"Libertarians are like house cats: absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."
> Pretty typically libertarian—freedom as long as nothing gets more dangerous. Kind of like rebellious children.
Or, as this guy[1] put it, like house cats. “convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”
As a former Libertarian who luckily grew out of that phase, I love this analogy.
> In a perfectly libertarian society, the bullies would not only take your lunch money, they would murder your family, burn your house, and leave you for dead by the side of the road.
What brand of libertarianism is the author talking about here?
> Obviously that doesn’t work 100% of the time, though.
What a great way to describe libertarianism in a single sentence. The vast majority of their talking points and ideas fall apart quite easily under any sort of scrutiny or contact with the real world.
> This is you dictating how I behave - which I find a much larger pile of BS, personally.
Societies dictate how their members behave in significant ways according to moral beliefs. It's always been that way and it always will be. The libertarian solution is BS in this context, because it appeals to libertarian morals that aren't actually held by the people who are being complained about.
>There's never a lack of rules because we all understand natural law.
No we don't.
More to the point, I can guarantee that not everyone agrees with your understanding of whatever 'natural law' is, or with your inalienable right to exercise that view in their presence. Not even Libertarians agree on that.
> My feeds are full of sociopathic libertarians calling for government to make sure they never suffer any consequences for their failure to adequately manage risk?
Not sure to whom you’re referring, but they’re not libertarians.
> Any regular person who doesn't have a personal army of servants, sycophants, and paid-for intellectuals knows that those axioms taken a priori are bullshit.
I dunno...libertarianism seems fairly popular these days - in my opinion this is unfortunate.
> anyone can do anything to anybody else at any time
That isn't libertarianism at all. Libertarianism is you can do whatever you want, provided you do not employ force or fraud against others. There's more to it than that, but that's the core idea. Another way to say the core idea is people have inalienable rights - life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Regulations exist to protect people not to impose their will on you. Fireworks is a good example: some people are qualified to operate and many are not. Countries with lax fireworks regulations (big surprise here) have lots of fireworks injuries.
The problem with libertarian values is that they assume that all people within society are rational, capable of making their own decisions or ones that don’t harm or adversely impact other people.
Want to listen to loud music? No one is going to stop you. In fact, go do it now! But don’t create a political or legal framework where a child or unsuspecting adult could permanently damage their hearing. Or blow their hands off with a firework. Or accidentally kill themselves with a weapon you’re using to live out a constitutional fantasy.
>Just don't take my freedom of self destruction. It's an important one to me, whether or not you feel the same.
You have that freedom regardless of whether the government allows deadly food to be sold or not. A famous libertarian economist once said that we can't only consider the ideal in isolation from the actual policies that are enacted toward that ideal - his main consideration was the capitalist idea of freedom, but mine is the idea of public health and harm due to negligence.
>I'm just trying to eat a hypothetical pufferfish, maaaan.
No you're not, you're arguing for society to be structured in such a way that companies are allowed to use dangerous products in what they sell to people. You can eat the pufferfish (and I must say that I urge you to) but that doesn't mean others should have to bear the cost of fearing if their next meal will kill them.
>No, that isn't a good reason to arrest me for buying or selling a fish.
This is about as reductionist as the claim that knife murder is simply the actuation of muscles and the thrusting of a metal object. How can you illegalise moving metal objects?
>The most ridiculous laws you people make are the ones that make parts of nature illegal
Plenty of things part of nature are illegal, including (but not limited to) rubbing the back of a frog that produces deadly toxins onto all the objects in your home.
> I'm not a libertarian exactly, but it always boggles my mind how the philosophy that at least tries to remain consistent with the ideal of not aggressing on the life, liberty, or property of others receives some of the most derisive comments.
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.
"Oh my god I'm being eaten by a fucking bear" --also libertarians
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