this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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My personal suspicion is he was a high school libertarian who then realized it was not what he thought. I called myself a libertarian in high school for a short time before I realized what that group was really about (basically freedom to hate, not freedom to love, unless it's loving children). I now call myself an anarchist.
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. He was a kid who lost his life probably doing something he was convinced was important, as so many kids do. Is he better or worse than the kids who were told that people in Iraq were evil and a threat to America?
Trump, and the whole MAGA movement, have done so much to erode trust in our institutions. The fact someone felt the need to put everything on the line for their (likely futile) attempt to stop it sucks. Even in success it likely would have failed. It would have galvanized support for that faction and someone else would have taken up the position. We need something more powerful than a bullet to kill the movement.
Conservative libertarianism can be summed up as "Don't tread on me treading on you."
?? That's... exactly the opposite of libertarianism. Look at the Libertarian Party nominee for 2024, he's a gay man who is extremely supportive of the trans community and came from the left. That's just about the opposite of the caricature you've painted.
I wonder if by "libertarian" you mean the "libertarian" wing of the Republican Party? Because those aren't libertarians at all, they're just conservatives who aren't as openly against civil rights. They're the sorts that somehow justify supporting Trump, which makes absolutely no sense to someone with libertarian values (again, see how Trump was booed at the Libertarian National Convention).
Libertarians believe in the non-aggression principle (i.e. they just want to leave you alone), and someone who attempts to assassinate a presidential candidate certainly doesn't meet that bar. They believe in same sex marriage (and probably non-monogomous marriage), access to recreational drugs, no foreign military involvement, increased legal immigration, fiscal responsibility, etc.
Exactly. We need to disseminate truth. Show people how Trump's policies have failed and will fail. Expose his lies, and demonstrate how alternatives are better. Unfortunately, Biden isn't the right candidate to spread that message. I am looking at Chase Oliver (Libertarian Party candidate) to spread that message, but unfortunately the LP is having some internal issues so he may be limited in his reach.
What we need is a champion for liberty that's willing to call out BS on both sides of the aisle, not in a "both sides" sense, but by calling out unique issues with both major parties. That push needs to be strong enough to make concrete steps toward solving the roots of the problem, such as:
Those have at least some chance at fixing things.
American libertarianism got co-opted by white nationalism way back in the 1930s, under Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard.
Kathy Glass won the Texas Libertarian Gubernatorial nomination in 2010 and 2014. She's an outspoken white supremacist with deep Trump sympathies. She abandoned the party in 2016 to go follow Trump, and she took a large chunk of the party base with her.
They espouse it. But when you get into what qualifies as "aggression", everything from migration to miscegenation can qualify. Thomas Sowell, a staunch libertarian economist, was a full throated supporter of the Iraq War on the grounds that Saddam helped perpetrate 9/11, evidence to the contrary be damned. Notorious Libertarian-Republican Ron Paul claimed that individuals infected with AIDS “victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for care", in a newsletter that argued for the criminalization of gay sex.
That's by design. The LP is shot-through with the worst strains of American bigotry and xenophobia intentionally. They're a common injection point for far-right conspiracies and a testing ground for ultra-nationalist ideology. Once you wrap an idea under the cover of free markets and individual liberties, you can smuggle it into the mainstream GOP and then on to "centrist" American politics.
Everything from Trump's Big Beautiful Wall to Lynne Cheney's trade war with China to JD Vance's Project 2025 can trace their roots back to libertarian academia.
Good riddance.
The issue with libertarians is that they can never agree on anything. Chase Oliver, for example, won the presidential nomination, yet the Colorado Libertarian Party nominated RFK instead. The Mises Caucus took over the party, their preferred candidate lost, and some "libertarians" across the country are butthurt about that.
It's an exciting third party to watch, and their platform doesn't even align with my own ideals. I'm registered with my state's Libertarian Party, but that's because they're the biggest third party nationally, and I care more about third parties getting recognition than about the specific platform they espouse (and I'm probably closer to my state's LP platform than any other party, so that helps).
