As your own statements demonstrate, libertarianism is the enemy of freedom. It just asserts that coercion and oppression by anything or anyone but the state magically doesn’t qualify as oppression, while forbidding the state from doing anything to stop such oppression.
Simply declaring oppression as not being oppression because it’s not the government doing it doesn’t make it any less oppressive.
Laws forbidding people from engaging in voluntary transactions (with no externalities or similar issues) are not all about liberty, and are antithetical to libertarianism.
The concept of the 4 freedoms comes to mind here, and I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, sure, freedom is neat and all, but boy if a social safety net ain’t even neater. I don’t want to get too deep into this; political theory is not my bag, but libertarianism bugs me on a whole bunch of levels. It just seems to be an incredibly naive ideology - “make everyone free and everything will turn out fine”. It ignores how much of one’s life is dictated by things completely out of one’s control.
Libertarians and you have different definitions of oppression. For example, if someone refuses to do business with me, I don’t define that as “oppression”. You probably would.
Because it is oppression, and has historically been widely used as a form of oppression. and declaring it not to be oppression doesn’t make it so. You might as well declare it not to be oppression to beat black people to death, as long as it’s not the government doing the beating.
If someone doesn’t want to do business with you, that’s not oppression.
If there’s a systemic pattern in a society of lots of people refusing to do business with an entire class of people, there very well may be oppression.
And if everyone in town refuses to do business with you? Say, because you’re left-handed? You don’t need government to oppress or suppress people. I think what BobLibDem was talking about WRT Jim Crow was the de facto discrimination and oppression practiced in the northern states - you didn’t have laws demanding it, but no negro was getting a house in this neighborhood. The interesting thing about this is that in this case, people were free to freely associate… and they did so in a way that caused oppression and discrimination.
Maybe, but he specifically wrote Jim Crow laws.
Declaring it to be oppression doesn’t make it so.
Then I leave the society. If there are THAT many people in the society that hate me so much they don’t want to have anything to do with me, I don’t want to live in that society.
Then I leave town. Why would I want to live in a town where everyone hates me?
Great, then on your way out of town you can admit that libertarians have no interest in ending oppression or protecting individual liberties other than property rights.
Wrong. Someone not wanting to do business with me is not “oppression”. I don’t have the “individual liberty” to force someone not to hate me enough to do business with me.
Correct. But of course states without Jim Crow laws had their shortcomings, too. Thank goodness we have Fair Housing laws that prohibit discrimination in selling and renting real estate. Libertopia would offer no such protection.
So in post #50, what did you really mean to say? Why did you talk about leaving town? Did you just want to say, “No, even in that case it’s not oppression.”?
Of course it is not oppression. That town would be impossible for me to live in, because everyone in it hated me. What does that have to do with “oppression”?
If I lived in a society where 90% hated me and I would have to look for the 10% that didn’t to do business with, that would make it an uncomfortable society for me to live in and I would probably leave. But it would still not be “oppression”. Libertarian ideology does not guarantee comfort. It guarantees freedom. As John Mace said.
Except that if you want to discuss whether Libertarianism is self-consistent or not, you need to you their definition, not yours. And since there is no single, objective definition of what “oppression” is, you can’t declare yourself right and them wrong outside of a given belief system.
The cornerstone of libertarianism is an adolescent detachment from reality. It’s World of Warcraft for politicos.
Pretty much. Then if you find yourself in a paradox where you can’t explain a libertarian principle, you can just hide behind the skirt of “well, not all libertarians believe that!”
If libertarianism is supposed to make me free, it does a pretty poor job.
I gave an example in the OP. A hundred employees want to form a union. The boss says he’ll fire them all if they do. They can’t fire the boss but the boss can fire them. Seems to me like the boss if the only person who has any actual freedom in this situation.
My system is that we have laws that tell the boss he can’t fire people for forming a union. True, the boss now has less freedom. But the employees all have more freedom.
It seems to me, like my system has a hundred times more freedom than the libertarian system.
A libertarian might argue that the employees are free. They can form a union as long as they’re willing to accept the consequence of losing their jobs for doing it. But, hey, the boss in my system is free too. He can fire all the employees for forming a union as long as he’s willing to accept the consequences of going to jail for doing it.
Explain why a system where one boss is free is better than a system where one hundred employees are free.