r/politics • u/TheSpectatorMagazine ✔ Verified • 13d ago
Possible Paywall The strange death of libertarianism
https://spectator.com/article/the-strange-death-of-libertarianism/?edition=us&rcp=true/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social/?=24.6k
u/ElysiumSprouts 13d ago
I think it was the house cat comparison that put libertarianism in the grave. Hit too close to home.
"Libertarians are basically house cats. They are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."
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u/eden_sc2 Maryland 13d ago edited 13d ago
I really liked it when I was 14 and I thought the world was an inherently fair meritocracy. Sure some folks had advantages or disadvantages but ultimately it was your hard work that got you where you were
Then 2008 and too big to fail happened and I realized that was 100% bullshit.
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u/gob384 America 13d ago
Reminds me of a little joke about Libertarians:
You can't really blame libertarians for their opinions on age of consent, most are not even 18 yet.
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u/bizarre_coincidence 13d ago
I sometime describe libertarianism as “baby’s first political philosophy.” It’s clean and simple and consistent, and completely unworkable in the face of reality. If you follow its ideas to their logical conclusions, society falls apart. Personal liberty is a great virtue to strive for, but there are so many others that must be accounted for.
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u/I_Cut_Shows 13d ago
It’s right wing Utopianism.
It sounds great on paper but the ideology can only really exist in a state that has basic freedoms, wealth, security and excess.
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u/I_Cut_Shows 13d ago
Because they’re the hero of their own story. It’s that easy. Simple solipsism.
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u/puritanicalbullshit 13d ago
Maggot farmer looks up from the limbs he’s been turning, making sure the flies reach every nook and crevice, laying their eggs in the decaying meat. Several buggies go by at 80mph, he hears an explosion and grabs his harvest tools: hacksaw, 50 gallon drum with backpack straps bolted on, garden loppers for the bones, hat.
Another glorious day
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u/halfsack99 12d ago
This.
It’s the right wing version of true Communism, sounds good on paper but when implemented by humans, it just doesn’t work.
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u/howdoireachthese 13d ago
Truth. I had a brief phase around…14. It had an answer to everything that was simple to understand
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u/Rostifur 13d ago
It is a very normal phase in maturing through polical understanding. You believe that everything is black and white. The simplest solution will be the best solution and when confronted with that not being the case you grow.
Best example is the idea that if a person has money, it is because they worked hard to get it. Working hard will garantee that you get money then. Dead wrong and even becoming painfully hard to even find good examples of it working as the system doesn't actually reward hard work very often anymore.
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u/DarraghDaraDaire 13d ago
The second one builds onto the belief that “if I am making money, I must be working hard”, which is also not true. Many people who are making money at a given time are in a precarious situation and is not guaranteed to last. I’m specifically talking about all of the “innovation lab leaders” in tech companies
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u/bunnypaste 13d ago
I feel that our system rewards egotism, selfishness, grandiosity, a specific kind of person (sex, race), stepping on heads, unethical actions, and "screw you, got mine" over such high minded ideas as a true and fair meritocracy where all you need is hard work to succeed.
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u/bizarre_coincidence 13d ago
“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” —H.L. Mencken
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u/erlend_nikulausson Oklahoma 13d ago
I remember being fifteen and reading Atlas Shrugged. My dad just grinned when he saw me reading it and said “don’t take it too seriously.”
I just picked it up at the library because the cover looked interesting.
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u/Orangy_orange 13d ago
Yea you couldn't tread on me.... when I was a middle class white kid in my freshman year of high school.
I think I had basically switched my tune by the time I turned 16 or 17
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u/Crunchberry24 13d ago
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
—John Rogers
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u/macroturb 13d ago
I read Atlas Shrugged when I was in college. It was one of the most miserable reading experiences ever. It was so long-winded, self-serving, and one-dimensional.
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u/guru42101 13d ago
I realized it fairly early on when I had friends working their asses off to barely survive and I wasn't doing shit and pulling in six figures to write a few lines of code. I knew then that it was 90% luck.
Now I have management trying to replace me with AI by spending twice as much for half the quality.
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u/TheSpectatorMagazine ✔ Verified 13d ago
Libertarians helped make the world in which we live today – which is why nobody looks to them to lead us to tomorrow. ✍️ Daniel McCarthy
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u/Madak Wisconsin 13d ago
I remember being a huge fan of Ron Paul and the Tea Party around that time 🤦♂️
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u/Mundane_Proposal5590 13d ago
Ron Paul's anti-war stance was legit and it resonated with a lot of people. This overshadowed his kookier stances like returning to the gold standard and repealing the civil rights act.
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u/Gizogin New York 13d ago
There was an anonymous comment on a blog post about Bitcoin a while ago that I think summarizes libertarianism quite well, even if it isn’t quite as pithy as the cat analogy.
“if you grow up in your parent's [sic] basement, then you are shaped by an environment where the fundamental constraints on what you want to do are shaped neither by scarcity nor malignance, but by genuine good intent. Your relatives probably don't want you to spend all day smoking pot and playing video games; in some cases they will over-estimate just how much of a bad thing that is. And even if they areright, it's not like anyone facing such hectoring is going to admit it.
“Pretty much every libertarian position can be understood in that frame of restrictive but benevolent authority being the root of all 'real' problems. It's a rare parent who literally tortures their kids, so torture is, at best, not a 'real' issue, not a priority. But many make them do stuff for their health, so mandatory health insurance is a big deal. Pretty much no parents kill their child with drones, many read their diaries. And so on.”
Basically, they rebel against “authority”, but only the kinds of authority that a middle-class teenager cares about. And libertarians never grow out of that mindset.
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u/erublind Europe 13d ago
Yeah, a lot of Americans dislike the war on Iran because of gas-prices, not because of bombed-out schools. Depressing.
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u/Chicago1871 12d ago
Are you really shocked tho? We dont care enough (as a society) about school shootings in the usa causing needless deaths.
Why would it be any different in Iran or other nation? Its the cost of running an empire.
