Are we being led by the Libertarians?

Jeff 152 · Apr 28, 2011

Fraggle Rocker said: ↑

He sure does. But these little snippets he keeps spamming all over the boards don't reflect a lot of good scholarship on any topic.

In America, most people who identify themselves as libertarians are, at the most charitable, "rightist-libertarians." Just as, in a lackluster election like 2000, the Green Party steals votes mostly from the Democrats, when it's the Libertarian Party's turn they mostly steal votes from the Republicans.

I'm one of the twelve or thirteen "leftist-libertarians" in the country, having once actually been a card-carrying member of the Peace and Freedom Party. I really care about people and want everyone to be happy. I just don't think the government is doing a very good job of making that happen. A statistic I often mention, which is now about fifteen years out of date so it's probably even worse, is this one.
If the aggregation of municipal, state and federal government agencies, who collect tax money for the purpose of helping the poor, would simply place that money on a table and carefully divide it up and give it directly to the poor families in America, every one of them would instantly have an annual income of forty thousand dollars.

Instead, they're struggling at less than half that level. Where is the rest of the money going? To an army of government employees who "administer" each other.

American libertarians are all in favor of lower taxes, less regulation on business, and freedom of religion (for Christians). But they're not so excited about ending the war on drugs, less regulation on immigration, or freedom of religion (for Muslims), which are the other half of the libertarian philosophy.

They also don't understand that their most cherished institution, the corporation, is an artificial entity that can only exist because governments have enacted laws to allow it to exist. Without those laws, entrepreneurs would have to raise capital the same way we proletarians do it: by deferring consumption and saving money, by putting up our houses and other belongings as collateral for a loan, and/or by forming a partnership with other entrepreneurs and enduring the inevitable headache of collective management.

It's widely asserted that we libertarians believe that "the solution to bad government is no government." That's slanderous. What we believe is that the solution to too much government is less government. We're not anarchists, Ayn Rand's archetypal characters notwithstanding.

Our point is that once government reaches a certain size, its efficiency falls so low that it becomes at best ineffective and at worst an impediment to progress. After all, a government is a sort of organism. As an organism grows larger, it moves more slowly, pays less attention to external stimuli, reacts less often and with subdued vigor to those stimuli, and devotes an ever-larger portion of its attention and nutrition to the maintenance of its own internal metabolism. It that a pretty apt metaphor for the government of any one of this planet's really large governments?
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Wow, I don't think I have ever agreed more with a post on this forum. Is that the characterization of a "left libertarian?" I think your "American Libertarians" or "Right Libertarians" are not really libertarians at all. The vast majority of tea party people and worse, people like Glenn Beck, claim to be libertarians but like you said aren't into ending the drug war, ending the other wars, religious freedom, and the worst, when they are actually corporate shills. I think it's slanderous to true Liberarians to make those people a type of libertarian. In my book, there is only one kind of libertarian and it's the kind you just described.

And thank you for refuting the libertarianism=anarchy claim. Also the libertarianism = corporatism claim. They are again bad misrepresentations of true libertarians or left libertarians as you call them.

So I think there are more like 13 to 14 "leftist libertarians" in the country now.
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Can't say I've been as politically active as you, but like I said I completely agree with everything in your post.

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YoYoPapaya · Apr 28, 2011

Libertarian socialists like Noam Chomsky?

Well that's not your average American libertarian.

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Jeff 152 · Apr 29, 2011

See that's why I don't like the term left libertarian. It makes you think of libertarian socialism, which is definitely not me. They don't believe in private property or wage labor.

Libertarian socialism (sometimes called social anarchism,[1][2] and sometimes left libertarianism)[3][4] is a group of political philosophies that promote a non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic, stateless society without private property in the means of production. Libertarian socialism is opposed to all coercive forms of social organization, and promotes free association in place of government and opposes what it sees as the coercive social relations of capitalism, such as wage labor.
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That doesn't really seem compatible with libertarianism at all. If a factory wants to pay a wage, and a man is willing to do the work and receive it, you would have to prevent a voluntary transaction.

So I just read the wiki page on left libertarianism and it's not for me also. How about something which is neither right nor left libertarian.

Wow just checked out the libertarian page on wiki - here are the schools of libertarianism:

Agorism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-communism
Autarchism
Christian
Consequentalist
Conservative
Constitutionalist
Crypto-anarchism
Deontological
Free market
Geolibertarianism
Green
Left-wing
Marxist
Minarchist
Mutualist
Paleolibertarianism
Panarchist
Propertarianism
Right-wing
Socialist
Voluntaryism

There are way too many. I hate labels.

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YoYoPapaya · Apr 29, 2011

AFAIK it started as a left wing ideology in france or something.... I believe i read that somewhere
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