That's why people talk about the difference between big-l Libertarians (i.e. members of the party) and small-l libertarians (those who consider themselves ideologically libertarian). White supremacy is absolutely anti-libertarian, as is any other form of hate, and I think pretty much all small-l libertarians and most big-l Libertarians would agree with that statement.
Pfft, he's not libertarian. I respect him, but he's a conservative through and through. My conservative grandfather (lifelong GOP member) would send us grandkids snippets from his columns. He's somewhat libertarian on economics, but conservative on everything else.
IMO, anyone who supported the Iraq war cannot call themselves libertarian. Libertarians do not support wars of aggression, full stop. Libertarians should absolutely be against supporting Israel in Gaza, for example. Saddam had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, and even if he did, invading Iraq would not be justifiable. There's a reason the Libertarian Party uses the porcupine as its mascot, and it's because they're not aggressive at all and instead have very strong defenses (quills).
Ron Paul is a lot closer, but only on foreign policy and fiscal matters, not on social issues. I can absolutely understand his premise (people with AIDS may use more medical resources than those without), but the conclusion is anti-libertarian. The libertarian answer here would be to allow care providers and insurance companies to adjust their prices based on things like sexual orientation if it adds a significant financial risk. Libertarians will never consider "the ends justifies the means" as a valid argument because civil liberties always come first.
Ron Paul got me excited about libertarianism because he was the only one with a national media presence saying things I agreed with, namely that we should close foreign bases and stop bombing people. I then found Penn Jillette, and his brand of libertarianism sat much better with me.
I don't think that's fair. I think it's more fair to say that those on the far-right have gotten booted from everywhere else and the Libertarian Party is radically inclusive. If you want to run for President, all you need to do is join a Libertarian Party somewhere or make a donation, and convince a delegate to submit your name. That's why RFK was nominated at the National Convention (someone entered his name, with his permission), but he lost in the first round. And IMO, that's how it should be.
Look at Trump speaking at the LP, he was essentially laughed out, especially when he tried to use the "if you want to win, vote for me" card, and his follow up of "good luck with your 3% of the vote." Trump has no roots in libertarianism, he just has a vocal fanbase, and some claim to be libertarian. It's like the hacker group Anonymous, anyone can claim to be them, but that doesn't mean actions by one member are condoned by another.
Here's a leftist interviewing Larry Sharpe, a prominent libertarian who ran for governor of NY. In it, he goes through and details a lot of misconceptions people have about libertarianism, one of my favorite was when he called out Reason magazine as being "Republicans who hate Trump," which IMO is pretty accurate.
The libertarian ideal isn't bad, but like you said it has internal issues where a significant portion are bad. Anyway, libertarianism doesn't generally want to protect people. That's why I prefer anarchism. Freedom for the individual and protections against corporations and other powers. Libertarians generally want "freedom" to be ruled by the elite, because they don't want to put in controls over them.
LIbertarians are massive fans of negative rights, but not positive rights (negative = can't do X, positive = must do X). So libertarians would be absolutely in favor of things like worker protections (e.g. can't fire someone for striking), not in favor of things like universal healthcare (e.g. can't compel a doctor to provide care), and a bit mixed on entitlements (most see cash entitlements as better than programs, but prefer no entitlements whatsoever).
I like the idea of anarchism, I just don't think it'll work in practice. There will always be people that want to seize power, so I think it's more likely to devolve into feudalism than for society to push against those powerful factions. People just... really suck at avoiding tribalism. So I believe in limited government that prevents any one group from getting too much power, and also provides a minimal safety net to prevent effective slavery.
Anarchism isn't a lack of government. It's just limited government and general removal or reduction of hierarchy. There's a lot of similarities between it an libertarianism, except anarchism sees the control being taken by corporations and fights against that. Libertarians invite hierarchy by not putting in protections against it.
You see the potential failures of anarchism (although you're not describing the political movement of anarchism, rather the definition of the word as commonly used), in that people will try to take power, but do you not see that a company will take power over people's lives if libertarians get their way? Like I said, I used to call myself a libertarian. This was before I had learned how much capitalists want to use their power to control people. Negative freedoms are there to be exploited if left unchecked.
Even with the government we have now we see massive issues in wage slavery, where you need to work to survive but you don't have enough available options to be free and fight your employer for your fair share of the value created from your labor, hence why the elites are getting so rich while the rest of us stagnate at best.
