Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/27/galt-underwater.html
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Well, libertarianism has several other obvious shortcomings, so if it took their inability to cope with climate change that was pretty late.
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As a libleft, it fucking pisses me off the AnCap types have hijacked the name and terminology to the detriment of the fucking world
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Kropotkin!
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Wellbeing is not a dream
#BreadSanta
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The inability to recognize the need for civil liberties, consumer protection, environmental protection, personal redress of conflict, and the limitations to “self sufficiency” are really big holes in their political ideas.
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Dude…
If the libertarian movement was “destroyed…”
Then…
Why are there still libertarians?
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Locke’s idea that you get private property by mixing labour with the commons had a proviso: As long as you leave as much and as good for everyone else. It would seem to me that things like environmental regulation would be there for the purpose of making sure as much and as good as left for others under Locke’s script.
Not defending Locke, here, but I do think it’s worth remembering that the intellectual/moral underpinning of our concept of property actually had a recognition in it that we live in a community and we need to think of the common good. An idea of property that owes absolutely nothing to the community is a straight up nonsense idea.
I’d like to see some self-made people really go it alone and stop breathing the air. And if that sounds facetious, they ought to remember that it’s specifically our collective use of the air that is under debate in climate change.
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Libertarianism is the belief that the only valid role of society is to listen to libertarians talk about libertarianism.
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“Libertarianism”, the halloween costume of narcissistic greed.
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You don’t get to use the oxygen from the trees on my property.
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They’ll just change names again. “Classic liberals”, Anarcho-capitalists, etc, nazis, etc.
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Climate denial has destroyed the libertarian movement
No, it hasn’t. The libertarian movement still exists. I don’t say that as a fan.
This is a pet peeve of mine, but I think it’s important. A lot of us on the left like to talk about how “Krugman destroys Trump in his latest column” or “Adam Schiff demolishes GOP arguments against witnesses” or so forth. This in turn is a subset of “you can’t” statements, like “you can’t say you’re pro-life and then put migrant children in cages to die!” or “you can’t threaten a default because Obama’s budget increased the national debt and then pretend you have no problem with it when Trump does it!”
Au contraire. They can and they do.
And libertarianism, short-sighted and intellectually bankrupt as it ever was, is nowhere near destruction. Its power didn’t come from the fact that Dr. So-and-so of the respected Whatever Institute once embraced the term, and it won’t dissipate because he renounced it. “Affluent white men who don’t like being told what to do” yet exist! Fundamentally irreconcilable intellectual inconsistencies have never “destroyed” a political movement all by themselves and this won’t be the first time they do.
I don’t have any problem with the argument this article presents. Makes perfect sense to me. Hopefully it’ll even make sense to a few soon-to-be-ex-libertarians! But let’s don’t hold any funerals for libertarianism just yet, because the corpse is still kicking us quite vigorously in the teeth.
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Completely agree. I remember when Obama was elected and one pundit said, “Is this the death of the Republican party? Yes, I think it is!”
The argument made here by Quiggin and highlighted by Doctorow will make zero impact on current Libertarians. It’s unlikely they’ll ever even be aware of it. Few people alive today consume media that challenges their worldviews.
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Let’s not misunderestimate the latent mutagenic capacity of privilege and resentment to produce new virulent and self-serving ideological permutations. Libertarianism excels in the fine art of turd-polishing and long-practiced habits such as those are seldom casually tossed aside: the turd-polishers will soon find a new varnish and hotbox the fumes. I will be elsewhere.
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If we were living on a tiny island the truth behind libertarianism would quickly become clear-- you can’t just do as you please when the entire island depends on the same limited resources. The only people who would embrace libertarianism would be those who wanted to have it all for themselves, to be supreme leader and dole out portions at their whim.
Well, we are living on a tiny island.
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I read another factoid/shower thought on reddit today about this tiny island:
In the length of time for the life span of the oldest human being alive 7.5 billion people have been born.
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Zombies. All zombies.
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