As a social democrat with Libertarian Socialist influences, I certainly hope so. But I still often say I’m a reformed anarchist. I think discovering social democracy gave me a better alternative. I think a lot of ideological ideas are held in the absence of understanding a wider range of alternatives.
(Not to knock anarchists, for whom I have a lot of affection. I sort of go in and out of identifying with it.)
Democratic socialism, as practised in the entire developed world except for the USA, works just fine, thanks. Those countries with the strongest social democrat policies - northwest Europe + parts of the Commonwealth - are doing better than the USA in economic terms these days.
Since you seem to be identifying totalitarian communism with democratic socialism, I’m going to guess you’re an American.
Libertarianism hasn’t caught on politically because pot-smokers are generally too lazy to vote imho.
Only if the OP was trying to have an intelligent conversation and/or learn something. If the goal is to provide people a chance to rip on things they don’t understand, it serves pretty well.
I am American, but I was talking about Marx’s version of socialism… which, as I said, looks great on paper. *Not *democratic socialism.
Now, if you’re talking about actual, real-world socialism like that practiced in some of the better European countries, I’m all for that. I think we could learn a lot from, say, Norway. I’d love to live there.
But…nobody is proposing new laws that permit rape and murder, so it doesn’t come up that often.
I agree that you have pointed out how my statement was incomplete, but, Jesus, do I actually have to cross that t? Do you actually believe that anyone else actually believes that libertarians are in favor of rape or murder?
(And…yes…in fact, I do know one libertarian – well, anarchist, actually – who is opposed to laws against rape and murder. He believes in total personal responsibility. If an act is wrong, then he won’t commit it. If a vote were held on such laws, he would vote to repeal them. So…you’re wrong… But in such a trivial way as to be of supreme unimportance to nearly any rational person!)
See my post above about dueling being a requirement in many fictional libertarian utopias. It isn’t that people would say “meh, what can you do” about rape and murder; it’s that sanctions against coercion and initiating violence (which rape and murder would certainly count as) would be decentralized- there wouldn’t be a state administering criminal laws. There would be unofficial rules and customs to distinguish between murder and justice, and to discourage blood feuds and tribalism.
I can only see this as an unobtainable ideal. In real practice, I can only say that, in my opinion, it would collapse into a…um… What’s the Greek term for rule by the local strong guy?
For instance, dueling is a fairly decent way for people to protect their rights, property, prerogatives, status, dignity, and whatnot. But some of us are clumsy, chubby, weak, slow, gangling, and myopic. Your dog could defeat me in a fair duel…and I mean with sabers! (He’d simply drop the saber!) The ideal of “equal justice” wouldn’t pertain; Edwin, the saber-master, would have “more rights” than I would.
Now, yeah, in theory, I could simply hire Artoine, another local saber-master, to fight for me… But now we’ve taken the first teensy step toward government…
(This is one of the reasons I don’t like the modern U.S. custom of having the family members of murder victims give speeches at the sentencing hearings for murderers. Some people have very articulate sons, nieces, aunts, etc. and others do not. One weeping little girl can add ten years to a prison sentence, and not everyone has a weeping little girl to put on the stand. “Equal Justice” is bypassed.)
(Hm… Maybe I could open a service… “Weeping Little Girls Inc.” Not that much difference from Artoine the saber-master!)
“And ever since he killed Mommy-”
*<whisper whisper whisper>
*
“ah, Daddy, I’ve cried every night that I went to bed!”
MOST libertarians I have known are not so extreme as to be approaching anarchism, libs who advocate for stuff like private police, military, roads, currencies etc are the extreme fringe. Most libs advocate for a strong but rather limited government, the biggest beef they have is with victimless crimes(drugs, sex, food, religion) and they would argue it is not the place of government to “save” people from themselves. They are not advocates of legalizing fraud, or creating a violent dog eat dog world.
If someone is advocating abolishing government totally they are not a libertarian.
Food crime? Religion crime?
While earlier definitions sounded no different than conservatism, this sounds like liberalism.
According to whom? Who gets to be the arbiter of what it and isn’t libertarianism?
Nitpick: tenet
Except, as mentioned upthread, “anarchism” is most commonly used to mean a specific vision of society that goes beyond it’s literal construction (an-arch-ism).
If this was a true Libertarian society, I’d be free to spell a word any way I wanted.
I meant laws prohibiting drugs, sex, food, or religion(or mandating it).
I think the best definition I have ever seen is that libertarians view government as a needed but evil thing, like weapons, so it should be used sparingly. So for example a military to protect against invasion would be a valid use of government, while a law banning trans fats would not be.
Norway is Norway too. We have to be extremely careful about ‘learning’ anything from most European countries especially today except as a stark warning of what not to do. Lots of them are about to fail completely due to mismanagement and creeping socialist ideas. I am not saying that that Norway will be among them because the Scandinavian countries are doing well relatively speaking for Europe but they also have demographic and population traits that don’t apply to a county like the U.S. It is a small country and they already dumped most of their failed population that wanted to do much better into the U.S. a long time ago and most of those are doing quite well today but here instead. The have a lot of offshore oil that can support their relatively small area and population as well.
Moderate libertarians like me like the U.S. model at least as it was but not the creeping socialist ideas. It isn’t a radical idea. It just serves as a counterbalance to those that want to take away personal freedoms in the name of ‘society’. We promote economic freedom first and foremost but also social freedoms including things like gay marriage and victimless drug use that don’t affect anyone else (I have never used an illegal dug in my life but I don’t care if someone wants to). It is a completely honest ideal but you have to accepts total personal responsibility with the possibility for failure and most people aren’t willing to do that unfortunately.
But who decides what’s a valid use of government in a libertarian system?
After reading this thread, I think your last sentence encapsulates the entire argument. Libertarians think that such a sentence has actual meaning. Those opposed use as an axiom the premise that in an interconnected modern global economy everything - literally everything - everybody does infringes on the rights of other people.
It’s impossible to reconcile these axioms. It’s also becomes obvious why the opposed condemn libertarianism in absolute terms - it’s completely analogous to the condemnation of Creationism because of its axioms.
I think this is an important realization. No matter what you do, you are balancing someone’s rights against another person’s rights. A conservative might be forced to live in a community where there are openly homosexual people, or people who roam around topless, or people who use bad language. That’s an infringement of a kind. But infringement of those rights usually loses to what we consider more important rights, at least in the eyes of a liberal.