Huh, there appear to be lots of them represented in the study about libertarian psychology that you linked in your OP:
According to that sample, it appears that over one-third of libertarians agree with the overwhelming majority of social conservatives in opposing abortion rights, and nearly one-third endorse the social-conservative view on opposing gay marriage. Maybe all the libertarians you know happen to fall in the other two-thirds?
You don’t feel that are libertarians who would say “I have the absolute right to keep and bear my firearm anywhere I wish and nobody can infringe that right”?
That was the point of the joke. There are libertarians who assert an absolute right of property ownership and libertarians who assert an absolute right of carrying firearms. And both groups will loudly insist that their rights are absolute and not subject to any compromise. And both sides will not recognize how two different absolute rights can be in conflict with each other, such as in the situation I described.
Yeah, AFAICT anti-abortion libertarians base their position on the assumption that the fetus is a full-status human person and thus entitled to the same fundamental rights as other human persons. Depending on where you arbitrarily choose to place the starting-point of legally recognized human personhood, the fetus’s rights to bodily autonomy either do or don’t trump those of the person carrying the pregnancy.
Neither of those (ultimately arbitrary) positions is intrinsically more “libertarian” or “non-libertarian” than the other, ISTM.
My post was intended as a response to Sam’s post, where he said no libertarians were opposed to abortion rights.
I got that, but you’re right that I wasn’t very clear about the fact that I was agreeing with you rather than debating you (I gotta remember that just beginning a response with “Yeah” is not as ringing an affirmation of concurrence as it sometimes sounds in my head).
Sorry is I misunderstood your intent as well. I just wanted to make it clear that in that post I wasn’t making a general comment of libertarian beliefs (which I have done in other posts) but was addressing a specific post.
And there were a lot “the government should stay out of marriage” types who popped up after gay marriage started getting accepted.
Ah, gentlemen, but you see, that’s the thing… you see people who proclaim themselves Libertarian taking the conflicting positions, because in many cases “Libertarian” is just a mantle they want to put unto whatever is their position about something they want to be able to do freely. So the person in Sam’s example takes the position of the “old school” property-rights/personal-space-supremacy Libertarian while the person in Nemo’s is one of those “Libertarians” who are really the “actually a RW conservative who wants to smoke pot and doesn’t like Church” types who seem to have seized the brand in the USA.
Not when you are on private property. In pub lic spaces, yes. Lots of libertarians feel they can carry a gun in any public space. But demanding that someone allow you onto their property is a violation of the non-aggression principle. No one has a right to come into my home or business if I don’t want them to.
If you want an actual stumper, try this: “Should a business be allowed to refuse service to black people?” That’s where a lot of Libertarians struggle, as the right to property conflicts with a societal fight against racism. That’s a much tougher call for most libertarians.
As for abortion, there’s a real split among Libertarians. I would say 90% of them are pro-choice, but there are a few who say that the rights of the fetus need to be taken into account. Ayn Rand, btw, was pro abortion because to her the actual rights of the mother supercede the potential rights of a human not yet born.
So libertarians can differ on that, without violating their principles.
That’s social conservatives. Libertarians have been telling the government to stay out of people’s bedrooms for a long time.
And the only debate about gay marriage among libertarians is whether gay marriage should be legal, or the state should get out of the marriage business altogether. I don’t know any libertarians opposed to gay marriage. There are probably some, because bigotry spans all political persuations, but I don’t know them.
As I noted above, the study you started this thread (partly) about seems to have found that about 59% of them are pro-choice. Certainly, anti-abortion Libertarians in mainstream politics seem to have a significantly higher profile than your 10% estimate would suggest.
But I agree, as I already observed, that there is nothing intrinsically non-Libertarian about either supporting or opposing abortion rights.
Not really. Libertarians think the govt should stay out of “their” lives but not the lowly others’ lives. All libertarians, when given power, implement a hierarchy of what humans actually get/deserve rights and which do not.
Libertarians insist on absolute freedom from the markets, when that results in discontent upon the masses and necessitates a heavily repressive government to stop the volatile situation from exploding they usually look the other way.
More precisely, I think, the “libertarian” principle of being “free to do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t interfere with other people’s rights” is HUGELY dependent on the underlying interpretation of concepts like “interference” and “rights”. Those interpretations are often very culturally contingent, shaped by a lot of unspoken assumptions about what qualifies as “interfering” and what doesn’t, for example.
I feel this points to a weakness in the Libertarian movement. Most Libertarians, from my interactions with them, see society in terms of the absolute rights they believe they hold as individuals. They acknowledge the need for an enforcement system to defend those rights; you cannot claim to be able to freely use your private property as you wish if other people are able to take that property from you without consequence. So they want a society to exist which will defend their rights.
The problem that arises is that this point of view minimizes any sense of reciprocal obligation. The average Libertarian feels there should be a society that steps in and defends their absolute rights. But it’s a fairly abstract feeling. They don’t feel that society should be able to call of them to help defend the imperiled rights of others.
In Libertopia there’s not a sense of “We’re all in this together. And that means I should help my neighbor (or even a complete stranger) so they in turn will help me.” The Libertopia ideal is more akin to “Look out for your own interests and don’t worry about what other people are doing.” Which doesn’t really answer why those other people should be worried about defending your rights.
The recipricol obligation is that I won’t interfere with you, either. We mutually respect each other’s rights and property, and promise not to initiate violence against others to pursue our own goals.
This is not my experience. In fact, a key aspect of libertarianism is a reliance on voluntary institutions and community, rather than government force, to achieve social ends.
Nobody thinks they can make it as a ‘rugged individualist’ without trade or cooperation with others, except for nutbar survivalists and such. The question isn’t community vs individuals, it’s the use of force by a community to keep individuals in line when they aren’t hurting anyone.
The real question (IMO) is, when can government prevent harm, as opposed to react through the legal system, to harm.
For instance: I can dump toxic waste on my land, as it’s my land. Does the libertarian acknowledge that the underground plume poisoning my neighbor’s groundwater is my responsibility, and does the libertarian acknowledge that preventing such poisoning is preferable to reacting to it?
IMO, that’s where the Libertarians I know lose.
Libertarians I know have no trouble with forbidding dumping toxins into the river or otherwise imposing externalities to others.
The definition of an externality is a cost imposed on people who are not part of a transaction.
Of course like anything else, actually figuring out where the line is in the real world is messy, with plenty of disagreement. Organizing libertarians is like herding cats.
He is not a Libertarian. He is a Right Wing Populist. Just like trump, Boris, etc. aka proto-fascists.
People calling themselves libertarians are not necessarily actually. Making laws that control a woman’s body against her will is the antithesis of libertarianism.