American Conservatives think they are Libertarian but theyre actually more liberal (towards the right) than they would like to be told they are.

The DSA libertarian socialist caucus has reinvented itself the last year or so, they put out some good solid analysis prior to convention, and is doing a lot of work to build a libertarian socialist plurality within the org.

Right libertarians arent politically coherent, their lack of coherence means they are shot through with Nazis who exploit unprincipled movements yo plant the seeds of hate. A libertarian could be your uncle who smokes weed but listens to Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan podcast, or it could be a school shooter, a transhumanist tech accellerationist who always brings up Rokos basilisk after a couple Busch lights, or a neo-Randian objectivist.

As a left-Hegelian, I like discourse around human freedom, but people never concretize what they mean by freedom, and we always end up back to Marx:

Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.

In my experience, libertarianism appeals to a particular type of naive and possibly insecure person, who has some kind of emotional need to make broad declarations about things/people they have no real-world experience with.

The only Libertarians I fuck with are Libertarian Socialists. Otherwise, Ayn Rand types are cringe as hell

My only real take here is basically every single libertarian eventually becomes a technofascist. Why is that? Idk. But it happens over and over again.

It’s something you either grow out of by 14, or you grow into a guy with a cheap suit, who takes himself way too seriously, and happens to knows the age of consent in every state by heart while having some very creepy opinions on it.

if you’re talking about libertarianism as in minarchism and antiauthoritarianism, i think the state should be downsized before it even withers away under socialism.

as for Libertarianism, that term is being used by anyone who thinks they can get away with doing drugs in public or marrying kids, and it must be reclaimed. seriously!

Libertarianism is a lie for people that want a high trust society without putting in any of the effort and cooperation that it requires. For people who expect things to naturally work while still saying “fuck you got mine”.

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I share most of the opinions expressed about it already expressed in this thread, so I’ll add one: whenever I’m exposed to libertarian media (podcasts, articles, etc), I’m really struck by just how surface-level the analysis is. It’s like, for anything going on in the world, they simply try to tie it back to “biG gOvErNmENt” and shoehorn everything into that. They won’t even show their work of how they get from A to B. I get that once you start applying dialectical materialism to your analysis of the world around you, other analyses can seem vulgar. But tbh even your typical liberal worldview seems more thought out than libertarians.

As an example, a libertarian I know was complaining about how California is going eliminate plastic carrier bags at supermarkets. I just asked “ok, then how else are we going solve the problem of plastic bags everywhere?” They just sorta shrugged off the question and said the government has no business banning bags.

I actually was a libertarian briefly a long time ago. It was the fact that it offers no real solutions for the biggest problems we face as a species was why I eventually abandoned it.

They’re almost like Republicans except they smoke weed.

Big L, I see. The american Libertarian Party is a combination of 99% of the people who still want to vote but can’t fit in with the dominant two, with 127 reasons per 5 members. Lots of them are just looking for a way to be allowed to do whatever they want that is currently illegal, whether that’s as banal as recreational drugs or as oppositional to society as child slave torture-rape. Whatever their ‘thing’ is, they want to be allowed to do it, the rest of society be damned.

It’s a wolf and a flock of sheep all inside a fenced-off meadow, thinking that everyone can do whatever they want and it will all work out to everyone’s favor.

Awesome, let everyone freely enter into any contract they’ll agree to, instead of a government enforcing rules at gunpoint!
Except the contract is written by a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, and the one “agreeing” to it is a single mom who will lose her income, apartment and access to child care if she “freely” refuses.

An end result of liberalist idealism. (plus what others have said)

I see it as an unstable economic model; it will either devolve to capitalism with monopolies capturing most if not all sectors; or devolve into communism with a single state-like entity controlling everything. At which point; no matter which way it went; it will collapse under its own weight.

The way it swings will depend on the people who are there at the start.

The modern version of libertarianism that we see most of; is based off some really bad assumptions:

• (1) the market is perfect
• (2) barriers to entry are irrelevant
• (3) monopoly is not bad
• (4) humans are rational actors
• (5) if the market can’t address the issue, it is irrelevant

(1) The market is perfect:
This leads to the assumption that all regulation is bad; and that it merely works to reduce personal freedoms and the ability of the market to produce things in the most efficient way possible.

It completely ignores history and the reason regulatory bodies were created. It also ignores that the market is not a thing unto itself; but is composed of people (see 4).

(2) Barriers to entry are irrelevant:
This follows directly from (1); even the simplest business has some barrier to entry. You have to buy somethings that your business needs to run. These are real costs, and will provide a barrier. Obviously, the bigger the barrier then more entrenched players have an advantage (see 3)

(3) Monopoly is not bad:
This is a subtle acknowledgment that (1 & 2) are completely false. Basically it is a cope, that even if monopolies form; clearly this is the market producing the most efficient production framework.

This ignores history; the major monopolies that were broken up. The crazy shit that went on to protect their monopoly status.

(4) Humans are rational actors:
Most economic models assume that consumers will make rational choices; they will make the most economically rational choices. Libertarians (in my experience) love this.

This ignores so much of reality; it also assumes that the values of all are the same as their own.

There is really too much in this point to cover here. So many things that we actually do make no sense if you were a rational actor, such as brand loyalty.

(5) If the market can’t address the issue, it is irrelevant:
There are many things that the market cannot address; but in the libertarian model these things are ignored.

e.g. fire fighting; this is the classic example where a market solution didn’t work.

But equally; policing; education; major infrastructure; functional health systems. There are so many examples; where if left to a purely market solution, simply would not get done.