Yeah we need to send Vinny and Sal over there to get those assholes to play ball. Whose city do they think this is! /s
The mafia and the government operate on the same concepts. Coercion and violence to take your property.
Money is the property of the state that prints it. Land likewise. You're leasing at best.
> Consider the following hypothetical example:
>> Trespass: George is walking across a field when David jumps out from behind a bush, grabs him, and gently but forcefully removes him from the area.
> In this example, it certainly looks as though David is the one committing an act of aggression against George. After all, George is simply walking along, minding his own business, when David comes from out of nowhere, physically lays hands on him, and drags him off the field.
> But suppose that the field in this example is David’s property, and that George is knowingly trespassing across it. In that case it is clear that most libertarians would say that it is actually George who has committed aggression. David’s violence, they would say, is simply an appropriate response to George’s impermissible intrusion upon his land.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-an...
Libertarians oppose expropriation and eminent domain because the government is the one initiating the aggression against the property owner by forcible seizure. (Although libertarians support limiting the power of the state, it is not the same thing as eliminating the state entirely. That would be anarchism, not libertarianism.)
The state works because they have a monopoly on violence and imprisonment. As long as they operate for general good and operate via a strict system of laws which prevents abuses and maintains rights, then that is a good thing.
Making my neighbor stop dumping waste into my drinking water (which I don't own at the point they are dumping in) by having to come up with enough money to buy them out and shut them down is not viable.
If they own that part of the river, they are dumping it on their property. This is the definition of an externality.
When you said:
> The state works because they have a monopoly on violence and imprisonment. As long as they operate for general good and operate via a strict system of laws which prevents abuses and maintains rights, then that is a good thing.
did you think that most libertarians would disagree? The status quo is that the state has a role in protecting human and property rights, and in regulating public and common goods. No pragmatic libertarian would suggest removing the state from these roles without finding a suitable replacement.
If you believe that a state should exist and should protect human rights, even so far as to use their monopoly on violence to shut down a private property holder who is causing damage to property owners no where near them based on economic externalities such as providing markets for endangered species parts, then what is the difference between a 'statist' and a 'pragmatic libertarian'?
Because most libertarians are not anarchists, and because statism encompasses all sizes of governments, statism can be compatible with libertarianism. However, people who want to abolish government altogether cannot be statists, and people who support government expansion to an excessive and unnecessary extent cannot be libertarians.
The problems I have with libertarianism are around these issues and your handwaving of them, and this is compounded by the fact that you haven't defined what libertarianism actually is, besides that it is 'not anarchy'.
Have you really thought about these things, or do you just find the idea of self-sufficiency and absolute personal freedom enticing?
Since the status quo is that public lands are regulated by the state, the state will sue people who illegally poach endangered species within its jurisdiction. However, if another state allows the poaching of the same endangered species within its jurisdiction, a libertarian approach in the first state would allow for animal parts to be imported from the second state and sold within the first state.
A comprehensive definition from Wikipedia:
> Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, and minimize the state's encroachment on and violations of individual liberties; emphasizing pluralism, cosmopolitanism, cooperation, civil and political rights, bodily autonomy, free association, free trade, freedom of expression, freedom of choice, freedom of movement, individualism and voluntary association. Libertarians are often skeptical of or opposed to authority, state power, warfare, militarism and nationalism, but some libertarians diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
You seem to be painting all libertarians as a homogeneous extremist bloc, which is just as fallacious as ascribing minority hardline stances to "all liberals" or "all conservatives". The above describes general concepts that libertarians support, and absolutes such as "absolute personal freedom" are ideologies that pragmatists recognize as infeasible.
No, libertarians are not like 'liberals' or 'conservatives', they are libertarians, and they believe in an absolutely minimal amount of state intervention. Have you talked to any before? It seems like you read a few books and have some notion of some kind of libertarianism which is not at all what is advocated for by real life 'libertarians'. There is a 'Libertarian' party in the USA and they have candidates and an agenda. You may believe one thing, and call other people's views 'fallacious' but those views are based very much on Libertarianism as represented by Libertarians.
Here are some candidates for the Libertarian party.
Since the first-past-the-post voting system used in most U.S. states makes it difficult for third parties to gain traction, most politicians who prioritize winning elections run under one of the two major parties. A libertarian candidate who focuses on reducing taxes is more likely to become elected on the Republican ticket than the Libertarian ticket. A libertarian candidate who prioritizes legalizing marijuana will stand a better chance on the Democratic ticket than the Libertarian ticket. The goal is to push for changes that would advance the libertarian agenda on specific issues while maintaining the status quo party line on other issues, since it is easier to enact targeted changes than to fight on all fronts. Political candidates who choose to be affiliated with the Libertarian Party need to be sufficiently radical to reject the two dominant platforms that are much more likely to win them elections.
Voters know that third parties including the Libertarian Party are disadvantaged in U.S. elections, and in races that Libertarian Party candidates are certain to lose or do not participate in, many libertarian voters select the candidate from one of the two major parties that they believe would do the best job advancing or preserving the parts of the libertarian philosophy that they prioritize. This is the most effective short-term voting strategy when voter prefers one of the major party candidates more than the others. In the long term, libertarians in the U.S. support ranked choice voting and other reforms that would empower third parties like the Libertarian Party. If the Libertarian Party does manage to gain traction, its platform would adapt to become more moderate, mainstream, and pluralistic to accommodate its larger voter base and encompass more of the libertarian philosophy.
There aren't many surveys that focus on libertarians, but this 2014 one from the Pew Research Center shows that self-described libertarians tend to be more diverse and less radical than you perceive them to be:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/25/in-search-o...