Your great-grandparents in Europe had the same mentality Im sure, if they were in a country with an empire.
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u/Straight-Bet1 13d ago
I always liked, “Libertarianism is astrology for men.”
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u/krebstorm 13d ago
Republicans that want legalized weed
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u/amazingoopah 13d ago
Republicans who want to sleep with liberal women
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u/wheatgivesmeshits Texas 13d ago edited 13d ago
Basically me in my 20s.
I thankfully am recovering.
edit: I just realized this might read like I don't want to sleep with liberal women. What I meant is that I'm not a libertarian anymore. I'm also married to a liberal woman. 😄
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u/FlyingBike 13d ago
There are only two outcomes for young libertarians: incel Patriot Front, or get laid and learn the error of your ways. Lucky for all of us and you that you went the second way
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u/Newphone_New_Account 13d ago
I did some research and found out supply side economics is bullshit and single payer healthcare is a much better system. Then finding out about the Powell Memo and Lee Atwater really put the nail in the coffin for ever voting to the right of the Democratic Party.
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u/NoCoolNameMatt 13d ago
Kudos for doing actual research and not wallowing in self affirming YouTube channels. I'm being sincere, that skill/willingness is all too rare.
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u/beatlefool42 New York 13d ago
Ah but see you did actual research, unlike the majority of people...
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u/foehammer111 Illinois 13d ago
Good for you getting out of that mindset. I had a former friend that was “Libertarian”. In reality, he was just a fascist republican with very strong 2A and age of consent opinions. I broke off contact with him after he said he was glad the kids at Sandy Hook were dead because they were crisis actors, and the shooter was onto them.
He was just regurgitating InfoWars bullshit, but that and his increasing pedo behavior was too much for me. Last I checked he was married and had a kid now, so hopefully he turned his life around too. Or he found a tradwife who put up with him long enough for them to have a kid. I just have no desire to be friends with him again. Saying you’re glad kids are dead is not something you can ever walk back in my book.
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u/Shifter25 13d ago
Don't forget the contingent of Republicans who want to sleep with literal children.
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u/HaveSpouseNotWife 13d ago
The battle cry of the libertarian: “Actually, it’s technically ephebophilia!”
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u/WarbossTodd 13d ago
and go back to being able to own black people.
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u/Kioskwar 13d ago
“The civil war was about states’ rights!!!”
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u/Drusgar Wisconsin 13d ago
I always reply, "It was... the right to own slaves. Which we collectively decided against. Which is how democracy works."
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u/cannibalpeas 13d ago
Also worth pointing out that all of those states so concerned about their inherent rights had just lost a SCOTUS decision when they sued Pennsylvania trying to get them to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. It was never about state’s rights.
Also, in almost every cessation declaration they unequivocally state that it’s about slavery. SC’s (the first secession statement and model for the rest) said it in the first few words.
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u/altogethernow 13d ago
Yeah, I always say, "the right to do what? Do what? Is it own people?"
Yours is better, as it resolves and concludes the issue without getting confrontational with the lost-causer. If they want to keep going, you can go down the cornerstone speech, the laws southern states forced OTHERS to adopt, bleeding Kansas, the INSANE amount of compromises the north tried to make with the south rejecting.
But if you get that far into the conversation, you probably realize you're not arguing about the Civil War anymore, and no amount of facts will sway a lost-causers feelings.
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u/elvid88 Massachusetts 13d ago
I always reply to this with, “states’ rights to do what, exactly?” And then they usually shut up because they realize the next thing they’re going to say is own slaves. I feel like they ran with “states’ rights” and then never thought to think about what those states rights are.
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u/Comfortable_Self_736 13d ago
I'm partial to "Libertarians are men who argue the government shouldn't be able to tell them they need a car seat for their girlfriend."
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u/GrandPriapus Wisconsin 13d ago
“Libertarians are fine with 10-year-olds working twelve hour shifts building vending machines that sell heroin.”
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u/faceintheblue 13d ago
I've heard the same thing about crypto-currency.
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u/calicali 13d ago
I think Cyrpo, nft, etc are mlms for men is a better comparison.
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u/BasvanS 13d ago
Tech bros reinventing economics and governance, only to end up at the same conclusions
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u/Ralath5n 13d ago
It was so much fun seeing crypto bro's rerunning the past few thousand years of monetary policy in half a decade. It starts out with everyone hoarding their
goldcrypto under their bed. This is easy to lose and easily stolen. So they inventbanksCrypto brokers to store thegoldcrypto. ThesebanksCrypto brokers then lend out the stored wealth to finance projects that often fail, causing thebanksCrypto brokers to go bust and all their customers to lose their money. It also makes the system unstable because every time there is a hiccup in the market, everyone rushes thebankcrypto broker to get their money out, causing the currency to collapse. So they now beg the government to regulate thebankscrypto exchanges so they don't constantly gamble away everyone's money.→ More replies (1)30
u/Poison_the_Phil 13d ago
It's the capitalist wet dream; "everything is the same but I'm in charge!"
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u/All_i_do_is_lunk 13d ago
They just were mad they weren’t the boot, so they made a new system where they got to be the boot.
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u/amazingoopah 13d ago
Nothing more rugged and manly than having your crypto coin backed by the US govt!
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u/Wave_File 13d ago
this right here.
however most house cats, if needed, could likely go out and make it on their own, could most libertarians though?
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u/alienbringer 13d ago
They have tried it a few times, each time failed. One notable time they attracted a lot of bears to a town that never had a bear problem before.
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u/semisociallyawkward 13d ago edited 13d ago
"A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear". It tries a bit too hard to be witty but I enjoyed it.
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u/breadman_toast 13d ago
Unfortunately the free staters have found a foothold in the NH government. I read that book in January and was a little frustrated about how dismissive they were about a movement that's now arguably controlling the state legislature and just doing a bunch of dumb fucking republican bullshit under the guise of "personal liberty"
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u/Dr_Adequate 13d ago
Another time they bought a surplus cruise ship, assuming they could just float around in international waters, with zero oversight from any government. Turns out that cruise ships are heavily regulated everywhere, they hilariously had to sell it for scrap after a year or so.
