I can only speak for America, but here they’re all a bunch of corporate-sponsored anarchy LARPers.

Libertarians are grumpy indoor cats. They’re violently independent and want to be left alone, but their survival is also entirely dependent on the systems surrounding them, which they completely take for granted.

The grumpy indoor cat doesn’t want your attention, they just want their auto-feeder to activate like it always does. Never mind the fact that you’re the one who keeps the auto-feeder filled. They don’t care about that, they just care that the auto-feeder dispenses food.

Hooray for me, and fuck you!

If you mean the Statesian, pro-capitalist kind, it’s mostly a silly ideology pushed by small business owners and other highly individualist classes that are nonetheless pushed towards the working classes by competing against ever-growing monopolies.

The left wing version, I disagree with as you can’t dismantle the state without removing the basis of the state, class, and you can’t remove class without collectivizing production and distribution. Small, local cells loosely organized in a decentralist fashion would still result in class struggle and thus a form of state to hold one class over the others. That said, the leftists are valuable allies at times despite disagreements.

In Poland most libertarians are at best petty bougie failchildren thinking they would be billionaires when they grow up, those that do grow up without touching grass (or too dense to feel the grass) are usually turning into unhinged austrian cultists with monarchist and nazist inclinations. Deeply unserious people

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”.

Naive idiots at best genocidal Maniacs at worst.

Left wing (actual OG) Libertarianism is great. Right wing Libertarianism is basically a bunch of antisocial/intellectually lazy people who think the ideal society is one where everybody has a few acres of land with a little shack that they built themselves where they subsist on potatoes, carrots, and chicken eggs and stockpile gold and silver to trade with another libertarian twice a year.

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.

Left libertarianism is great and serves as an effective counterbalance to many issues. Right libertarianism is often foolish at best and rarely includes the freedom to do things like live your life as you please

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.

Depends on how it’s defined.

Current libertarianism is just rebranded reactionary conservatism.

Classically though, “libertarian” simply referred to someone who advocated for maximum individual liberty and minimum state intervention. The term first gained popularity in the US in the wake of the New Deal, when the term “liberal,” which had up until then referred to that position of maximum individual liberty and minimum state intervention, was coopted by leftist authoritarians. Since the classical liberals needed a new term, they shifted to “libertarian.” And notably, at that point, libertarians were at least as likely to be left-wing as right, with the two groups merely splitting on which specific government services should be counted among the minimum.

That started to go wrong when the Libertarian party was established, and finished going wrong when the Tea Party was transformed from a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts to a traveling carnival of hate.

And there’s also the political compass sense of “libertarian” as simply the opposite of authoritarian, by which I’m as “libertarian” as it’s possible to be. It should be noted though that in recent years, mostly through meme communities, even that conception of “libertarian” has been increasingly characterized as more of an alternate authoritarianism.

So there’s a conception back behind each use of the term “libertarian” that is at least close to mine (I’m actually an anarchist). But IMO not coincidentally, the term has been in all cases warped to refer to some form of authoritarianism, which I unequivocally oppose.

I don’t think libertarianism works, it relies naively on how the free market is omnipotent, how freedom is everything and how having a small government is somehow good. There are no countries that are entirely libertarian, that also tells a lot about the ideology’s applicability in practice. A brilliant book about why libertarianism doesn’t work is a book “A Libertarian Walks into a Bear”. In the book, a group of libertarians decides to take over the small town of Grafton in New Hampshire en masse as part of their “Free Town Project”. Of course this group cares neither about the town’s original inhabitants nor their rights. What’s the result? They hollow out pretty much everything from the library, to the school, the fire department and the police. No regard is given to any laws on hunting or food disposal, and that lures in bears, who turn so aggressive that they invade people’s homes. In addition to bears, sex offenders and all kinds of criminals are also lured into Grafton. It’s pretty entertaining book, I recommend it.

Another reason why I dislike libertarianism is that it can function as a gateway to fascism. This is a known phenomenon. Several key figures in the alt-right for example used to be libertarians. I stumbled into a clip from some American Libertarian Party convention where Richard Spencer was with Ron Paul. I had to rub my eyes a bit.

The most virtuous profession to be, in libertarian logic, is scammer. Big money gain for little effort, therefore good.

Working together is not allowed in individualism. Everyone must be a untrustworthy scammer out for the other’s money, as that’s what libertarians think everyone aspires to be.

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.