> Self-described libertarians tend to be modestly more supportive of some libertarian positions, but few of them hold consistent libertarian opinions on the role of government, foreign policy and social issues.
...
> None of the seven groups identified by the 2014 political typology closely resembled libertarians, and, in fact, self-described libertarians can be found in all seven. Their largest representation is among the group we call Business Conservatives...However, they are also supportive of an activist foreign policy and do not have a libertarian profile on issues of civil liberties.
Libertarian's as described in that survey (and as you probably are as well) are 'Republicans who like smoking weed and don't have a problem with homosexuals'.
Your perception of what libertarians believe in is more closely attuned to anarcho-capitalism, which is a radical subset of libertarianism. Most libertarians are not anarcho-capitalists. I described your comments as fallacious because you are attacking libertarianism using arguments directed at anarcho-capitalism (straw man).
I have never described my political affiliation here, so please don't make assumptions. The Pew Research survey says that 12% of Republicans, 6% of Democrats, and 14% of independents describe themselves as libertarians, so it is not reasonable to label all libertarians in that survey as Republicans.
At this point in time it is clear you are not going to change your mind on this -- and as long as you continue to claimn that I am wrong and fallacious for making assumptions about libertarian political ideas based on my direct experience with people espousing them, then I am afraid we are at an impasse.
Radicals tend to be louder than moderates, but judging an entire demographic based on the opinions of its most radical subset is not going to yield a realistic picture of the demographic. If you only consider people libertarians if they pass a purity test that requires them to subscribe to radical beliefs such as the complete abolition of the state, then the resulting group of people will be radical and non-representative of libertarians as a whole.
> convincing people how reasonable you can be instead of distancing yourself from the crazies
Again, I did not express any political ideology. When I saw you making comments conflating libertarianism with anarcho-capitalism, I explained the difference and brought in evidence to show that self-described libertarians generally do not hold the radical views that you believe they do. Equating libertarianism to anarcho-capitalism makes as much sense as conservatives equating progressivism to antifa and warning of a far-left takeover.
It doesn't account for massive differences in power, there's nothing in libertarian philosophy which takes into account that a multi-trillion dollar corporation will, always, have absurdly more power than any citizen or small collection of citizens.
Suing someone/something is not a magic bullet, in your utopian libertarian world you'd have to pay lawyers for that. You'd require lawyers that want to work with you instead of large corporations, corporations which would be free to blacklist any lawyer working against them to work for them. Not taking into account that these corporations can just slowly dial up the inconvenience to communities they'd like to push out, are you gonna sue them multiple times? What exactly do you expect that your powerless minimal government be able to do if you win a trial against such actors, to fine them? If they can just pay the fine, over and over, and they calculate those fines are just a cost of business that will be paid off by ROI, is that ok? Or do you expect the government to take action and shutdown a company that's constantly breaking the law?
I simply cannot understand why you really believe that suing a massively more overpowering force in a libertarian world is achievable, not only achievable but required to keep a balance of... Power.
It's absurd.
Libertarian world = no control of the government over any aspect of the economy, no public ownership, only private property is a right, everything is negotiated through contracts between private parties in society.
Authoritarian = almost total to total control of society by the government. Economy, customs, culture, speech. No dissent to the official government line of policies is tolerated, the people are completely controlled and submissive to the whims of the leadership. Decision-making is reserved to the political elites and the people have no voice in the process of it.
One is an economic-political philosophy, the other is a political system of control, not sure why you want to compare both.
When people say things such as "Libertarians don't account for externalities" and use a caricature of a "libertarian utopia" to attack libertarianism at large, it pigeonholes libertarians as extremists, and does not paint a realistic picture of how libertarianism actually influences politics every day.
I'm aware that Libertarianism as a philosophy has much broader branches of it, that it includes by definition concepts of freedoms and autonomy. Unfortunately most of the interactions I have with self-identified libertarians (both in Sweden and in Brazil) go towards extremism. As much as most of the philosophies under the umbrella of Libertarianism aren't that extreme that's what I see in public discourse, it's a caricature.
Libertarian thinking is also responsible for inspiring trickle-down economics, free market privatisations across the board and so on. These policies have been, at least, a mixed bag of results with plenty of it being failures (e.g trickle-down and privatisation of healthcare/education). We know, empirically, what the consequences of purely libertarian policies such as the ones brought by neoliberalism can be: monopoly/monopsony formations (i.e corporations mergers), empowerment of elites, diminished power of labour and so on.
Libertarianism defers too much power to private individuals, without much regard to the power imbalances that will arise from its philosophy, just trusting that certain mechanisms will balance it all out. That's my main reservation with the philosophy as a whole.
Is it your contention that people are misrepresenting libertarianism as extremist out of ignorance or malice?
Do you think that is unreasonable to view libertarianism as extreme because people who are 'real' libertarians are forced to run as Republicans, and because in the future the libertarian party is going to become more moderate and reasonable?
I am trying to understand why you expect people to have a nuanced view of a political group that does not present itself as such, because you feel that it should or will be something else.
In the U.S., self-described libertarians as a whole do not uniformly hold the views that you assume they hold. When 11% of people in the U.S. describe themselves as libertarians and correctly identify the term per Pew Research's definition ("someone whose political views emphasize individual freedom by limiting the role of government"), yet only 1.2% of U.S. voters chose the Libertarian Party ticket in the 2020 U.S. presidential election despite a 66.8% turnout rate,* you are not accounting for most libertarians in the U.S. when you limit your awareness of libertarianism to what is presented in the Libertarian Party platform.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...