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Comment by epakai | Hacker News Reader

For alternative assessments of the above:

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundatio... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Institute_for_Ju... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Individ... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute

Many seem to associate themselves with libertarian ideals. All have been funded by the Koch brothers.

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Yes - I used the term "freedom-oriented" but they are small-L libertarian organizations. Libertarians are freedom-oriented and advocate for private / market-oriented solutions to problems rather than government solutions

Their use of the term freedom is manipulative. There's no freedom for the propertyless in a Propertarian - essentially neofeudal - society, and they know it. It's 100% propaganda.

Private solutions ≠ market-oriented solutions.

Markets are emergent phenomena that exist where ever there are free people. They are so natural that even in Soviet Russia markets were endemic, as well as current North Korea. If there exist products people want to buy, and prices are not fixed at gunpoint, there will exist markets.

This is simply not true. And to argue that some sort of minuscule trading is comparable to today's market economies would be ridiculous. There are a lot of stories in colonial history where the colonialists complain that they need to discipline (or euphemistically "civilize") the native population because they have no concept of labour and property - basically they are "lazy" subsistence farmers and need to be introduced to the market, a.k.a. wage labour through the creation of artificial scarcity (e.g. by the colonialists claiming to now own the land and demand a return, or by requiring a tax in the colonialist currency to cover for their "war costs").

Ha yeah libertarians are the kind of people who want to replace the police with private security. I have absolutely no delusions about what kind of society they would create- and as someone who isn't a millionaire there's nothing in it for me.

Yes these are expressly libertarian outfits. Liberty is a good thing! Also, the Koch Brothers fund a lot of things, including criminal justice reform: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/charles-koch...

Wait wait wait wait wait wait, Rayiner. Liberty is a good thing. It does not follow axiomatically that libertarianism is a good thing. Libertarianism has a quirky and unpopular orthodoxy, one that equates drivers licenses to "a license to make toast in your own damn toaster", and creates utopian New Hampshire townships that are ultimately overrun by bears.

Give me liberty, as the saying goes, but also drivers licenses, and hold the bears.

Libertarianism isn't bad on spec. But it is not reasonable to suggest that people shouldn't be made aware when their sources are all libertarian, as these ones are, for the same reason that it's good to know if your sources are Jacobin, Current Affairs, and In These Times.

Sure, insofar as we’re also willing to go around saying “liberal newspaper the New York Times says, …”

We do that incessantly!

> Libertarianism isn't bad on spec

How is it not? It's deeply anti-democratic, basically handing over power to corporations and wealthy people. It's not like its biggest proponents are advocating "a great reset" where all people will start at zero property again or something, it's just a power grab for the already propertied.

Since I'm not a Libertarian, I'm the wrong person to ask to mount a defense of it.

Alright. I'm just annoyed that such obviously reactionary stuff get the benefit of the doubt constantly, and to add insult do injury, call it freedom.

The same reason the ACLU challenges the no-fly list also serves to challenge driver's licenses, and actually exposes that we are accepting very strong prior restraint on the right to travel. You can keep people from driving, but not proactively.

Some other arguments though, yes, they go too far.

I'm not even saying Libertarians are wrong about drivers licenses, just that they're idiosyncratic and unpopular on that issue, and it's worth knowing what you're getting yourself into if you take their word for everything. I think Reason is generally pretty sane! (But they were idiosyncratic and unpopular on the opiate crisis, by way of example.)

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