# Michael Lind vs. the Libertarians **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 18, 2013, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863 "2013-07-18T17:06:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2013, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/41 "2013-07-18T23:04:11Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > I am not sure if we even have any true Radical Libertarians on this boards. Anyone who wants to end the Fed probably counts, and we have a few. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2013, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/42 "2013-07-18T23:05:27Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > You finally presented something that is both correct and fair. That is a fairly good description of the typical libertarian and it seems perfectly reasonable to me but of course it would because I am a moderate libertarian as are most of the others here. I am not sure if we even have any true Radical Libertarians on this boards. > > If you or Lind or anyone else are really just talking about Radical Libertarians, it would be helpful to make that point clear up front. It is no more fair to compare all libertarians to the worst ones you see in the news than it is to call all Muslims terrorists or judge all animal rights activists by the actions of PETA. You could probably even get some of us moderate libertarians to agree with you on some points. The platform of the Libertarian Party is Radical Libertarian while Ron Paul was just pro-pot legalization Pat Buchanan. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2013, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/43 "2013-07-18T23:17:57Z")
I’m waiting for the obligatory “Libertarinism has been tried. It was called feudalism!” Anyhow, the Economist piece you linked to ethers Lind in the first sentence. Libertarian after libertarian has answered this question. I’ll sum it up thusly, if anal propriety is so great, how come prison rape victims just dont get raped? It’s because there has always been a group of individuals who wished to live off the labor of the rest of the people. These people were able to monopolize force in such a way that it was accepted by the majority. The means through which such acquiescence is ascertained gives you a clue to the “form” of government (i.e. democratic republic vs. dictatorship) but not the “nature”. For the nature of government has been and will forever be the predation of one group upon the production of another. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2013, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/44 "2013-07-18T23:26:54Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Anyone who wants to end the Fed probably counts, and we have a few. Yes ending the cartelization of banking and money creation in the US is RADICAL. Ifigured you for trustbuster, BG. Your undying love for the monied elite is a bit disturbing ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2013, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/45 "2013-07-18T23:37:14Z")
I seem to have missed the part where Lind got around to addressing the fundamental point raised in counterargument (Every political idea known to man was, at one time, untested; ergo, the argument “X is untested” is clearly insufficient). ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2013, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/46 "2013-07-18T23:47:48Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > t’s because there has always been a group of individuals who wished to live off the labor of the rest of the people. So you’re a Marxist, are you? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2013, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/47 "2013-07-18T23:57:28Z")
> [@Steve\_MB](#): > > I seem to have missed the part where Lind got around to addressing the fundamental point raised in counterargument (Every political idea known to man was, at one time, untested; ergo, the argument “X is untested” is clearly insufficient). The point is that libertarianism is – from the radical libertarians’ POV – not something that can be tried or tested piecemeal or by stages; it’s all-or-nothing. In the second article: > [@](#): > > An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored. In the third article: > [@](#): > > Writing in The Economist, a libertarian-leaning magazine, Will Wilkinson tries to answer my question in a different way: > > > [@](#): > > > > One doesn’t have to be fond of libertarianism to imagine perfectly sound answers. When I was a libertarian, I might have said that there are no libertarian countries because too few people have been persuaded to become libertarians, just as at one point in our history too few men had been persuaded to support women’s suffrage. When enough have been persuaded, it will be tried. > > Wilkinson is confusing policies and systems. In my essay, I took care to distinguish the two. I pointed out that particular useful policies favored by libertarians can be adopted by modern countries, without fundamentally altering the dominant mixed-economy model that blends markets, government and the nonprofit sector in a compound that will always be too “statist” for libertarians. > > American progressives in the tradition of the two Roosevelts have never been doctrinaire “statists” or “socialists” and have no objection to promoting markets, where that serves the public interest. A progressive can favor privatizing the Post Office and expanding Social Security