I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot more libertarian-haters than, well, libertarians in this world. Interesting to see where this discussion goes…
Planet Money did a great piece on this fest in 2011.
A bunch of people who have this proposition put to them:
‘All of us put a little bit of money in a pot, and no-one’s mother has to die of cancer untreated’,
And they scream:
‘Over my body draped in mechanical devices designed to kill and the final confusion of my socially disfunctional personality’.
Christ, what arseholes.
“Libertarianism” with the capital “L” is crackpot economics with a massive dose of paranoia. For nearly a hundred years, wealthy rich people have paid right wing media to whip up resentment against income taxes while paying hack economists to float alternative tax strategies that would create a massive shift of the tax burden onto poorer people. And if someone has money to get their ego a massage like that, well good for them.
And if libertarians were just people who liked guns and weed, well count me in. But it’s also a convenient cover for people with all sorts of scummy antisocial tendencies. Ron Paul for instance finally dropped out of public life when Anonymous revealed he had been coordinating his campaign with several notorious white supremacist organizations, which is why he vanished without a word of explanation in the middle of a campaign. The white supremacist perspective is that a libertarian win would let them slash the social safety net which would touch off a race war (which they’ve been prepping for some 40 years).
And then there are the “trust fund libertarians” who inherited a bunch of money, and calling themselves “libertarians” gives them an identity of some sort. Also I think it’s sort of a general rule that the more dependent someone is, the more they have to blather about how independent they are. As a group, they probably more problems with dependency than average.
Who, exactly, are these people you’re talking about? There are lots of people who identify as libertarian (maybe most) who believe in just such a pot. They may argue about the best way to get money into it, but they believe in the pot.
Ironically I think most Libertarians would go for that.
Except in the real world they see it as, not everyone is putting money into that pot, and not everyone is putting in an equal percentage. When presented as equal and fair most people, no matter their political ideologies, will lean toward those ideals. The problem becomes skewed when you over lay what happens in the real world with those ideas.
There are so many kinds of libertarians that to describe them as if they’re all the same doesn’t really make sense.
Also, Milton Friedman, a “capital L Libertarian” if there ever was one, was described by Paul Krugman as “a great economist and a great man.”
For what it’s worth, I’m not a libertarian. I just feel they’re more liberal on issues I care about - civil rights, criminal justice, foreign policy - than Democrats. They also tend to kill fewer people than Democrats or Republicans.
The link the the actual article is screwed up. Given that I am the first one to post about this, I guess everyone else is just commenting without reading.
I was directly referencing the Libertarian in the article who felt he needed someone threatening him with death before he would kick in for anyone else’s cancer treatment.
But hey, #NotAllLibertarians.
Oh, and then it would be ‘theft’.
We have words for people like that. Libertarian is becoming a synonym for them.
I wonder what the music’s like at LibFest
Ted Nugent.
“I am God,” a longhaired 20-something repeats to the people babysitting him in a bathroom hallway. “I am a perfect logical machine.”
that sounds about right. idealogues on acid don’t beat around the bush.
As a group I think the libertarians have a lot of good ideas, but I feel the same way about the communists.
Libertarianism is cleaned-up, watered-down objectivism, and objectivism is an ideology formed with the specific purpose of making selfishness a virtue.
Mr. “Fuck your sick mom, I got mine” demonstrates that that purpose is alive and well in modern libertarians. (Assuming that’s an actual quote and not an author’s impression, since, as Clayton Coffman pointed out, the post’s been up for five hours and the link still doesn’t work.)
Libertarians have about 90 seconds of good material before going off on some absurd tangent. It’s like listening to a radio show about alternative medicine and the guest sounds really knowledgeable but after a couple minutes everyone is talking suddenly about bee pollen enemas or something (why is it always enemas?).
That’s one way the internet is threatening those in power. Libertarians and communists never used to talk to each other (except in the sterile confines of academia), but slowly they’re beginning to read each other’s blogs, mostly trolling but very occasionally seriously considering the arguments.
Gradually, a third position is being synthesized - not a tepid compromise but an even more radical position which recognizes Power itself as the enemy, in both its political (socialist) and economic (capitalist) forms.
I just want the link to the pics at the bottom to work.
More liberal than the Democrats is a rather low bar don’t you think?
There are other political traditions that have the same position as libertarians on those issues, albeit for different reasons, and they don’t come with libertarianism’s narrow conception of freedom as private property and worrying anti democratic authoritarianism.
