That's not what I observer from social conservatives when it comes to their beliefs. The majority want to use government to force their values on society, like having prayer in public school, fighting the drug war or banning abortion.

Also a majority tend to be rather hawkish and in favor of intervention abroad. Libertarians are in favor of none of those things.

Libertarianism will look like a "coherent political philosophy" only if you're a young white kid from an affluent family.

I'm going to assume what you mean is that nobody lives entirely by Libertarian ideals. While that may be true, it's true of every other political category as well, so I guess nobody is anything under that logic.

This is where I think some libertarians wander off from what those largely in favour of state actually think.

I think a lot of people would agree there's a lot wrong with government, but most would also rather have one. They just want one that's run better.

Your libertarianism seems quite pragmatic and I personally sympathise with the ideas behind libertarianism - lack of coercion, lack of people making arbitrary moral decisions (like drug laws) and imposing them on society.

However I also like public services, welfare safety nets (BI is indeed interesting) and various other things that only come with state-level cooperation.

> But it doesn't really matter to me if my characterization of libertarians isn't 100% accurate because I have no respect for anyone who calls themselves libertarian in any way.

Tell me you've never spoken to a libertarian without telling me you've never spoken to a libertarian.

I've witnessed self-described libertarians doing exactly that. It usually goes along with a lack of understanding of the power they have over someone far less economically fortunate.

Beyond the standard American individualism (the baseline), regular people don’t claim that they are such rugged individuals that don’t-need-no-society like “libertarians” do.

That’s the discrepancy. If you take away one of the two things that cause the discrepancy you’re just talking about a different subject.

I am most certainly not resorting to psychoanalyzing libertarians. I just said that I believe libertarianism is a perfectly logical conclusion for a reality that (to me) seems alien to the one we actually have. One notable (though far from unique) example is the libertarian concept of freedom of choice: It is perfectly reasonable for an idealized person, but at odds with our experience. Countless psychological experiments have shown that it is quite easy to restrict people's effective choice with nothing more than simple manipulations (with varying degrees of effectiveness, yet all fall very far from violence or even the threat of violence), yet libertarians insist that this does not constitute an actual restriction because their idealized person can somehow choose not to fall victim to those manipulations, even though the actual number of people who seem to be able to do so in the real world is small. Other examples include libertarian notions of people's motivations (again, perfectly reasonable yet at odds with findings), libertarian ideas of how power propagates in society and more.

It is therefore not interesting to argue with the libertarian ideas -- they are perfectly reasonable. There's no point in arguing with the desire to build winged bicycles if their inventor assumes a weaker gravity or greater human strength and stamina. The problem is with the premise. Libertarians insist that our findings are inapplicable to testing their premises, yet fail to provide evidence to support theirs[1]. So I think generalizations are very much in order, because this puts libertarianism itself in a (large) class of utopian ideologies, all of which share quite a bit in common[2].

> if you're an example of the average sociologist or anthropologist

I am neither. After getting my math degree I briefly entertained the notion of becoming a historian of medieval Europe until I realized academia is not where I want to spend my time.

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[1]: Some would gladly provide supporting evidence from approximations of libertarianism, yet discount counter-evidence on the ground that it is only an approximation.

[2]: What sets libertarianism apart from some is its idealization of some things we know quite well, and so some of its followers share the ideology but not the premise or the goals. They root for the ideology precisely because they want the very same results that many (like me) believe would be bad for most people, because they believe they will be among the few who will benefit. This, too, is common among some utopian ideologies (like social Darwinism). But it means that you can find some libertarians who describe their utopia as something that sounds almost like communism (no one has too much power over others), while others describe a jungle where they (so they hope) are at the top of the food-chain. This divergence of vision is actually rather unique.

There are a lot of libertarians who disagree with other libertarians.

> Actions are evaluated at the individual level -- which is apparently a radical new concept.

If this were actually true, then libertarians couldn't say anything useful about groups of people. Which means you can't talk about governments and corporations at all.

So what's the incorrect statement here?

I get that you're proud of your philosophy, but why is it that every time someone represents it to me, they open gaping wide holes large enough to fly a planet through?

Well yes, I too can think up the philosophy of xg15ism in which people like me are well off at the cost of everyone else - and then demand that society implement it, pretty please.

I just don't see how that would bring us forward in any way.

..you should really get a better grasp on libertarian philosophy before making statements like this.

If there were any two groups libertarians would lump people in, it's violent and non-violent actors. Libertarians don't recognize the rights of corporations, governments, dictators, despots, etc. Actions are evaluated at the individual level -- which is apparently a radical new concept. Libertarianism isn't a philosophy about government, it's a philosophy about human action in general, all of which is empirically evident. It's waaayyy more principled than a political philosophy, which seems to drive many people nuts.