at the same time. Or vice versa (progressive arguments against Social Security privatization are based on its practical problems). I recently co-authored a proposal to use vouchers for eldercare in the U.S., without thereby becoming any less a sinister statist enemy of human freedom, from the perspective of the libertarian cult. > > You never find similar pragmatism among libertarians. They are always against any public option and always for a real or imagined private option. Libertarianism is dogmatic, not experimental. Any maverick libertarian who suggested a deviation from orthodoxy — say, expanding Medicaid, on efficiency grounds — would be expelled from the cult as a “statist” heretic. > > Bailey and Wilkinson accuse me of discouraging potentially useful social experimentation. But it’s not an experiment if you know the result in advance. Libertarians, like utopian socialists and utopian anarchists, think they already know the desirable end state of human social evolution, even if they are content to move toward that utopia incrementally. > > Most liberals would approve of the philosopher Karl Popper’s distinction between “piecemeal social engineering” and “utopian social engineering,” symbolized by the lethal attempts of Jacobins, fascists and communists to remake whole societies from scratch on the basis of this or that theory. In _The Open Society and Its Enemies,_ Popper wrote that “the piecemeal engineer will adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evil of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.” In some cases, fighting urgent evils requires the expansion of particular liberties, like abolishing slavery and segregation and securing the right to vote. In other cases, it requires limiting particular liberties, like the freedom of employers to buy and sell slaves, use child labor or pollute the environment. > > Libertarianism poses as a comprehensive public philosophy promoting the “greatest ultimate good” of individual freedom, not just a list of particular policies, like private toll roads instead of public highways or vouchers for schools. So it is not enough for libertarians to point to discrete measures that have been adopted by systems based on other principles, like social democratic progressivism or conservative welfare capitalism. Libertarianism as a system will be hard to take seriously until there are at least a few functioning, systematically libertarian countries in the world. > > Maybe at some point in the future some country will take the plunge and unilaterally adopt the gold standard, replace police and soldiers with private contractors, abolish all taxation except for a flat, regressive consumption tax, eliminate all public safety net programs, eliminate most or all environmental and occupational regulations, allow foreigners to move in and out of its territory without registration or regulation, and so on. And maybe that regime will even endure for a while, instead of quickly collapsing or suffering rejection by voters with buyer’s remorse. > > Meanwhile, in today’s world, the focus of the political mainstream — moderate conservatives and centrists, along with progressives — is on modifying the inherited model of the twentieth century mixed economy, to adapt it to the changed circumstances of the twenty-first century. While there are substantial costs and benefits at stake, the reforms that are at issue are essentially incremental — cut Social Security or boost it, slightly increase or slightly lower legal immigration, increase progressive income taxation or add a federal consumption tax like a value-added tax to the mix. > > And what exactly does the libertarian movement contribute to contemporary American debate? Here are a few of the ideas that the rest of us, from center-left to center-right, are supposed to treat with respectful attention: calls for a return to the gold standard; the abolition of the Federal Reserve; the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service; and the replacement of all taxes by a single regressive flat tax that would fall on low-income workers while slashing taxation of the rich. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/48 "2013-07-19T00:01:52Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > Yes ending the cartelization of banking and money creation in the US is RADICAL. Ifigured you for trustbuster, BG. Your undying love for the monied elite is a bit disturbing I’d gladly see them swinging from lampposts, but ending the Fed would be no threat to **them.** ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/49 "2013-07-19T01:11:17Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Let me guess: Engineering? Computer science? (Libertarians appear to be overrepresented, for some reason, in fields technical but not scientific.) I think that’s true, and I think there’s a very good reason why Engineers tend to be more libertarian while scientists tend to be more liberal: Engineers have to deal with the real world at the very lowest levels where it is the most complex. They have a better understanding of complexity and a wariness of grand plans and sweeping statements of fact. Scientists, on the other hand, often deal in the abstract. This is especially true in the areas of science and mathematics today that are the most contentious - sociology, climate science, economics, psychology, etc. Those also seem to be the areas that collect the most liberal of scientists. In my experience, when you get down to more concrete sciences like geology or particle