# Any Libertarians still on the board? **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [March 15, 2020, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-libertarians-still-on-the-board/849537 "2020-03-15T16:20:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2020, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-libertarians-still-on-the-board/849537/41 "2020-03-19T20:07:21Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > However, in the interest of making largely irrelevant distinctions: A Libertarian Party-style Libertarian government would be able to stop a genocide, because it would have a military and a police force and, generally, no philosophical problem with using violence to stop people from committing murder. I disagree with this - while the LP platform says that they’re for a small, defensive military, I don’t see how they would fund it or staff it. They are against most methods that a government can use to raise money (including inflating currency and borrowing money), so actually funding a modern army and having it ready for defense seems to be beyond them. Things like fighter aircraft and radar-guided artillery take a lot of money and skilled people to operate, and the LP doesn’t really have a way to fund this at peacetime levels. And note that in every war the US has ever been in, funding military operations required heavy use of revenue streams that the LP says they object to. Note that the traditional model for the US army, with a small professional core and large body of militia to draw on, isn’t possible for libertarians, as that required having all males over 18 as part of the militia and being able to call them up without their consent. It’s also pretty clearly not an effective for using modern weapon systems, the original US wasn’t trying to maintain military-grade jet aircraft and the pilots and support that go with them or nuclear weapons, but you don’t even need to get that far to run into problems. So yeah, the LP at a quick glance would be capable of self-defense against a potential conqueror, but doing so in practice appears to be beyond their fiscal and labor policies. Saying they’d have a defensive army is pretty much just a handwave. ---
**Author:** ![Grestarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grestarian/32/3227_2.png) [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2020, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-libertarians-still-on-the-board/849537/42 "2020-03-19T23:12:29Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > No, they are advocating to turn this country into Somalia. They’re just not intelligent to realize that’s the result of what they’re calling for. > > Libertarians believe you can have a society that has no government three hundred and sixty-four days of the year. But on the one day you need the government to solve some problem, you can just snap your fingers and the exact amount of government you need will appear - without needing any financing or recruitment or training - will solve the problem in a way that everyone agrees with, and then vanishes once again until the next time it’s needed. Sort of like Batman. > > And Libertarians don’t understand that most of what a government does is spend its days preventing problems. Governments work better when they quietly provide vaccination programs year after year rather than waiting until everyone has the disease. But libertarians don’t understand this; they think if they’re not seeing the crisis, the government must not be needed. Seriously? Like “My house hasn’t been burglarized so we can abolish the police and sherriff’s departments in this town.” ?? –G? Never mind that the house three doors down was ransacked last night. ---
**Author:** ![actualliberalnotoneofthose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e79b87/32.png) [@actualliberalnotoneofthose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/actualliberalnotoneofthose)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2020, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-libertarians-still-on-the-board/849537/43 "2020-03-20T04:07:40Z")
If you know anything about libertarianism, you know there is nothing remotely libertarian about Trump or his administration - if that’s what you are implying. Trump loves big beautiful government, opposes private property rights for individuals (going so far as to use government to seize private homes for his businesses) loves deficits, huge welfare programs (especially for corporations), and pretty much ran on expanding the scope and power of the federal government. Libertarian think tanks and legal societies have long opposed Trump and successfully sued him on behalf of his victims, often when self-styled “liberals” and fake limited government “conservatives” were silent. ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2020, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-libertarians-still-on-the-board/849537/44 "2020-03-20T12:14:53Z")
> [@actualliberalnotoneofthose](#): > > If you know anything about libertarianism, you know there is nothing remotely libertarian about Trump or his administration - if that’s what you are implying. Again, this is incorrect. A lot of Trump’s domestic policies directly match planks in the Libertarian Party’s platform and I listed some explicitly above. Trump does not match the lp platform or any typical definition of libertarian completely, but to say there is ‘nothing remotely libtertarian’ about a person who is vigorously implementing parts of the LP’s platform is simply incorrect. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2020, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-libertarians-still-on-the-board/849537/45 "2020-03-20T14:22:39Z")
> [@Pantastic](#): > > I disagree with this - while the LP platform says that they’re for a small, defensive military, I don’t see how they would fund it or staff it. So it’s another case of their theory being at odds with reality. It is, to use a Republican trope, one of those “objectively supports” things: They claim to be anti-pollution, but since they refuse to let the government do anything about pollution, they objectively support pollution. They claim to be in favor of an army of some kind, but since they are opposed to any mechanism to fund one, they objectively support us being utterly disarmed. > [@Pantastic](#): > > Again, this is incorrect. A lot of Trump’s domestic policies directly match planks in the Libertarian Party’s platform and I listed some explicitly above. Trump does not match the lp platform or any typical definition of libertarian completely, but to say there is ‘nothing remotely libtertarian’ about a person who is vigorously implementing parts of the LP’s platform is simply incorrect. Oh, you know the song-and-dance from the Socialists: “Unless you perfectly implement my proposed system exactly in every particular, you can’t use its failure as evidence that my system doesn’t work. Nothing from history has ever come close, because nothing from history has ever been my exact perfect system, so reasoning from similar systems tried in the past is bogus and means you’re a mean nasty smelly baby.” It’s part and parcel of performative politics, the alliterative alternative to getting out there and doing the work to convince people and, if you can’t, figuring out what you _can_ get people to agree on, so you’re part of the solution instead of a loud, whiny, completely worthless part of the problem. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/any-libertarians-still-on-the-board/849537.md?page=2)