The way I see it, anarchism is a variety of systems that are united by a distrust in central authority. I don't know of any single political movement of anarchism, only the general category of anarchism, which includes things like anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, and everything in between.
Trust-busting is an essential role of government. Libertarians are generally against monopolies, since monopolies indicate that markets aren't working as intended. In fact, most libertarians advocate for small companies, whereas both Republicans and Democrats advocate for regulations and whatnot that just lead to larger companies entrenching themselves. When you strip the regulations that raise the barrier to entry, you get more competition. When you remove legal protections, large organizations will get targeted by angry customers and workers.
And do you know why that is? It's precisely because of government regulations that have destroyed smaller businesses. Requiring businesses to offer benefits, minimum wages, etc increases the barrier to entry for smaller businesses who may rely on family members, friends, etc for labor as the business is established, all of whom are okay with foregoing certain benefits to help the business succeed.
Libertarians are against such restrictions.
I am a bit odd in that I support a Negative Income Tax (supported by Milton Friedman), which would guarantee a minimum standard of living for everyone (set the floor the poverty level or something). Pair that with eliminating the minimum wage and workplace benefits, and people will only take jobs that they actually want to take. That's a pretty small government policy if you ask me, high tax, but small in economic oversight, and I think it can solve a host of issues we have in the economy without resorting to regulations. This directly subverts "capitalists'" ability to control people, because you'll always have the option to say "no" while still having basic necessities met.
I honestly have no problem with "the elites" getting rich, provided the rest of us are getting richer as well, and the economic indicators I've looked at indicate that is, in fact, happening. People today are generally better off than they were 10, 20, 50, etc years ago. Yes, the wealth and income gap is widening, but real wages are increasing, generally speaking (here's data for median real wages over the last 50-ish years in the US).
Dude, the current situation is not because of regulation like increase minimum wage or such. It also occurred (much worse) before we had those. Just look at the gilded age. Very little regulation and almost zero competition in many industries.
You can almost always find the issue by looking at what the elites are against. They're against unions, increasing the minimum wage, and other regulations. The goal of capitalism is maximum exploitation of resources, which includes human resources. They want to remove regulations that prevent this to increase profits. Just look at how many rich assholes are libertarians, because it benefits them the most, not because it's beneficial to everyone else.
Real wages are potentially increasing marginally over time, yet productivity is increasing even more. The difference between productivity and wages has increased over time. People do more work and get paid less.
Labor is the source of value. Without labor the rich can't get richer. Only through exploiting labor do they get anywhere. The only way the wealth gap increases is by the rich taking more and more from the people actually creating the value. They are stealing from workers by removing ways they can negotiate for fair compensation.
Labor isn't the source of value. Labor is the source of the whole product, which is what has value, of the firm. Labor is de facto responsible for what is created in production. The employing class is quite literally stealing from workers through their appropriation of the property rights to the produced outputs and the liabilities for the used-up inputs, which together make up the whole product . This appropriation implies a mismatch between legal and de facto responsibility @whitepeopletwitter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value
I'm familiar. What I am saying is that the subjective theory of value is correct, but that doesn't mean some sort of labor theory doesn't hold. The labor theory of property (LTP) holds. Think Proudhon and the classical laborists and less Marx @whitepeopletwitter
The problem with the gilded age wasn't that there weren't enough regulations, but that corruption in the market and the government was ignored, so companies just bribed their way around whatever they wanted. That's another form of barrier, in that smaller companies can't bribe as effectively as larger companies.
One of the big changes that came out of that era was the Sherman Anti-trust Act, which gave the government a mechanism to break up anti-competitive companies. This isn't a regulation per se, but a kill-switch for when the market gets out of hand.
These days, companies can't just bribe their way around regulations, but they can bribe their way into regulations. ISPs can prevent competition by crafting arcane rules w/ city and state governments to endlessly delay any kind of construction effort. Factories can require workers to join a union and demand resources that new upstarts can't afford. And so on. So the bribery has just moved to creating laws to prevent competition, and they need to be more clever about it or they'll get hit with anti-trust.
