OK – for once, a NON Freeper post:
The recent libertarian outbursts in some of the political groups on Facebook started me thinking about the entire libertarian attitude/POV, I don’t do this much, any more than I ponder the viewpoints of the Flat Earth Society, since by numbers they are a tiny minority – a fringe of a fringe, if you will.
Of course their vociferous nature is compensation for their tiny numbers, but the whole thing is amusing, in a watch-someone-slip-on-their-greed-and-fall-down way.
libertarians decry laws, regulations, and the other hand brakes that the civil contract enacts to keep us honest and accountable, but amusingly, only those laws that they disagree with. They pretend that they want to set us free, but only from those things. If there is such a thing as “cafeteria catholics”, I suppose their doppelganger would be the “buffet bourgeoisie” of the libertarian (I would say Libertarian Party, but this silly pretense at unification fell apart in 2006).
So – from the old anarchists came the modern libertarian. Even the old anarchists knew that “Do what thou wilt will be the whole of the law” was not only not original (thank you, Alistair Crowley), but would ultimately make it EXTREMELY hard to hold onto their imagined future gains, since anyone with the wit to lay in wait for them and snuff out their candle and simply TAKE those gains could do so with no penalty. “Buffet bourgeoisie” libertarians do say they want laws against such, but only because it would mess up their Randian utopia.
Real word relevance? I’ll see your Friedman and raise you a Pinochet.
Ron Paul? At least Friedman has a job.
Libertarians would tell you that REAL LIBERTARIAN VALUES have never been applied in the real world. Let’s ship the current leadership of the Von Mises Institute off to Somalia and let them report on that real world progress, shall we?
Bottom line?
For me, it’s that the people who demonstrate the very reasons for laws and regulations are typically very good examples of why we have them.”Fuck you, I’ve got mine” is not the description of a social structure, but a rationalization for greed and the utter and complete lack of a soul.
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Exactly!
I used to frequent a message board that featured a highly committed libertarian. Every regulation was bad, every personal expression was pure and holy. I think he might have had Asperger’s or some other OCD disorder. He was definitely a caveat emptor type (as well as others).
One day I decided to pin him down on food purity and health department regulation of restaurants. It took about a week, but I finally got him to admit that, yes, perhaps it was a good expenditure of tax revenue to help insure that the dining public wouldn’t be poisoned if they chose to go out to eat instead of consuming their own home-grown produce or personally butchered cut of meat. I decided that was a good place to end it, although within a day or two he was right back to yowling about government regulations and nanny state this and that.
These people are just too exhausting to interact with.