Libertarianism, IMO, basically just means that liberty justifies itself, and that the burden of proof is always on those who would restrict liberty. Anyone that agrees with that, in my eyes, is a libertarian. We can disagree on what impositions are justified and which are not.
Now as for taxes, taxes are definitely justified, provided the money is spent in the interests of those paying the taxes, as in used mainly to do things we can’t do as individuals very well: have a military, police, firefighters, roads, mass transit, etc. I get a lot more queasy at the idea of the government doing a safety net, but that’s been around since long before I was born so I guess I have to accept it given that it’s a fixture of our society. But I’d resist any new attempts to pad the safety net.
But even if we’re going with the most minimalist government, taxes are needed to fund it.
I can’t speak for all libertarians, but to me, if liberties are directly restricted by private entities ,that could be a cause for government intervention. Depends on what liberties we’re talking about though and to what extent a private entity is restricting liberty. There’s a huge difference in power between a government and say, Facebook.
I said that the burden of proof is on those who would restrict liberty.
Libertarianism is also about privacy, which is why libertarians have led the charge against NSA, while liberals have suddenly become complacent with their guy in office.
That would be the Libertarians themselves. They want to restrict my right to pick apples, just because they have some artificial claim to the land the trees are growing on. I want those apples, and they are taking away my liberty to pick them!
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.
It’s not an artificial claim. Chances are, they planted the tree and care for the tree, or bought it from someone who did.
However, taking your claim that you have a fundamental right to steal from others(in the law of the jungle your argument has merit), we restrict the right to take what we can by force as part of forming a civilization.
I’m not sure what the deal is with opposing property rights. One of the basic reasons man formed societies with laws is so that the strong wouldn’t prey on the weak by just taking whatever they wanted when they wanted it.
I’m not arguing that property rights aren’t important. They are a vital right. But they’re one right among many important ones. Too many libertarians seem to feel that property rights are the only right or at least that it’s the right that outweighs all the others. And many times they don’t even recognize they have this belief - they feel that liberty and property rights are synonymous and they get confused when somebody argues about a different interpretation of what liberty is.
absolutely. I was just pointing out the illogic of inferring that privacy rights have no value since we have so much less privacy. First, we can still roll back the violations of our privacy that the government has imposed on us, and second, we can fight new attempted violations.
If liberals would join libertarians in a reliable coalition on this one issue, we’d be winning this battle. Instead, liberals only form an alliance of convenience when a Republican President is in office.
They only seem like the rights most frequently under attack if you interpret any attempt to find a balance between competing rights as an attack on property rights.
They don’t need more defending because they’re in particular jeopardy. Rather they appear to be in particular jeopardy because you value them over everything else.
In Texas, a man is allowed to kill an intruder with a shotgun with only slight excuse if the man has intruded on the shooter’s property. Have his property rights been eroded?
(Now it is true that the rights of a woman to her own body are under attack. Are those the"property rights" you speak of?)
In the U.S., people like the Koch Brothers are able to use their huge financial property to influence elections. Is your complaint about the very few restrictions that still remain?
Disney continues to get huge profits from the intellectual property of A.A. Milne (whose heirs lost their share long ago). Is your complaint that Disney is unable to also copyright characters from Grimms’ or Aesop’s Fables?
The celebration of property over people has led much tax burden to be shifted from rich property owners to ordinary people. I guess you’re complaining this trend hasn’t gone far enough?
Rational observers widely agree that government props up the property values of banks and other financial institutions at public expense. Again, is your complaint that they don’t go far enough?
America is almost a Utopia for economic thinkers of the Dog-eat-dog school like yourself. If you know of a country that comes closer to your ideal, please tell us? The Friedmanist-Pinochet Chile? The Friedmanist experiments in Eastern Europe, Iraq, or South Africa? Medieval Ireland, as another Liberlunatic proposed?
Libertarianism does indeed have a response to your claims. It says that it is immoral.
If anyone accepts the current regime of taxation as legitimate, that person is at best amoral. If a person advocates for an increase in taxes to accomplish his or her desired interests (personal subsidy, foreign invasion, wealth transfers to his or her favored groups), that person should be educated on the immorality of his or her actions and ostracized from the community if they continue to participate in conspiracy to commit theft.
You are the first libertarian I heard claim that libertarianism is based on morality. We have libertarians who post here that claim that morality is too subjective to form the basis of protecting liberty.
Do you ever get the feeling that, if you gathered up all the staunch Libertarians and gave them a nice hunk of land(say, New Zealand), there would be total anarchy within a year?