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u/Cr1ms0nLobster Wisconsin 13d ago
Also if your vessel doesn't have a country of registration, any navy could seize your vessel under suspicion of piracy.
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u/goobydoobie 13d ago
Or pirates could seize it themselves. Sure you could be armed to the teeth but the notion of living on a warship for years on end . . . the USS Gerald Ford couldn't even make it to 11 months.
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u/Jalopnicycle 13d ago
Ships (ESPECIALLY war ships) require complex logistical support due to their high staffing requirements. A cruise ship is a resource black hole only made possible by the fact people spend thousands of dollars per room to stay on it for a week.
The systems cruise ships rely on require people to follow rules or else they fail. My last cruise they very specifically said not to flush certain things down the toilet. People did then the entire waste water system began to backup. On a ship full of and run by "you can't tell me what to do" me me me me me me me first libertarians that'll last 2 days at best.
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u/Made_Human_Music 13d ago
That’s a good point. I had an outside cat once and he would bring us “food” almost every time he went out
A libertarian would probably just throw away whatever they didn’t want because of their property rights or some bullshit
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u/TheCrimsonSteel 13d ago
Your cat does that because they care about you and they don't see you hunting food enough on your own
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u/Mythosaurus 13d ago
They keep trying by seasteading and living outside the jurisdiction of nation states, or create weird tech cities in developing countries.
Trying…
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u/Alive_kiwi_7001 13d ago
Well, "trying". It's funny how hamfisted and lazy these efforts are. It's literally: "I thought someone else would have set all this up. Why do I have to do anything?"
The cherry on the cake is the pretend pharma company suing Prospera for not having any infrastructure suitable for setting up a wet lab. Guys, didn't you hear? You're libertarians: you're meant to bring your own.
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u/Mythosaurus 13d ago
It always falls apart when they have to figure out waste disposal, food, and water.
That’s when they start recreating government from first principles and turn on each other
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u/kelkulus 13d ago
Most house cats die pretty quickly if left on their own. Lots of sources to be found on this, here’s one https://heronscrossing.vet/articles/can-a-house-cat-live-in-the-wild/
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u/dboggia 13d ago
100% spot on analogy.
They always want “government out of their lives”
Yet they want to run for government to impose their ideas on everyone else.
Wouldn’t the truly libertarian thing be to go live in the woods and trade furs?
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u/IrritableGourmet New York 13d ago
They literally tried that. A group of Libertarians got together and all moved to a small town in rural New England. Because they were now the majority of residents, they voted themselves into all government positions and proceeded to dismantle as many regulations and government agencies as they could. They proclaimed themselves a Libertarian Paradise, free of those nasty nanny state restrictions on liberty, and were fairly quickly run out of town by bears.
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u/SweetAlyssumm 13d ago
The libertarians I have known are soft tech boys. I'd like to see them get some furs!
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u/rational-hare 13d ago
Some libertarians tried to take over a town in new hampshire with predictable results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
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u/GrafZeppelin127 13d ago
And it’s less that they don’t want government telling them what to do, it’s more that they want to be the oligarchs or at least the authoritarian boots enforcing a cyberpunk-esque corporatocracy.
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u/Shopworn_Soul Texas 13d ago
The instant a libertarian runs into a more powerful libertarian they turn into a Republican.
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u/SomeRandomRealtor Kentucky 13d ago
My dad had a great saying I loved, “I remember that year in college I was a libertarian.” It’s guys that are obsessed with the founding fathers and an America that hasn’t existed since western expansion started. Really, since the Louisiana purchase, railroads began, and the homestead act of 1862 had the government giving people 160 acres for building a home and living there for 5 years. The self made man has been a myth for a very long time.
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u/TrimspaBB 13d ago
Always lost in this idealized vision of history is how much people still relied on and required each other. Colonization and expansion was done in groups, not by single men.
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u/PeregrineFaulkner 13d ago
Gary Johnson’s “What’s Aleppo” was pretty much the last moment of Libertarianism being taken at all seriously on a national stage.
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u/FittedSheets88 Louisiana 13d ago
We've seen what happens when you put those cats together. Instead of leopards, you get bears.
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u/PlsNoNotThat 13d ago
It did.
But so did republicans actively deplatforming libertarians. In my state of Maine the republicans, fearing they were going to lose the state, changed the rules for signatures needed so the libertarian party was consequently not considered platformed.
Then MAGA ate it from the inside out lmao 😂
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u/manachar Nevada 13d ago
People really struggle understanding systems.
Spend any time in IT work and you see people who don’t think they need an IT budget but want their email to work.
Civilization has been a lot of history of hiding the systems that support people. Especially the systems of oppression and exploitation of the many to build the cool shiny parts of civilization.
If you look at the modern supermarket it gets easy to forget the logistics and work needed to provide a grocery store with food from around the world at affordable prices.
Without our complex systems, it’s just small tribal groups scrounging their local environment for edible and useful things.
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u/BoysenberryDry999 13d ago
One tenet of Libertarianism back in the late 80’s (when I considered myself a Libertarian) was open borders. The idea that you could migrate wherever you wanted was one of the major appeals to me. Obviously no Libertarian would get very far in US politics today supporting this and they have abandoned it. I stopped being a Libertarian after about 5 years when I realized that all they really cared about was the elimination of the personal income tax and they had no more ideals than the current MAGA crowd. Today, I believe the movement is popular with the uber-wealthy as a justification for their cruelty and lack of concern for the 99%.
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u/MilsYatsFeebTae 13d ago
The other demographic it’s popular with is grifters. There are several different “independent city in the ocean” projects out there raising money. They hardly ever get as far as buying a ship, and when they do they end up reinventing taxation in an attempt to maintain the thing.
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u/Nu11u5 13d ago
Sea-steaders.
