To my libertarian friends complaining about getting furlough notices from their government jobs

[Robot_Arm]

@Derleth

This genuinely depends on who you’re talking about and where your experiences with them come from.

Some libertarians are anarcho-capitalists in everything but name. Privatize the police, end all public spending, disband the military and rely on county-level (posse comitatus) volunteer militias for defense, and everyone makes their own private currency. They’re still pleased to call themselves libertarians.

Others are paleoconservatives who want to go back to the era before FDR. They’re happy to have a do-nothing Federal government, a military that is equivalent to what we had prior to WWII, and to rely on the states to do everything from OSHA to civil rights enforcement and everything else. Goldbuggery begins about here on the scale, as does opposition to the Federal Reserve. They claim to want to preserve the Constitution, but they don’t really want to see the Supreme Court overturning any laws; the fact this would de facto mean the repeal of a lot of the First Amendment is apparently OK by them. Ron Paul has snapped up a lot of these people.

Others are about how I was circa 2000 or so: They don’t really want to dismantle the government, or destroy our economy by chasing gold, or do anything really revolutionary, but they believe more local control would be good and are willing to vote for either party, at least in theory. In my experience, they’re GOP voters who don’t quite realize the GOP is far more interested in Big Business and the Religious Right than anything to do with shrinking the overall size of government.

I know there are groups I’ve missed, including the small but vocal racist and anti-Semitic fringe currently centered around Alex Jones, but I think those hit the high points.

The first person I ever heard talking about libertarianism was my brother. He is now 50 years old, has never held a job more difficult than a paper route[sup]*[/sup], lived with my mother until her death, and inherited the house and enough money to not starve for the rest of his life. I do not recall him ever admitting to having done anything wrong; all the misfortunes of his life can be lain at someone else’s feet. I suspect that his libertarian streak is part of this effort to shift blame. His failure to succeed can not be his fault, it can only be the government (me, other people, organizations, companies, etc.) standing in his way.

That may not be a large subset of libertarians, but it was the first I encountered.

• To be strictly fair, he did work at a diner/lunch-counter type place once, for about half a day.

[septimus]

It’s not a complete explanation of any perceived differences, but government agencies have to cope with inefficiencies that private agencies do not. Public schools deal with handicapped or difficult students that private schools would not have admitted. Governments have a commitment to fairness and service auditing that private agencies need not have. And read essays by Lewis Lapham to learn that the GOP often explicitly imposes extra paperwork burden on government agencies as a form of sabotage.

Watch a “libertarian” interact, in person or by a phone, with a government bureaucrat. The “libertarian” will deliberately waste as much time as he can with stupid comments and questions.

[What_the]

@Doctor_Jackson

Point taken, but a Libertarian with a government job is not an oxymoron. Libertarians do not advocate no government, but a significantly smaller government that concentrates on core functions like defense and regulating interstate commerce. A libertarian in either of those departments (or the afore mentioned CBO, gotta have a budget) could be perfectly logical.

Especially one who is doing an excellent job at his important function who doesn’t see a long term fix in across the board actions rather than completely eliminating functions of lesser worth.

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

I work in an office with a couple of Texas Teabaggers. When it was announced that FEMA wasn’t going to continue giving out free money to West, Texas they turned into whiny little babies.

They seemed to quieten down after I accused them of being Socialists

[F.U.Shakespeare]

@Robot_Arm

The first person I ever heard talking about libertarianism was my brother. He is now 50 years old, has never held a job more difficult than a paper route[sup]*[/sup], lived with my mother until her death, and inherited the house and enough money to not starve for the rest of his life. I do not recall him ever admitting to having done anything wrong; all the misfortunes of his life can be lain at someone else’s feet. I suspect that his libertarian streak is part of this effort to shift blame. His failure to succeed can not be his fault, it can only be the government (me, other people, organizations, companies, etc.) standing in his way.

That may not be a large subset of libertarians, but it was the first I encountered.

• To be strictly fair, he did work at a diner/lunch-counter type place once, for about half a day.

I call such people “camo conservatives”. They espouse extremist Randian principles to camouflage the fact that in any other country in the world (especially Libertaria), they’d have starved to death long ago*.

*In the words of Homer Simpson’s nemesis Frank Grimes.