The problem with libertarianism is that it requires everyone to have essentially the same beliefs. The likelihood of that happening can be judged from the fact that libertarians can’t even agree on what libertarianism is.
Broadly speaking, the main tenant of libertarianism is that government should not overrule any individual’s liberty. The sole purpose of the government is to maintain order and enforce the basic rights that everyone agrees on. The ideal is that the government should be invisible and you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t force somebody else. So it’s not anarchy because the system does have a government behind it.
The problem is that people don’t all agree on the definitions of essential concepts like liberty, order, basic rights, and force. And that leads to disagreements over what the government should be doing.
No, we all understand the definition we are using and agree with it. You’re the one who doesn’t, so you’re the one who has to define it. You claim you are here to fight ignorance, so fight it if you think you see it.
I’m going to continue to call you on it every time you engage in shaming. You know why.
You are out of touch. Quite a lot of us hate Steve Jobs. As well as Mark Zuckerburg. Bill Gates gets by because he’s a philanthropist. Pretty much everyone else gets a pass because no one knows who they are.
The failure of libertarianism is not that people will rise up and fight against the man–it takes a hell of a lot to gt them to do that. The failure is that those who are doing the exploiting have it in their best interest to limit the freedom of others. The only way to beat that is with an even stronger government.
The idea of high individual freedom and a small government just aren’t compatible. A democratic government exists to ensure freedom.
As usual Der Trihs is pretty much spot on. The advocates of libertarianism all make the assumption that they’ll be better off, that liberal governments only suck their hard-earned money away to support leeches. There’s are reasons that there never has and never will be a libertarian nation- it’s not only entirely impractical, it’s completely intellectually and morally bankrupt.
My ex-brother-in-law was libertarian, is a professor at a major university (not in poly sci or econ), and has pretensions at intellect. We had some discussions early on, but then I stopped because his basic underlying premises was that everyone is rational and intelligent and knows their own best interests. I think the entire philosophy collapses on those three points.
In a small enlightened environment (perhaps, say, if a university were to be able to completely govern itself with no outside intervention)… well, maybe it would work. But in the real world, it’s idealistic to the point of being stupid.
He is the main character in a book that Libertarians have based their religion on. Kind of like Scientology, but less believable or workable in the real world.
Well, let’s give him credit for not offering “Somalia” as one of the choices.
Yeah, I’ll 3rd that.
But the reason libertarianism won’t work in a full-blown form is that it relies on the assumption that people value freedom above all else. They don’t. Or, at least they don’t as soon as some creature comfort is threatened. People like a balance of freedom and security, and when they feel they don’t have enough of one of those, then they want the pendulum to swing towards the other.
People need government, people need control. If people are not controlled by something, someone will spring up somewhere to do that. There is no way we can have a functional civilization with a almost non-existent government beyond a certain population. I don’t know what that population is, but I wouldn’t really call anything smaller a civilization
That piece of wooden shite is staring at me from my bookshelf, I mean she couldn’t even write a decent sex scene, how that chunk of trash has become the Bible of some is beyond me.
This is one of the cool things (although frustrating!) about TSDMB: I rarely need to post, because someone else will almost always have already said exactly what I wanted to say!
This is the “other” opinion allowed for on the poll, and this is why I voted for “other.” Libertarianism is actually a very stringent form of government, masquerading as its opposite. It shares this quality of self-denial with “Scientific Creationism.”
True libertarians don’t masquerade as anything. It is an extremely selfish and fatalistic philosophy at the government level and admittedly so. It is also not unscientific like any form of creationism is. There is nothing scientific or unscientific about it. It is just a political preference about how we want to be treated and overall societal consequences are not a big concern. It would be great if everyone did well under libertarianism and thrived but that is not the point because libertarians are more focused on individuals rather than whole societies as long as individual freedoms are not being abridged.
It is about letting everyone have the maximum amount of freedom and allow everyone to thrive or fail on their own while maintaining law and order. It is a little socially Darwinist at the government level in that way and unapologetically so. However, that doesn’t mean that libertarians are cold-hearted. Families, charities, and private organizations are supposed to help those in need individually without massive government bureaucracies to spread resources around inefficiently.
Libertarianism is very simple as a philosophy. You are born, you build what you can among yourself and your loved ones, and then you die. Personal liberty and property rights reign supreme. Although it sounds sounds simple, it is a foreign concept to most people.
Libertarians are very socially liberal. Gay marriage? What does that have to do with me? Nothing whatsoever so it confuses us about why anyone is even talking about it. The same thing goes for almost all personal issues that don’t directly affect anyone else. Libertarians are often considered conservatives in a way but they are the direct opposite of the socially conservative/authoritarian branch.
Libertarians don’t want a Mad Maxx free-for-all either. There is a strong government but limited in function. To that say that such a style would never work, the U.S. in its original form is a close approximation to what modern libertarians would like minus the slavery. Like I said, I am moderate libertarian and not an idealist. We just hope to aim for a government that moves closer to the libertarian ideal rather than an authoritarian one. All leftist forms of government are authoritarian by their very design.
But that little point illustrates the fundamental problem I mentioned above. Libertarianism only works when everyone agrees on what the rules should be.
If the United States had been founded as a libertarian republic, you’d have had half the country insisted that fundamental libertarian principles required the immediate abolition of slavery - no way was libertarianism compatible with people being held in slavery. And the other half of the country would be insisting that fundamental libertarian principles required the full and perpetual support of slavery - no way was libertarianism compatible with the government interfering with the right to own property. And both groups would be completely sincere in their belief that they were the ones upholding libertarianism and their opponents were betraying everything libertarianism stood for.
We can all sit back and now and say it’s obvious which side was right - but it wasn’t obvious back then. And lest we think we’ve progressed beyond that kind of problem, imagine instead it was a group of people half of whom insist that the government has to uphold the principle of protecting children from being murdered and the other half of whom insist that the government has to uphold the principle that women are free to make their own choices about abortion.
A working government has a solution to problems like this - majority rule. Everybody argues their point of view and then there’s a vote. And everyone has to live with what the majority says, even if they don’t agree with that majority view. It’s not perfect but it works.
But libertarians can’t accept this idea. They say that the individual shouldn’t have to buckle under just because the majority says so. A person should be free to do whatever they want as long as they live within fundamental principles. Which just brings us right back to the problem of figuring out what those fundamental principles are.