physics, that liberal dominance starts to vanish although there’s still a disparity. But it’s true that engineering tends to attract more individualists. In most schools, the engineering faculty is the second-most ‘right wing’ faculty after business. But there’s another reason scientists today tend to be more liberal - modern science requires a lot of grant writing, a lot of schmoozing, and a lot of political skills. Many scientists spend more time writing grant proposals than they spend in the lab. A lot of the funding comes from government, so scientists have to be okay with that and even advocate for more of it. Scientists, especially in academia, don’t necessarily get paid based entirely on merit, but rather on their position in the hierarchy based on seniority, political skills, etc. Engineers, on the other hand, tend to be paid based on merit. A 30 year old superstar can be making ten times as much as a 60 year old average engineer. Conservatives tend to like that type of compensation structure. Also, to become a scientist these days at the Ph.D. level means surviving and thriving for many years in an environment that is decidedly liberal. I had the opportunity to be a scientist, and I turned towards engineering precisely because of these reasons. I didn’t want to be an abstract thinker subsisting on government funds or constantly going hat in hand to benefactors to plead for resources. To me, the appeal of building things, of being hired because I had skills that were profitable, of testing my ideas in the real world with all its messiness, were more appealing. I was totally okay with being paid based on what I produced rather than on seniority or a collective bargain. That’s probably because I have the type of personality that drives me towards libertarian/conservative thought. For all these reasons, I think as a generalization engineering selects out the individualists and libertarians while basic science is more attractive to liberals, although there are obviously many exceptions on both sides. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/50 "2013-07-19T01:22:52Z")
> [@](#): > > Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world. It shouldn’t escape one’s notice that this is the same traditionalist argument that we used to hear from many opponents of gay marriage. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/51 "2013-07-19T01:23:54Z")
These endless, tedious discussions of ‘pure’ libertarianism are about as useful as are discussions of ‘pure’ progressivism which you can find on the conservative analogs of this board. I doubt you could get two ‘progressives’ to agree on what their perfect form of government is. And you can always find someone who wears the badge of ‘progressive’ who has claimed to want some pretty outrageous things - including some members of Congress. I’m sure progressives roll their eyes every time someone comes here demanding that they defend the craziest utterance issued by a fellow ‘progressive’ as if they all must believe exactly the same thing. It would be better for everyone if we discussed these philosophies on an issue-by-issue basis, or treated them as a tendency or direction rather than an absolute destination. Progressives have a tendency to want government to engage more with the problems of society and ‘fix’ them using the power of the regulatory state. They divide people up into oppressors and the oppressed, and want to use government as a tool of mitigation. But that doesn’t mean every progressive wants a totalitarian state where all income is equalized and no one can gain economic power that others don’t have. Those that do would be Communists. ‘Progressive’ is much more slippery a term and can be taken to mean any number of things. But in general, progressives want to move in a direction of more government control in those areas where they see disparities or social problems they think the government can fix. Likewise, libertarians generally think government is ineffective and that government regulations are coercive and should only be used to stop other forms of coercion. But what constitutes coercion is not easy to pin down, and many libertarians would differ on their definitions. Is fraud coercion? How about hidden defects? How about visible defects that a consumer can’t possibly spot without specialized knowledge? What about the case where a man buys the only road out of town and then begins using that to force people to do his bidding? Where are the lines drawn? Since we can’t know exactly what individual libertarians think, and because libertarians themselves tend to be individualists and not prone to collective action or collective decision-making, it’s silly to try to force them all into one box and declare that to be ‘true’ libertarianism. Of course, if your real goal is to simply label them so you can smear them, it’s a fine tactic. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/52 "2013-07-19T01:29:30Z")
