchists. State actors co-opted a subset of the movement(and the entire libertarian movement) and you didn't mention that. Imagine i just talked about socialism while referencing nazis over and over.. because that's how you sounded to me.
No-one has thought of Anarchists when they hear the word "Libertarian" for over 20 years and no amount of complaining on the internet about how the word was stolen will bring it back.
Communists are exactly as conservatives call you? We need to raise awareness that language is being distorted and not just go with it.
Libertarians will tell you this is not an anarcho-capitalist example because it obviously failed, but look up Kowloon Walled city for a good example of how an anarcho-capitalist society looks like.
To what degree is that like my mom saying "look at Venezuela for a good example of socialism"?
I agree that libertarianism is often short sighted, but I'm under the impression that your average libertarian believes that there should be a government with just enough power and responsibility to ensure that the citizens don't infringe on each other's "liberties". I don't think that's at all guaranteed in an anarcho-capitalist society, but I could be wrong.
I don't agree with libertarianism because it doesn't attempt to solve the tragedy of the commons whatsoever. Which is why I believe the fediverse can only be maintained through a culture of cooperation of its users.
The tragedy of the commons is a capitalist myth
How so? I think of it as an anti-capitalist thought problem in the first place.
It's not how either commons or people work, it's the fantasy of one eugenicist freak
So uh, did you read this article? It most certainly does not claim "It’s not how either commons or people work". Quite the opposite.
It's a thought problem, not a literal pasture anywhere.
In other words, "he's not wrong, he's just a racist". I didn't know about the guy before this article. Ironically, they have accomplished exactly the accreditation they were trying to discourage.
That is already how I understood the thought problem's relevance to climate change prior to reading this article.
Double strawman. 1) No one invokes "Hardin", that's why they had to tell us who he was. And 2) The tragedy of the commons doesn't make any claims about who is to blame for hogging the hypothetical "commons". The tragedy of the commons is just a situation. It could apply to any finite resource; ex. if someone is selfishly hogging the wifi bandwidth, everyone's netflix experience sucks. It's not relevant whether 20 people are hogging it, or just one or two people.
The article seems like a non-sequitur, and a waste of time. It means well, but I wish they wouldn't preserve this racists legacy in this way. Feels like taking it's taking the discussion 2 steps backward to take 1 step forward.
He is wrong, because he's a racist. The commons the "tragedy of the commons" is about were an actual real social system which did not work the way he supposes. Capitalism inclosed and ruined them, just like it's inclosing and ruining the planet. The idea that this is just a natural result of a shared resource existing is entirely ass backwards, and comes from this guy's racism and capitalist ideology.
It seems like Hardin didn't even originate the thought problem. The article conveniently leaves out that Hardin simply wrote an article about, and created terminology to refer to William Forster Lloyd's thought problem from over 100 years earlier. Instead they opt to give the racist credit. Why?
Again, the commons is not an imaginary thought experiment, but a real thing that existed, and the so called tragedy is just flat out bad history.
William Forster Lloyd was an early 19th century British economist, I can fucking guarantee he was racist too.
Well, one argument that could be used is that for example Venezuela is not the Marxist variant of socialism, but it is their own thing called Bolivarian Socialism based on ideas of La Patria Grande and Simón Bolivar, a good comparison is that of Gadaffi's Arab Socialism, which picks up ideas of Marxism (Bolivarian Socialism does this too, of course), Islam and Pan-Africanism/Pan-Arabism. So in that case it doesn't strickly follow the rules of what some people would call orthodox scientific Marxism, since both incorporate ideas that might not be 100% coherent with dialectical materialist analysis of certain issues. Besides, both Venezuela and Libya suffered from great US meddling (both countries suffered coup d'Etats, Venezuela suffered two if I recall correctly, and embargoes), and specifically for Venezuela the embargo was pretty harsh since their economy depended a lot on crude oil export, which they could not carry out as they should. Still, if you look at the numbers, Venezuela has greatly improved in the last couple years even though it still has insane amounts of inflation, it went from 438.12 on 2017 to 65,374.08 and in October of last year it was of 1,588.0, so as you can see going from 65,000 to 1,500 is a huge success, even if it's still extremely high in comparison with other countries.
Regarding Kowloon, I'm sure you can find some excuse, but to put it simply, it was a place of a really small area (2.6 ha (6.4 acres)) but with a really high density (50,000 people and 1,923,000/km2) but at the end of the day was a perfect place for such experiment since you don't have the complicated macroeconomics of not even a small country. The place was ignored by the English government (it was during the Hong Kong colonial time) but at the same time prohibited the Chinese government of the mainland from taking it to its own due to its closed proximity with Hong Kong, and furthermore it was not some place that was, for example, a CIA funded place to destabilise a region. In simple words it was ignored by pretty much any type of governmental entity and left to be as it could. You could argue, though, that the place started as a poor place, without access to basic needs, but if anything after its anarcho-capitalist existence it should have improved, not get worse. Construction was done without any type of care for regulations, medical care was done by whomever who had access to some tools, and life was even worse than stuff like Latinamerican Villas or Favelas, since even stuff like sunlight was not accessible for people living in the lower strata, since due to its small area housing needed to be built vertically. I'm sure people will find excuses, but to me it's a perfect example, funnily enough I've met some an-caps who wholeheartedly saw that place a desirable thing. There is a book by a photographer that has some of the best photos of that place at the time called City of Darkness, I think it was available at LibGen, and also the place was shown in the film Bloodsport featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme.
That's a lot of really interesting info, but I don't think it addressed my question. My question was, does an "an-cap" society really align with libertarianism, because from what I know of libertarianism, it doesn't. Libertarians aren't anarchists, they believe in a minimal govt that prevents people from infringing on each other's freedoms.
Your points about lack of construction or medical regulation are good, though. I don't think a libertarian would endorse those types of regulations, but innocent people will die in completely avoidable ways without them.
Some are just young and/or naive. If you don't think past the surface it makes sense. It's (American) conservativism with less hate. And it's another tool to manipulate people into supporting lower taxes on the rich.
It's appealing at a glance because the first thing kids notice about it is that you don't have to hate gays for no reason.
They are fine with removing regulations because "the market" will balance it out
I dont think there is a requirement for them to be "bad" but theres a lot of them who are and the ideolog kinda supports being a douche.
It's hard to answer this question because libertarians and socialists are like water and oil. That said, things like the end of intellectual property and abolition of the police are points that I see both sides agreeing (there might be more points, but I can't remember right now).
The problem is that aside from a few of the original writers (like Mises or Hayek, examples from the top of my head), most libertarians out there on par, or even more than tankies in their fanatism. But maybe that's a problem with most big movements anyway.
I don't make assumptions like that usually. There are some groups that have lots of corruption within, just didn't know if I missed the memo on libertarians.
No. Most people are decent people, even the people with dumb political ideas.
Not really. Internet has distorted the reality. I have talked with lots of them in person and online outside of social network that are all day talking about politics and nothing to do what memes make it seem. Also if you look at right wing memes you will find they are accusing left wing people to be pedos(but same applies). In resume, memes like that don't represent reality, its just a "cultural war" that is used to throw shit against the "other side".