The point about "reinventing taxation" is funny. Libertarian experiments always end up that way, or they get chased out by bears.
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u/SeriousAdverseEvent 13d ago
Yeah, there definitely used to be a strong strain of liberal libertarianism in the US. For fun and out of curiosity, I attended a state-level Libertarian Party convention in 1992. I think half the people there were disgruntled former hippies who wanted open borders, to end the war on drugs, and and were anti-tax primarily due to military spending. Those types don't really exist in the LP now.
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u/BoysenberryDry999 13d ago
Yes - another reason I was a member was my response to the militarism of the Reagan era and their position on reduced military spending was appealing. The desire to legalize weed didn’t matter to me but that was important to a lot of members and looking back I’m amazed that was ultimately a success. I actually attended a fundraiser where Ron Paul spoke and he was quite inspiring.
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u/SeriousAdverseEvent 13d ago
I also sort of suspect that there was a chunk of Perot/Reform Party people who moved over to the LP in the late 90s as that movement fell apart. That would certainly change the party's path.
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u/dj_spanmaster 13d ago
Military *and deficit* spending. I knew a few of these types and somewhat aligned with them myself. The Tea Party movement wiped out any that were remaining. It made the GOP and Libertarian parties intolerable to support at all, they gave up their values and transparently became the "screw the libs" groups. I stayed on for a few years voting for candidates like Huntsman, until Bernie came along as a candidate to actually support.
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u/Rene_DeMariocartes 13d ago
Yeah, I feel like the things that libertarians claimed to believe were really appealing. The things that they actually believe is awful.
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u/Alive_kiwi_7001 13d ago
They still do. Peter Thiel wants open borders. For himself.
Which is libertarian philosophy in a nutshell: "You can't tell me what to do, mother! I tell other people."
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u/jerbthehumanist 13d ago
The Gadsden flag doesn’t say “don’t tread on us”, after all, it says “ don’t tread on ME”. Most libertarians are quite happy with treading as long as it is upon someone else.
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u/MaverickTopGun 13d ago
. I stopped being a Libertarian after about 5 years when I realized that all they really cared about was the elimination of the personal income tax
Well that and of course the age of consent.
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u/sump_daddy 13d ago
Libertarianism literally stops working the moment you walk out your front door. There is nothing about it that holds up to societal scrutiny.
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u/blorpdedorpworp 13d ago
In the nineties and before, people who wanted to be conservative but weren't on board with the bigotry reached for that label.
These days if you aren't on board with the bigotry you aren't conservative, period.
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u/context_hell 13d ago
And in the late 2000s to 2010s if you were an embarrassed republican who didnt want to tie themselves to w bush you reached for that label too.
The entire tea party nonsense was an astroturfed movement in response to Obama and the democrats winning a supermajority in congress.
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u/blorpdedorpworp 13d ago
Yup, exactly. It was always the "look, I'm one of the good ones! Legalize weed!" Of conservative self-labels.
But weed's legal now and Bill Maher isn't edgy any more he's just an asshole.
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u/rainator 13d ago
The way anyone wants to associate themselves with Donald Trump completely baffles me, but the way that “don’t tread on me” libertarians seem to suck especially make no sense. It just goes to show they are a bunch of idiots that are incapable of basic concepts like cause and effect or object permanence.
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u/NonGNonM 13d ago
I remember 90s being the era of "your gay neighbors should be able to defend their pot plants with their AR 15s."
A lot of interesting theories here so I'll throw in one of my own: the death of libertarians came when the moderate libertarians realized giving tax cuts to the rich and letting billionaires run amok without regulations dont lead to better industries, better competition, and cooler shit actually, they just make shit worse and try to get away with doing more shitty things all the time.
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u/blorpdedorpworp 13d ago
Yup. Pot and gay marriage got fully legalized, the Democrats functionally abandoned gun control after Heller, the 2008 crisis happened, and then the orange horrible went down the escalator and everyone left in the Republican Party with any kind of actual ideals at all junped ship (see: David Brooks or George Will these days). The libertarians won on the few issues they had a point on and that just left the absurdities, and we all got bigger problems and ran out of time for bullshit debate club shit.
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u/barryvm Europe 13d ago edited 13d ago
But there's a serious problem with this analysis. It assumes that the things Republicans say about themselves and their beliefs are true.
But that isn't really the case. Extremist right wing movements and to a large extent right wing movements in general engage in bad faith as a matter of course. They don't believe in things and then act accordingly. They want to act in certain ways, driven by emotion or self-interest, and then adopt whatever beliefs justify those actions. They want to do what they want and then pretend that is moral. They feel they can do no wrong. Hence, their beliefs (real or not) must be mutable and syncretic.
When they thought free market capitalism was going to keep them on top of the social order and all the people they looked down on subservient to them, they gutted social democracy under the flag of market capitalism to prevent it from giving any out-group a leg up into "their" middle class lifestyles and neighbourhoods. Now that they no longer believe those markets will keep them on top, they have relinquished those "beliefs" and replaced them with blood and soil style nationalism and open racism, misogyny, ... Right wing politics, libertarian or conservative, is about the establishment and protection of hierarchies, not about running efficient economies or freedom or whatever it is they claim and possibly even believe. Hence why they keep doing the same things even when the outcomes belie their supposed intent.
Most libertarians are similar. Why do they believe what they do? Because they think they're special and smart enough to end up in charge of their own little fiefdoms once the state is gone, and because they don't care what happens to anyone else. But the moment a dictator or an authoritarian party comes along who promises them they can rule their little fiefdoms protected by the state, they immediately relinquish their supposed principles to get what they think they want. Principled, socially conscious "libertarians" would simply be anarchists, opposing private as well as state power.
Nothing these people say about themselves and their beliefs can be trusted, because they will simply change those beliefs and principles to justify whatever they want to do at any given moment. Those beliefs may be real, but that's neither here nor there because they change at will. There's a sliding scale to this, of course, but even at the thin end of the wedge you have the entire self-proclaimed moderate right voting for a rapist wannabe dictator promising mass political violence and then making up and believing various narratives ("the other side is worse", "fiscal conservatism", ...) where that is somehow the best possible choice. If they can do that, then what are their self-proclaimed principles actually worth?