> [@Tom\_Tildrum](#): > > It shouldn’t escape one’s notice that this is the same traditionalist argument that we used to hear from many opponents of gay marriage. Good point. Legalized abortion had also never been tried - until it was. In fact, the entire argument is pretty much a conservative argument - that change is bad and that there must be a good reason if something hasn’t been tried before. I thought the whole worldview of Progressivism is that change is good if it brings about more social justice, and that traditonalist arguments are merely window-dressing for the entrenched power structure. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/53 "2013-07-19T02:17:48Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > So you’re a Marxist, are you? Marx was inspired by the class theory of the classical liberals, no doubt. He was never able to flesh out his own. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/54 "2013-07-19T02:19:24Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I think that’s true, and I think there’s a very good reason why Engineers tend to be more libertarian while scientists tend to be more liberal: Engineers have to deal with the real world at the very lowest levels where it is the most complex. They have a better understanding of complexity and a wariness of grand plans and sweeping statements of fact. Of course, OTOH, it might have something to do with the apparent affinity between [Engineers and woo](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo). > [@](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > Best answer: Science doesn’t have access to truth, engineering does. > > —Anonymous Coward 14535673, Godlike Productions[1] > > An **engineer** is a professional trained in engineering: the design and construction of devices or other works. They put science into practice, designing the stuff that makes civilization. > > Most engineers are as sensible and reasonable as anyone. But engineers as a group have a noted tendency to pontificate on things well outside their area of expertise, to the point of actual fallacy. This phenomenon is so prevalent that users of talk.origins have come up with the Salem Hypothesis, which predicts that any creationist claiming scientific expertise or advanced degrees is likely to be an engineer.[2] Of course, this does not mean that engineers are likely to be creationists. > > The phenomenon also applies to some fields of computer science, such as software engineering, which are more applied mathematics than science. > > Quantitative evidence of this is lacking, but it has been noted on the internet frequently. > > \ > > **How engineers think** > > Engineers are not scientists nor are they mathematicians.[3] They are engineers. Every other field of knowledge is interesting insofar as it is useful raw material for engineering. Engineers care about results in the real world, and get these results; other people are observably utterly delusional about technology and probably shouldn’t be allowed near scissors.[4] This breeds a certain arrogance. > > The vast majority of engineers are perfectly reasonable and are fans of science and mathematics, even though those fields are not what they do. But respecting science is not always a requirement of the job. > > **Religious conservatism** > > Engineers are measurably more politically conservative than scientists. A 1972 study[5] showed professors of engineering describing themselves as “deeply religious” and “strongly conservative” more than those in any other field. Applying the same analysis to data gathered in 1984 found 46% of male American engineers describing themselves as both conservative and religious, compared with 22% of scientists. > > Explanations for this are limited. > > \ > > **Engineers out of their depth in other ways** > > - Ray Kurzweil - being a brilliant computer scientist means all other fields, particularly biology, can be treated as subtopics of computer science. He also claims that nutritional supplements and “alkaline water” do something useful. > - Mohamed El Naschie - an engineer who believes he knows much more about mathematics than most mere mathematicians. > - Eric S. Raymond - his knowledge of and work in software engineering remains quite good. His batshit insane wingnuttery, not so much. > - Richard Hoover, who wrote the meteorite bacteria paper for the Journal of Cosmology. > - Far too many youthful Ayn Rand casualties such as Petr Beckmann, for one. (John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, was an engineer as well, though people tend to forget that Atlas Shrugged is fiction). > - The leadership of China - China is currently run not by revolutionaries or politicians, but by technocrats. They seem to be attempting to solve everything like an engineering problem (more force here, more repression there, and we will have a harmonious society!) and, although they have good sense enough not to ignore the laws of economics, they are still somewhat incapable of understanding the full complexity of the social tensions within their country.[11] > - Dewey Larson (1898-1990), one of the numerous engineers who think they can do physics better than physicists. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/55 "2013-07-19T02:25:28Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > Marx was inspired by the class theory of the classical liberals, no doubt. He was never able to flesh out his own. I think not; theirs included some perception of class interests in conflict but no element of class struggle or catastrophic class conflict. This is about as lefty as the classical liberals get, and by today’s standards it sounds more like a slightly progressive Democrat than anything else: “Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.” “By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.” “The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess … It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.” “We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate … Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.” “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” “The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquility of anybody but themselves.” – Adam Smith ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/56 "2013-07-19T02:28:12Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I thought the whole worldview of Progressivism is that change is good if it brings about more social justice, and that traditonalist arguments are merely window-dressing for the entrenched power structure. If you will examine progressive arguments against libertarianism, you will find few are traditionalist in nature. It’s more of a content-vs.