But big companies love higher minimum wages, Amazon supported a hike to $15/hr, and many larger companies have higher internal minimum wages. McDonalds also isn't particularly worried about it. I think this is for a few reasons:
Here's a paper about the minimum wage that discusses job loss:
And some snippets from the paper:
Unions are a bit more tricky, and it largely comes down to control. Small companies aren't big enough to have unions, so having a union at a large company is just an added expense and barrier to getting work done. If unions strike, they lose a ton of money, and unions will strike because they know it'll give them leverage, but they often don't get enough concession to make up for the strike (my union uncle constantly complained about that, and my non-union dad was a lot happier; they worked at the same company). IMO, unions are an indication of an unhealthy company, if employees feel like they're being treated well, they won't feel the need to unionize, and both the employee and employer are likely to be better off.
So unions can be a mixed bag, and since they don't really hurt small businesses, there's really no benefit to a large company for supporting them.
No, people produce more value and their wages don't keep up with that. They're not doing harder work or working more hours, they're just using more efficient tools to get more work done with the same amount of effort. Worker wages are based on competition, so the more people there are that are capable and willing to do a job, the less that job will pay.
Real wages are increasing, that is the metric we should be interested in. If a worker thinks they can get more on their own, they'll do that, and that's a check on wages.
That's partially true, but capital is also important. You can't just go and make or fix high tech equipment with your labor, you need expensive tools to do so, and that's where capital comes in. Without invested capital, the jobs wouldn't exist.
If labor was the only ingredient, laborers would just labor for themselves and turn that labor into income.
They're not taking anything from anyone, there merely using their capital to produce goods, and selling those goods in a consensual transaction. The laborer is better off because they have a steady job, the customer is better off because they have a product they wouldn't otherwise have, and the investor is better off because the invested capital is returning more than was put in.
If you take away the capital, you take away the incentive for innovation and steady jobs. You can always choose to work for yourself and take on your own risk, and in that way you get to reap all of the benefits of your labor. Or you can choose to apply for a job and sell your labor for an agreed-upon price.
I think we should be pushing for something like UBI/NIT so people can make a choice about whether to labor in addition to where they might sell their labor. We shouldn't be pushing for increasing the minimum wage, because that just proliferates the dependence cycle on 9-5 jobs.
Workers are responsible for creating the output (positive) and using up the inputs including the services of expensive tools (negative). Sure, labor wouldn't be able to do what they do without invested capital, but this point doesn't support capitalism. The workers could just as easily jointly work for themselves in a non-capitalist setup with investors still being compensated.
To sell labor, there must be a transfer of responsibility, but such a procedure is impossible @whitepeopletwitter
They can do exactly that in a capitalist system, it's called a worker coop and those do exist.
What do you mean? When you work for a company, the company takes responsibility for any mistakes you make. If you make a faulty product, customers will sue the company, not you. If you get injured on the job, the company must pay for your recovery. That's the whole point of a corporate structure.
Sure, alternatives can exist within capitalism, but the problem is that capitalism allows persons to be legally treated as things as well in the employer-employee relationship.
I am exclusively talking about deliberate actions, and the de facto responsibility that comes with them i.e. the who-did-it sense of responsibility. De facto responsibility can't be transferred to match the legal responsibility asssignments in the employer-employee contract
@whitepeopletwitter
Then I don't get your point, because it seems to have nothing to do with economic systems and everything to do with human nature (we like to point fingers).
Are you suggesting consequences would be more socialized with socialism? If so, I don't think that's the case, especially if we take the USSR as an example where scapegoats were thrown in the gulags. With capitalism, your immediate consequences are limited to losing your job or perhaps a cool l civil lawsuit since your employer is not allowed to use any form of force against you.
I don't think de facto responsibility matters much in capitalism, only de jure responsibility truly matters.
The moral principle is that de jure responsibility should be assigned in accordance with de facto responsibility. Capitalism doesn't satisfy this principle. That is the problem. The reason I mentioned that de facto responsibility isn't transferable is that employer-employee contracts inherently involves a transfer of legal responsibility, but there is no way to transfer de facto responsibility to match. Employer-employee contracts are invalid because of this.
@whitepeopletwitter