Because every time you need to apply such a reductive philosophy to reality, it falls apart. This would be fine if they adopted it as a purely personal lifestyle but they try to push it as a feasible form of government.

They do this by mostly ignoring the real world complexity and real historical issues when aspects of their philosophy were actually applied.

Examples? I’ve seen arguments police should be entirely privately funded, insider trading should be legal.

Those are two separate things and I only assert the former (although I think most libertarians have the best intentions). As to the latter, I just think that whatever evidence we have seems to suggest that this is the case, and it is reasonable to believe it is so (and that does not preclude that it may also be reasonable not to). I'd never make such a strong assertion, though.

I also did not conclude that libertarianism is impractical. In fact, I think evidence suggests it is very practical (and systems similar-enough to it, IMO, were the norm throughout most of Western civilization), only it might be quite bad for the majority of people.

I mainly just took issue with the statement that libertarianism has never been tried by saying that we did try approximations of it which are no less accurate than all other approximations of similarly extreme ideologies.

I do, however, feel that arguments with libertarians often hit an impasse when discussing not ideas but facts -- facts that are hard to conclusively ascertain -- such as the actual dynamics of society. I feel that libertarianism pre-supposes a human dynamics which is at odds with everything I've learned in my (not too many) years of social studies; libertarians, of course, would disagree[1].

> Yet you also mention anarchy as a possible alternative

I did no such thing. I simply stated that both anarchy and social democracy ideally allow all people to express their power freely, unlike libertarianism or communism, which are too freedom-constricting for my tastes. I never said anarchy is practical or something I actively strive for; merely that it (as well as social-democracy) is compatible with my moral views. Of course, history has shown that the main problem with anarchy is that it is unsustainable, in that it naturally gives rise to some form of government.

[1]: Although the number of libertarians who have actually studied human society is vanishingly small. There are hardly any libertarian sociologists, anthropologists or historians. There are more than a few economists, but economists rarely agree on anything... :)

And to reasonable people, it sounds reasonable.

In terms of political philosophy, most libertarians come at it through a rights based framework (see: Bastiat, Locke) and believe rights to be non-arbitrary. You seem to be suggesting a more self-interested framework which I'm not going to argue for/against.

In terms of reality, libertarians skew wealthy and less social. Like most groups they are more likely to rationalize a system that is congruent on the surface with their place in society.

Yes it is.

> Libertarianism centres around freedom (ie, liberty).

Libertarianism centers around the individual. Which is why it disagrees with the notion that a private person or group should be regulated even if that might increase net liberty in society as a whole.

This is patent nonsense. "Anti-government" libertarian types (who aren't actually anti-government, by the way) have no interest in throwing masses of people in jail. Only 10% of the prison population is housed in a private prison - if the libertarians were in charge they'd all go broke.

No, the problem is the big government people who want to incarcerate everyone who spits on the sidewalk - the very antithesis of a libertarian.

I was remarking about your specific claim about the Libertarian perspective and your implication that they’re inconsistent:

> [libertarians] see the police as necessary to insulate them from the negative externalities of late-stage capitalism.

The libertarian belief that a “rising tide floats all boats” might be incorrect, but inaccuracy and inconsistency are different things. Moreover, progressive policies have often been hard on the poor, and socialist and communist policies have been absolutely disastrous. No political ideology is blameless.

I wasn't saying libertarianism isn't valid. I was saying that making a claim about what libertarianism is is necessarily suspect, mine as much as yours.

> Libertarian insight is more relevant because it's deduced using principled and empirically evident reasoning.

Are the principles deduced from empirically evident reasoning, or is it as questionably axiomatic as any other system?

This isn't a "libertarianism makes sense" claim you're making; this is a "libertarians are so awesome" claim. Furthermore, neither this sentence nor your economics analogy actually refutes my essential claim that the inability to evaluate and reason at anything other than the individual level makes it impossible to speak usefully about groups of people. The empirical evidence is that groups have significant effects on people. It is quite clear that it is extremely rare, if at all extant, that people can be defined without relation to a group.

That leaves libertarianism and its radical individualism very suspect, from an empirical point of view.

> False dichotomy ;)

You have to present a third alternative to show it's a false dichotomy.

> It's simply saying, here's a framework for analyzing human action, and here's what the outcomes will be.

To be frank, that's not a philosophy at all. That's a model. These are two hugely different things, not least because philosophies are normative.

Libertarianism, as I understand it, is founded on the claim that the word "liberty" has an esteemed place in the structure of the world. That isn't a "framework for analyzing human action"; that's an assertion that "freedom is important and we should not impinge on it". This is a really significant deviation from your claims.

Or I guess you could disagree with all this. Are you sure you're a libertarian? You haven't brought up freedom or liberty at all. You kinda sound like an economist.