-content thing. Not even Lind’s arguments here are traditionalist in nature. ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/57 "2013-07-19T02:49:59Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Since we can’t know exactly what individual libertarians think, and because libertarians themselves tend to be individualists and not prone to collective action or collective decision-making, it’s silly to try to force them all into one box and declare that to be ‘true’ libertarianism. > > Of course, if your real goal is to simply label them so you can smear them, it’s a fine tactic. Well said **Sam Stone**. It is all true. The most basic philosophical definition of a libertarian is someone who values individual rights over the rights of the collective. It is looking at things from the opposite lens philosophies like communism or socialism. In the libertarian viewpoint, societies are primarily a collection of individuals with their own rights that need to cooperate based on their own self-interests. Under more collective philosophies, society itself is the most important thing even if it is made up of individuals that need to be accommodated according to their differing needs. It sound like a rather subtle point on the surface but it has profound implications on how people view practical matters. Small ‘l’ libertarians do not hold any viewpoints that are exclusive to them. Almost all of them are also part of the platform of the major political parties. The problem arises when you realize that no major party represents your views so you use that term as a descriptor. It is basically short-hand for economic conservatism and social liberalism combined. That is why I don’t understand why libertarianism gets labeled as a crazy fringe belief because the crazy ones are only a small percentage of the ones that self-identify as libertarians. It is simply an amalgam of different viewpoints that exist in other movements. The Pew study cited above shows that we are well educated and tend to make a lot of money and I think that is a compliment rather than a point of ridicule. ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/58 "2013-07-19T04:08:49Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > Well said **Sam Stone**. It is all true. The most basic philosophical definition of a libertarian is someone who values individual rights over the rights of the collective. There’s the rub. Libertarians take great pains to note they are not anarchists. So, how do they reconcile that they value law and order yet eschew some authority over themselves? They want to live in society (the collective) yet want to ignore the collective’s directives. If it is not anarchy and there is law then where is the line drawn? Vague hand waving about laws that respect “individual rights” get us nowhere. What does that mean? How does that work? ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/59 "2013-07-19T04:16:15Z")
> [@](#): > > In all the revolutions, there have always been but two parties opposing each other; that of the people who wish to live by their own labor, and that of those who would live by the labor of others…. **Patricians and plebeians, slaves and freemen** , guelphs and ghibellines, red roses and white roses, cavaliers and roundheads, liberals and serviles, are only varieties of the same species. Adolphe Blanqui, protegé of Jean-Baptiste Say in 1837 > [@](#): > > The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. **Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian,** lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another… -Karl Marx ---
**Author:** ![pancakes3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ba9def/32.png) [@pancakes3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pancakes3)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2013, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863/60 "2013-07-19T04:36:44Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > There’s the rub. > > Libertarians take great pains to note they are not anarchists. > > So, how do they reconcile that they value law and order yet eschew some authority over themselves? They want to live in society (the collective) yet want to ignore the collective’s directives. > > If it is not anarchy and there is law then where is the line drawn? Vague hand waving about laws that respect “individual rights” get us nowhere. > > What does that mean? > > How does that work? Where’s the line drawn between conservatism and liberalism? Are you expecting there to be a line? Am I not allowed to call myself libertarian unless I fall on the correct side of that line? What if I want to get rid of tariffs but think that public school is a good idea? What if I don’t want to label myself at all but agree with certain libertarian points? Most libertarian points? Will you still think I’m a pie-in-the-sky, impractical ninny? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-vs-the-libertarians/663863.md?page=4)