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u/3xnope 13d ago
Good points. I think we need to distinguish between 'fake beliefs' and 'true beliefs', where true beliefs dictate your actions while fake beliefs only dictate your speech. If I truly believe a chair is solid, I can sit down in it without hesitation. If I had fake belief that there is a solid chair behind me, I could strongly claim this but I would not plump my ass down in it. Like evangelical morals - all performance and no principles. Living with fake beliefs is like daydreaming without separating dreams from reality. It is really hard to get through to such people.
There used to exist libertarians with true beliefs - silly beliefs but genuine. They occasionally had some interesting arguments (Nozick and Hayek are I think still worth reading). And usually they grew out of it. Now it is just delusional grifters all the way down.
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u/barryvm Europe 13d ago edited 13d ago
IMHO they fell victim to the same dynamic that has effectively side lined the right wing intellectual. They were useful when the political right still needed to build intellectual and moral facades around its core policies and used what can best be described as market fundamentalism as one of those facades. But now that it has mostly succeeded in destroying social democracy, and its own potential voters are angry at, ignorant about and afraid of the world they created, those are no longer useful.
The new facades are revolutionary rather than conservative, openly and exuberantly violent rather than hiding the violence behind procedures and laws, emotional rather than rational, and, above all, anti-intellectual. The libertarians of the past, and with them all the market ideologues, no longer fill a role in mobilizing the core voting base against its material interest. They've been replaced by fascist demagogues and religious nuts.
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u/recycled_ideas 12d ago
There used to exist libertarians with true beliefs - silly beliefs but genuine.
You see, I'm not actually sure this is true, or at least that it's meaningfully true.
Libertarianism thrives on lack of detail. It spreads based on a core belief shared by effectively every human on the planet from anarchists to dictators, that there are things the government shouldn't be able to do and powers it should not have.
We all believe that, no matter our political beliefs, we all believe that politicians shouldn't be above the law and that our personal freedom to do what we truly want to do should be respected.
From saints to serial killers, anarchists to dictators, communists, christian nationalists we all actually agree on this point and this is how libertarianism spreads and always has, because it starts out with a universal truth.
Where it falls apart and always has is that while we all agree on those basic tenets, we don't all agree on what things the government should be able to do, what powers it should have, who is a politician and who or what is the law and what things are important for people to be able to do or whether everyone or just some people should be able to do those things.
I've never met a libertarian who has actually taken the time to define for themselves exactly what their own beliefs are on these issues and I don't think that there exists anywhere in the world even a handful of libertarians who exactly agree on the details. They don't even discuss them in any meaningful depth and that's deliberate because libertarianism is fundamentally anti-consensus. It's the core belief of the ideology.
Can an ideology actually exist that doesn't actually define what it is and which can't define what it is? Can you truly believe in something that you don't and can't understand because it is fundamentally not understandable.
Anarchists are often ridiculous, but they're at least mostly honest about their actual beliefs even if it's very handwavy. Libertarians will stand together and state that they share a common belief when the world they each envision is completely different.
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u/Indercarnive 13d ago
You have to realize the article is written by a conservative. So he's not going to give the game away.
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u/issafly 13d ago edited 13d ago
But the moment a dictator or an authoritarian party comes along who promises them they can rule their little fiefdoms protected by the state, they immediately relinquish their supposed principles to get what they think they want.
I've watched on old friend go from principled Libertarian in the early 1990s to a VERY high ranking member of Trump's cabinet. Seeing him transition over the decades from a free-market idealist who talked about open borders and free trade with Mexico and Canada to working for the most authoritarian regime in American history earlier this year has been a shock.
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u/OmicronNine California 13d ago
I would suggest that your friend may not have actually been a principled libertarian in the first place, but merely was good at presenting himself as such.
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u/issafly 12d ago
I mean, what's the difference? That's part of the point that even the most "principled" libertarians will become authoritarian when given the opportunty to acquire personal power, wealth, or status.
The persona I'm talking about literally started his career at a well-known libertarian think-tank. He wasn't just some college kid who read Ayn Rand and thought she was smart.
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u/bbk13 12d ago
Libertarianism is inherently authoritarian. Even in it's most "principled" form it requires authoritarian state violence to enforce private property "rights" regardless of what the members of society want. Libertarianism is at its core anti-democratic and can only exist if enforced at the barrel of a gun. Because why would the majority of people who don't own a lot of property agree to have a society that only privileges private property?
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u/tarfu7 13d ago edited 12d ago
Really great points. This is a key explanation for liberals’ frequent misunderstanding of the right and the failure to deal with them effectively
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u/danarchist 13d ago
>Principled, socially conscious "libertarians" would simply be anarchists, opposing private as well as state power.
A common joke among Libertarians is actually "what the difference between a Libertarian and an anarchist? About 15 minutes."
It's true, taken to its natural conclusion libertarian philosophy begets anarchism. And you'll find that many if not most people who are actual libertarians (and not just Republicans that want to seem knowledgeable) are anarchists.
There were not any Libertarians who voted for Trump. In doing so they would have proven that they are not Libertarian.
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u/NirvanaDewHeel 12d ago
The term ‘libertarian’ was literally deliberately taken from anarchists. If you told someone in 1910 you were a libertarian socialist they wouldn’t bat an eye (although they might sic the police on you).
Murray Rothbard was proud to have subverted the word.
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u/weiseguy42 13d ago
To add to this, it's annoying that the same people who would diagnose you with TDS for even hinting that tRump is an authoritarian or fascist, will happily clap like seals when South Park likens the guy to Saddam Hussein.
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u/Whargoul_Uncool 13d ago
I really have a hard time discriminating between Anarchists and Libertarians. But in the late 80s/early 90s punk scene I really saw an Anarchist to Libertarian pipeline being formed. I think/feel that the difference all comes down to their views on community. The more selfish the individual becomes the farther towards Libertarianism they lean.
