this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Libertarians are just Republicans who don't understand how taxes work.
Some of the funniest shit in the world to me is watching a libertarian talk to pretty much anyone remotely competent in discussing policy and watching in real time as the libertarian reinvents things like taxes and liberal democracy trying to make their policy prescriptions make sense.
I had a "debate" with a libertarian once. It's annoying because they reply with: "it's the government's fault" or "free market can do it better" and citing examples just leans to their boring hypotheticals.
Workers rights, healthcare, regulations, public transit, public healthcare, mail, etc, it's boring how uninterested they are in how things actually work.
Yeah that can get very boring. I suppose though if they had any interest in how things actually worked they wouldn't be libertarians. That's exactly what kept me from aligning with them back in high school when I first started getting into politics.
Like I got as far as roads and it was like "Wait a second, how would you handle roads going into areas where where it wouldn't be profitable to run them?" They either just wouldn't have roads, or someone would build it and would make it profitable by charging exorbitant tolls. Neither of those were acceptable to me and my agreement with libertarianism died. There are always going to be things in society that are not profitable but are worth having because they have downstream benefits to society.
The problem I've had with a lot of them related to what you mentioned is that their very base motivation for wanting libertarianism is selfishness. They don't want to pay for things other people use so the argument becomes "well that area just doesn't have roads. I won't live there so I don't care. That's for the locals in that area to figure out."
From what I've gathered libertarianism is "I got mine, fuck you."
Like hospitals. Sure they can be profitable, but they should still be running with funding even if they are not.
Education of the masses being a great example.
Yea, like, you know, clean water, moderate temperatures and a livable environment...
The argument is generally to favor non-coercive solutions to avoid centralized power breeding corruption (admittedly with a caveat that wealth can also create centralized power). I'm not clear how that would entail more taxes. Or exactly what you mean by "liberal democracy", which in the conventional use isn't something they disagree with?
I don't mean more taxes I mean taxes at all. Pretty much every libertarian I've ever heard talking about it says "Taxation is theft," then the ones I'm talking about will for example get asked to describe their ideal society and when asked how to say maintain some key infrastructure they essentially describe collecting taxes from the citizens for it. Things like that.
That's a special breed of American right-wing libertarianism. It's not indicative of the ideology worldwide, nor does it reflect the beliefs of the more academic libertarians.
Do those True Libertarians live in Scotland?
Australia.
The True Scotsmen are hanging out with the True Libertarians in Australia. Good to know. Are the True Christians there as well?
I understand you're being snarky with the No True Scottsman parable, but what I said is accurate. Libertarian has taken on a different meaning in America than it has in most of the world. There are Libertarians in most developed nations. I chose Australia because there's an Australian commenting on this very post, expressing his surprise at what Americans view as libertarian. I'm sure you can find his comments if you look.
So Australian Libertarians don't believe in the free market above all else and that governments basically should only exist to enforce individual property rights? Awesome.