They’re the same as any other conservative in that respect, per Frank Wilhoit:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
The in-group for most Libertarians tend to be people of (supposedly) superior intellect, who just happen to usually be white cis-het males from affluent backgrounds.
The core problem with that view is that the idea’s proponents are generally unwilling to apply the same presumption to all action by private corporations or markets in general, despite copious evidence that – left unchecked – they can be as destructive and hapless at scale as any nation-state.
Libertarian concern for actual civil liberties has always been non-existent. Civil liberties exist to protect people who lack the political force of the majority, or raw power of the monied elite.
Libertarians are against the things which uphold civil liberties such as a strong government enforcing regulations ensuring them.
it should no longer be concerned about offending progressives or Beltway types and shouldn’t be afraid to reach out to the coalition that elected former President Donald Trump.
So, they’re fully embracing the old saw that libertarians are just failed republicans. On-brand.
They’re all funded by the Kochs and their ilk, including the groovy young leather-jackets-and-weed crowd at Reason.
In the end, every faction in the movement is united by and in service to the sugar daddies’ core (and thoroughly discredited) agenda that ultra-wealthy real humans should not have to pay their fair share of taxes and that ultra-wealthy fictional humans (i.e. corporations) should not be subject to regulation. Some factions may be more overt with bigotry and anti-Semitism, some may try to focus more on drug decriminalisation and de-militarising the cops, but those amount to petty differences in the larger scheme of Libertarianism.
They try, but it goes right out the window when some of them are allowed to use the NAP to provide a basis for “voluntary enslavement” under a contract.
None of the anti–Mises Caucus delegates or supporters that I have spoken to at the convention—including people from Illinois, Florida, Texas, Massachusetts, and even Mises stronghold New Hampshire—said that this takeover would make them walk.
With such great ideas, I can’t understand why they need anything or anyone else, besides The Marketplace, to prop them up.
I suppose their response would be that they have no other choice than to accept altruistic subsidies. If it weren’t for those meddling bureaucrats &/or woke-types*, they wouldn’t need to be propped up, and a free & unfettered Reason magazine would be self-sufficient.
*Presumably so strong &/or nefarious that not even superior intellect can overcome their barriers
As of approximately a week or two ago, the FTX guy, as a billionaire cryptobro mogul with pretensions to altruism, would have been held up as a Galt-level paragon of libertarian values. Now that his billions have vanished and his business exposed as a ponzi scheme, he is suddenly the “dirty jew” in some international cabal. The rapidity of this shift shows just how thin the libertarian veneer of unfettered-capitalism-as-enlightenment is over the core of good old fashioned bigotry motivating the ideology.
Well, yeah. What libertarians have traditionally argued for is a split between “positive” and “negative” rights. The government deciding whether black people can or can’t live somewhere is bad. Private citizens making it impossible for black people to live and work somewhere is fine, that’s just the market, in the end market incentives should fix it or whatever.
Needless to say I don’t think it’s actually a sensible distinction at all…but this isn’t even that. The government are actually the bad guys on this one. And yet.
The Agorists seem to have mostly left the Libertarian Party though, and are trying to take over the (socialist) anarchist online spaces where they are continually reminded that they are not in a capitalism friendly space and asked to “go somewhere else, please?”
Actually the government are the bad guys in both. Since they are protecting private citizens who want to exclude people from living and working. Segregation of private business required force of law. A free and open market disfavors discrimination as artificially limiting potential customers.