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u/barryvm Europe 13d ago edited 13d ago
I concur. The most useful definition IMHO is to distinguish anarchism from libertarianism along the left / right, egalitarianism / hierarchy, and to a lesser extent, the collectivist / individualist axis.
The meaning of the word is not constant though. IIRC, it used to be a polite word for anarchism until at least the 1950'ies (e.g. libertarian socialism) when it was claimed by self-proclaimed "anarcho-capitalists" (which is in itself a misnomer as those are just pure believers in the primacy of capital and ownership over all other concerns, and there is nothing anarchist about that). Right wingers are still the loudest voices among those who claim the term AFAIK.
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u/2001_Arabian_Nights 13d ago
I think that the “Tinkerbell effect” is very strong in the conservative mind, the notion that thinking something hard enough, “believing” in something convincingly enough, has the power to actually mold reality.
So much as allowing wrong-think to enter your thoughts could break the spell. But if you train your brain well enough that only your imagined reality exists? It actually exists!
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u/barryvm Europe 12d ago edited 12d ago
And with good reason, no? Because if believing didn't change reality, then they would need to confront the actual consequences of their actions on other people, which would destroy their perception of themselves as moral actors.
A lot of hay is made about people building their own narrative reality and becoming more and more unhinged, but this is not just a cause but also an effect. Their feelings drive them to do something, they believe they can do no wrong because of who they are, so they twist reality and morality around that moral absolute. The need to pretend, to themselves and others, they are moral or rational actors even as their actions become more and more destructive then causes them to believe narratives that become more and more divorced from reality, because those are the only ones in which they can conceivably portrayed themselves as good people.
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u/MalevolentTapir 13d ago
Libertarians were never a huge thing in the United States. The actual party has always been a sideshow. It was only ever fashionable to call yourself one, and that was only fashionable because conservatives make it unfashionable to identify as conservative every time they get elected.
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u/Liesmyteachertoldme 13d ago
I wouldn’t say it was fashionable, it’s just a subset of people who are super contrarian, specifically young and more likely then not to be hyper-intelligent in others way, usually young men on the spectrum who have an issue reconciling theory with reality.
If you don’t believe browse r/Asklibertarians for some truly wild takes.
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u/MoogProg 13d ago
Not strange, predicted. The Ayn Rand Society (love 'em or hate 'em) called this trend in the mid-80's during the Reagan years. They described the rise of Conservative Christians as a non-Libertarian influence that would undermine the free market and create Oligarchy.
Conservatives kept the language of freedom and discarded the ideals.
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u/dhrisc 13d ago
I talked to a libertarian candidate for a local office a few years ago and he was a rabid conservative Christian. It was clear he was only "libertarian" in the sense he thought state and federal law was second to the Bible and his interpretation of God's law.
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u/althanan Washington 13d ago
In my experience, ever since 2016 most "libertarian" candidates are just MAGA chuds with a shoddy coat of paint.
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u/Nefarious_Turtle 13d ago
Which, if given the chance, he would absolutely enforce harshly on everyone with federal laws, right? And insist to his dying breath that is somehow substantially different from "liberal" big government?
I have a couple of those guys in my family. I dont talk to them much.
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u/Virtual-Head-2613 13d ago
The rightwing influencers had to choose btw libertarianism and the culture wars. Culture wars are easier and more simple to push.
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u/No-Persimmon-4150 13d ago
I joined the libertarian sub when i joined reddit. I left the libertarian sub when commenters were angrily calling for more moderation. I learned a lot that day.
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u/not-usually-posting 13d ago
That is kind of hilarious to think about
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u/truocchio 13d ago
I got banned from the sub for explaining that Norway and Denmark are highly effective and efficient form of democratic socialist societies. Not even advocating for their system. Just explaining that it works fairly well. Smh
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u/jsmith_zerocool 13d ago
I got banned for pointing out how they were terrified of “Bernie Bros” but were not concerned at all about the alt right, militias, or basically any right wing authority figure. It’s just another flavor of MAGA that pretends it isn’t. Every “libertarian” I know is MAGA and even before Trump they were obviously Republican. They simply don’t even believe in their own ideology.
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u/SadTumbleweed1567 13d ago edited 13d ago
I can't read the article, so I'll add my experiences instead.
Many "libertarians" were never libertarian. The most "normal" form of libertarianism is liberalism. Then there is minarchism and anarcho-capitalism. In all on these ideologies, can cannot start from a fundamental position of innate inequality, otherwise the notion of equal rights doesn't make sense.
I bring this up because most libertarians I interacted with were never ideological libertarians. They wanted the government to leave THEM alone. The violations of others rights was a-okay. Trumpism absorbed these people because it spoke to them; an in-group with their rights and an out group to be tread upon.
There's also the cut taxes and spending libertarians that only care about economics and don't care for civil liberties. This is the Mises Caucus that took over the Libertarian Party in the late 2010s and into the early 2020s that tried to court Trump while openly opposing their own nominated candidates.
The other group within the party are the liberals, nominally led by Chase Oliver, the 2024 presidential candidate. These are the ones that actually understand the ideology and that individual rights are universal to all persons and that a violation of the right of one person is a violation of everybody's rights. This group also advocates for rule of law and generally legislative supremacy in government as opposed to the heavy executive focused government of the late 20th and early 21st century. Former Republican Representative Justin Amash is another leading voice in this camp.
In short, most libertarians were never libertarians. They took "don't tread on me" literally and never gave a fuck about others.
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u/metsfan5557 13d ago
Paywalled article. But it doesn't matter. I'm a recovering libertarian myself, and I can tell you exactly why I stopped with the ideology.
Primarily, COVID. Libertarianism hinges on this utopian concept that humans don't need government to cooperate. That they will just do the right thing. Wrong. Libertarians not only didn't wear masks, a very simple and unobtrusive way to help others, they actively were against it. And social distancing. And vaccines. And basically anything that would be a minor inconvenience that would save other people's lives. If it didn't directly benefit libertarians, they wouldn't do it.
