i met plenty of people who'd like to fuck clowns and a total of zero who want to fuck libertarians. Clowns 1, Libertarians 0
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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So many of my friends grew up in libertarian families. I wish their parents had been professional clowns instead of perennially divorced wealth obsessed crypto-nazis.
Let me guess - that way you're a mile away, and you have their shoes?
Actual argument I had recently with a "libertarian" family member:
Libertarian: "Rent control shouldn't exist! It's wrong for big government to tell property owners and renters what kind of agreements they can enter!"
Me: "What are your thoughts on single family zoning that bans missing-middle housing throughout most of the US?"
Libertarian: "Well that's different! People choosing what kind of rules should apply to where they live is the epitome of freedom!"
Me: "Couldn't that same argument apply to rent control?"
Libertarian: "Wha...you have clearly been brainwashed by the woke mind virus! So sad!"
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I walked my late teens/early twenties in those shoes. Would not recommend.
Libertarian ideology is logically solid, but it has two minor problems:
- It heavily depends on assumptions that never hold in real life.
- Any other ideology, when confronted with bad outcome predictions of their models, will try to explain why their way actually prevents these bad outcomes. Libertarianism... prefers to explain why these outcomes are actually a good thing.
Except it isn't logically solid, because the premise is that Governing bodies cannot be expected to provide for the general welfare because humans are naturally greedy and selfish, and the solution is that we abolish all social safety nets and instead rely on voluntary charity to solve the problem of poverty...
But what voluntary charity exists if by Libertarian's own logic: Humans are too greedy and selfish to give to the poor even when they're literally mandated to do so?
Milton Friedman, my favourite libertarian, advocated for a negative income tax as the best form of social safety net. It means that the minimum amount of money any person gets is not zero!
He also liked to point out that a lot of other government programs were in fact regressive: paid for in taxes by working class people and providing the benefit to middle class and up. A classic example of that is funding for higher education. It’s pretty darn regressive to pay for higher education with taxes collected from working class people whose children don’t even attend higher education!
He has a lot of other arguments that make a ton of sense. He is against any and all forms of subsidies for large businesses and he is against laws which create and protect monopolies and oligopolies.
The one thing I’m not clear on is how to organize society to protect against future government interference and especially corruption by special interests.
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I'm socially libertarian and fiscally communist
That's just an anarchist.
That's the joke.
an anarcho communist to be exact
Anarchism is often called libertarian socialism.
whats a libertarian im not usaian
the word libertarian comes from anarchists (eg. libertarian socialists) however right wing anarchists (anarcho capitalists) have claimed the term, so now a libertarian is a right wing anarchist
I still don't believe that anarcho-capitalists exist. The ideology just loops back into fascism most of the time.
I see it more like feudalism with extra steps
A rebrand, if you will
If they use the term themselves, it's just a synonym then
There is no critique of capitalism so it’s incompatible with anarchism.
They’d be actual anarchists if they didn’t conflate capitalism with markets.
Capitalist anarchism doesn't exist. Capitalism is a form of unjust hierarchy (or if you want to stick to the literal meaning of “anarchism”: capitalism is a way to create rulers)
There are capitalist anti-statists, bit being against states isn't sufficient to make you an anarchist for above reasons.
Capitalism is a form of unjust hierarchy
It's a form of hierarchy through economic accumulation. The problem of justice is in the privative accumulation. When we start the game playing from a stacked deck, only a handful of people ever have an opportunity to accumulate new capital, while the rest of us are bound to serve through debt.
Leveling the playing field allows people to accumulate within their lifetimes, and incentivizes capital development broadly, without allowing intergenerational accumulation to stagnant the system.
But wealth redistribution is incredibly unpopular among the people with the most political capital, necessitating some kind of social or economic revolution to achieve change.
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I say co-opt it back to its original leftist roots. I don't mind calling myself a libertarian instead if I'm talking to a right winger who's scared of anarchists and then just say "the socialist kind". It's a conversation starter to introducing a right winger to how one can believe a market free from capitalists (the best kind of free market) is actually not the worst idea ever
there are also people like me who are in the middle and think both the left and right have valid economic points and arguments but that authoritarian rule is gross.
Libertarianism is a spectrum just like authoritarianism.
both the left and right have valid economic points and arguments but that authoritarian rule is gross.
I'm not clear how you have privatization without authoritarianism. Property claims without enforcement aren't worth much.
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American Libertarianism is all about minimizing governmental oversight, regulation, and taxation. Basically people who already "got theirs" and want to pull the ladder up behind them so no one else can. Sovcits are like extremist libertarians.
Some of them are so stupid that they never even "got theirs." But they see people who look different than them getting things that they didn't get, and they can't abide that...
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Reminder: Ayn Rand died on public assistance.
They're only for freedom to gouge for water at the only source for a hundred miles when they believe they'll be the ones holding the ladle.
In my heart, i am a libertarian.
In my brain, im not stupid enough to believe that the general public is smart enough to make it work.
The eternal problem of "the general public" is that they're a product of their material conditions. They don't emerge from the soil and engage with the world on first principles.
When you grow up in a community that has been heavily privatized and financialized, socially owned and operated community functions have to be developed from the ground up rather than inherited. Any kind of proposed social change will grow out of the body of the system that came before.
Libertarians grow up in countries where it is easier to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
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Libertarianism - The idea that a just society with fair rules is impossible because of the greed and selishness inherent in human nature. So by embracing this we can abolish all taxes and social safety nets, instead we would solve everyone's problems through voluntary charity work, as after all humans are naturally giving and kind.
Yeah, clown shoes seem appropriate. I can somewhat respect a philosophy that I disagree with by saying "Well, that's certainly a take, can't say I'm on board."
But I cannot if the problem isn't that I disagree, it's that it is self-refuting by its own logic.
Kinda like how Sam Harris' Free Will Denial nonsense is bullshit simply by my own ability to decide for myself that it's bullshit.
Please. Libertarians can always afford WAY more expensive shoes than that
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