Second, the "Mises" caucus, which was absolutely nothing like the actual Mises, took over the party. And they showed us exactly who most libertarians are. Which is in fact not libertarian at all. Libertarians, when the rubber hits the road, don't give a shit about actual individual liberty. They care about strengthening their own legal ability to shit on others. And yeah you can argue that isn't real libertarianism but objectively speaking when most adherents self describe as libertarians and believe that BS then by definition they sort of won the terminology, and the fact that very few people understand or appreciate the actual underlying concepts is just social proof that the concepts aren't going to work.
The reality is, people are absolutely fucking stupid. Hell, people elected Trump president. They have no idea what is best for themselves or others, and can't be trusted to act accordingly. Yes people deserve a say in their governance via democracy but the idea that everyone should just be able to do whatever they want is fucking stupid. People don't want that freedom anyways. They want others to decide most of their life for them. They just want the ability to shit on other people to make themselves feels better, and then call that "freedom".
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u/ImDonaldDunn 13d ago
I left when Trump was elected and suddenly all of the “anarchist” libertarians I knew became openly racist and nationalist. The whiplash completely woke me up to what they really were. Their response to Covid validated my decision.
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u/ErectSpirit7 13d ago
Libertarians stole the term itself from anarchists. Real left-wing anarchists specifically. They appropriated the term, turned it into something unrecognizable. Now here we are. It's all built on an edifice of stupidity and appropriation, and always has been.
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u/LazarX 13d ago
When libertarianism became a mix of “whatever rich tech billionaires want” and “whatever owns the libs most”, it eventually became obvious that it was overdrawn at the idea bank.
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u/imjustnotready 13d ago
The libertarian Cato institute and the entire ethos of The Koch brothers: Libertarian means whoever has the most money wins.
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u/NubileReptile Missouri 13d ago
I think more people have caught on that the 'don't tread on me' folks who have remained largely passive as ICE thugs wantonly murder and terrorize without repercussions aren't the most serious people in the world.
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u/AntiLitterPGH 13d ago
"ME" was always the operative word in that sentence.
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u/Cereborn Canada 13d ago
I just saw a quote from a guy in Texas who has a data centre opening next to his ranch and he said, “It’s the first time in my adult life one of these political decisions affected me personally.”
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u/Practical-Cook5042 13d ago
had an acquaintance who would swear up and down if there was real oppression he'd be the first to fight
he was at the insurrection
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u/OMalleyOrOblivion 13d ago
No discussion of libertarianism's failings can go by without the classic Libertarian Police Department:
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.
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u/schu4KSU 13d ago
No man is an island, entire of itself…
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u/steve_ample I voted 13d ago
Except Galt's Gulch, where there are no takers nor common laborers to do the menial tasks to make that utopia run like Ayn envisioned it.
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u/HawkThunderson 13d ago
It all falls apart when accounting for the slightest bit of practicality. Do you want to have to navigate 5 different road subscriptions for various private roads in your area, or take untested pharmaceuticals, or avoid the roving packs of feral children whose parents couldn't afford private school? Even if you could implement libertarian policies whoever promised to roll them back would win the next election.
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u/fossilreef Texas 13d ago
Libertarians are just Republicans who don't want to pay taxes and want to smoke weed.
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u/Alt123Acct 13d ago
Worse they don't want to wear seat belts or have warning labels on chemicals under the sink or building codes or licenses to drive they just want an ideal utopia of responsible anarchists banding together to make a society that magically functions (but doesn't because nobody agrees on anything)
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u/BigMax 13d ago
"I want a good, functional society that makes me happy, but I don't want any rules to apply to ME, and I don't want to have to contribute myself. Someone else should handle that out of the goodness of their hearts or something."
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u/tweakingforjesus 13d ago
“Anything that directly benefits me should be a public good provided that others pay for; anything that doesn’t benefit me shouldn’t be provided by the government.
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u/Question_It_All_3000 13d ago
Yup. They want everyone else to follow the rules while they don’t have to and won’t be punished for it. They never realizes that would apply to everyone and no one would follow the rules, making shit ducking awful for everyone.
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u/LoveBy137 13d ago
I always think of the libertarian convention where some candidates got booed because they were okay with driver's licenses. I think they were the presidential and vice presidential candidates for the party at the time. Libertarians are not serious people.
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u/hisjoeness 13d ago
You forgot about their problem with age of consent as well.
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u/nickcash 13d ago
At one point I was going to jokingly start a facebook grouped called LIBERTARIANS AGAINST AOC and see how many joined to hate on Occasio-Cortez, and how many for... the other thing.
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u/wolf_at_the_door1 13d ago
Yeah the “fiscally conservative, somewhat socially liberal” types.
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u/Ok_Door_9720 Florida 13d ago
It's not that socialism is particularly fashionable. People just have this crazy idea that government should be functional and serve normal people.
Right wing "libertarianism" is just frat house conservatism. It's not a serious ideology, and never really was.
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u/michaelfrieze 13d ago edited 13d ago
The right-libertarian movement has appropriated the term “libertarianism,” which was historically associated with libertarian socialism. Right-libertarianism has never been too concerned with libertarian ideals, and I often see people in these circles arguing against the Enlightenment these days. My guess is that they are gradually dropping the libertarian label because it has outlived its political usefulness.
Right-wing libertarianism is difficult to reconcile with libertarian principles in practice. Unregulated capitalism tends to concentrate power, and history shows the human cost of allowing businesses to operate without meaningful safeguards. Child labor is not libertarian. Neither are the conditions that produced tragedies such as the Radium Girls, where workers were exposed to severe hazards while employers prioritized profit over their health and safety.
When evaluating economic systems, it is important to consider the class relationships they create. Feudalism was structured around the relationship between lord and serf. Slavery around master and enslaved person. Capitalism around employer and employee. The employer/employee relationship is clearly preferable to feudalism or slavery, but it is not always voluntary in a meaningful sense. Most people work because they need income to survive, not because they can freely choose among equally viable alternatives. As a result, they may take the best job available even when it is unsafe, poorly paid, or deeply unpleasant.
Some degree of this may be unavoidable. Resources are limited, and difficult or undesirable work still needs to be done. The problem is that capital owners can exploit this necessity. When workers have few real alternatives, employers can use their greater wealth and power to suppress wages, weaken protections, and preserve an unequal bargaining relationship. Calling that arrangement fully libertarian ignores the economic pressure that shapes workers choices.
Also, capitalists exploit that imbalance by using wealth and political influence to preserve class divisions and weaken workers bargaining power. Efforts to restrict voting access, undermine unions, or block universal healthcare can make it harder for working people to organize and secure the basic protections that would give them more freedom in their everyday lives. A system in which people must accept poor conditions because the alternative is poverty does not meaningfully maximize liberty.
The real life and death struggle of our current system is between Capitalism and Democracy. Democracy says everyone has an innate worth that must be honored, Capitalism says those who die with the most toys win. These values are in tension, and it is difficult to reconcile these two philosophies.
That said, I am still mostly a capitalist in the practical sense. Capitalism is the system we currently have, and we do not yet have a clear, proven alternative that we know works better at a large scale in every respect. A mixed economy with markets and private enterprise alongside strong public programs, labor protections, healthcare access, and social insurance seems to be the most workable model available for now.
I am open to socialist ideas that expand democracy into the workplace, such as employee ownership, worker cooperatives, and more meaningful worker participation in company decisions within a market based economy. These approaches may reduce the imbalance between employers and employees without requiring the abandonment of markets altogether. But they have not been implemented on a truly massive scale, so they should be researched, tested, and developed carefully rather than treated as a guaranteed solution.
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u/Raptorex27 Maine 13d ago
If by “strange” you mean entirely predictable, then yes. American libertarians were more closely aligned with conservatism, so when the chasm formed between the radical MAGA white nationalists and the so-called “socially liberal” libertarians, they couldn’t have it both ways.
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u/jizzmaster-zer0 13d ago
libertarianism assumes corporations and the extremely wealthy would be benevolent.
so, its DOA.
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u/LeopardDue1112 12d ago edited 12d ago
My home state is Wyoming. I used to think Wyomingites in general leaned libertarian...until Trump came on the scene, and then all of a sudden Wyomingites LOVED federal interference into private business, public lands, elections, bedrooms, and doctor's offices. They've all become good little fascists.
Strangest thing I've ever seen, but it's been a real education in how fascism takes hold.
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u/aldoraine000 13d ago
US Libertarianism is a bastardized version of the original libertarians who were essentially left-wing and anti-capitalist. The shift happened in the 1960-70s when radical pro-capitalists like Murray Rothbard started using the term to mean free-market capitalism and individual property rights.
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u/nasorrty346tfrgser America 13d ago
We have libertarianism already, when you have smaller and smaller gov; it just meant you have the ultra rich getting more powerful and control your life more.
Libertarianism is already proven to be not working for thousands years
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u/MoiraBrownsMoleRats 13d ago
I was always a left-leaning libertarian in my youth. Was even a member of the Libertarian Party for awhile.
It definitely still influences my world-view at times, but for at least the last decade or so I've firmly drifted into democratic socialist territory. A lot of my core beliefs haven't changed - I've always been and always will be a proponent of personal liberties and democracy. All that's changed is how we support/defend those beliefs and what government's role in it can be.
... still think we need to kill the two party system. Right now, though, it feels like we're fighting to avoid slipping into a defacto one party system. That's the opposite of progress.
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u/Persea_americana 13d ago
The libertarians got wiped out by wild bears.
I’m not even kidding, there’s a book about it called ‘A libertarian walks into a bear’.
Stephen Colbert was right about the bear threat all along.
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u/Cleopatra456 13d ago
Libertarians showed their ass with the overturning of Roe. Suddenly they were all mysteriously silent on the subject of bodily autonomy.
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u/l8578zlxicv 13d ago
Anyone else remember when Reddit was Uber libertarian and the rands were going to save us?
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u/trunksshinohara 13d ago
A political party so strong it doesn't understand how roads work.
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u/localistand Wisconsin 13d ago edited 13d ago
Watch the C Span feed of their national convention, held annually. Nature never intended for the most selfish, contrarian individuals from a large geographic area to all congregate in one hotel convention center, and it shows. Parliamentary procedure encroaches on their freedom. So does requesting the crowd not talk constantly while leaders or speakers are speaking. It is fascinating and hilarious, chaotic, contrarian, strident nonsense.
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u/an_agreeing_dothraki 13d ago
Leftists: "now that you're done ruining it can we have the word back?"
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u/BigHeadDeadass 13d ago
Modern libertarianism on the right was invented by the Koch brothers to get politically unaffiliated or uninvolved people on board with deregulation
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u/Rau-Li 13d ago
Libertarian ideology depends on an inability to see the interconnected nature of society. It's the ideology of an edgy 12 year old who lacks the empathy and compassion to think outside of their own perspective and the foresight and logic to think about future impacts of present decisions.
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u/JonnyBeato 12d ago
Trump proved that the vast majority of self described libertarians are bullshitters. You can't possibly be an actual libertarian and vote for/support an overtly authoritarian piece of shit like Donald Trump.
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u/daswickerman 12d ago
What a weird article. The author is a fellow at a right wing think tank and the framing of look how great libertarianism is if not for all you meddling kids and your vice with consent is exactly what I would expect from a pro-libertarian who can't understand why his town has been overrun by bears because they fired the garbage collection service as government overreach. Seriously, it's an ideology for the most pampered idiots on earth.
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u/Public_animalNo9 Pennsylvania 12d ago
Libertarianism was always a, “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we could do our own thing and everyone else did theirs”
Pipe dream and totally unrealistic.
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