Freedom is the ONLY thing that counts. I do acknowledge that Libertarians claim to want to pursue freedom.
However I believe that Libertarianism, will only replace tyrannical government with tyrannical rule by businesses.
The problem with governments no matter their political leaning is that most political ideologies lack any mechanism to deal with corruption and abuses of power. Libertarianism seeks to deal with this by removing government and instead hand the power to private companies.
Companies are usually small dictatorships or even tyrannies. Handing them the power over all of society will only benefit the owners of these companies. The rest of society will basically be reduced to the status of slaves as they have no say over the direction of the society they maintain through their 9to5s.
These companies already control governments around the world through favors, bribes or other means such as regulatory capture or even by influencing the media and thereby manipulating the public’s opinion through the advertisement revenue.
Our problems would only get worse, all the ills of today’s society, lack of freedom, lack of peace, lack of just basic human decency will be vastly aggravated if we hand the entirety of control to people like petur tihel and allen mosque.
Instead the way to go about this is MORE democracy not less of it. The solution is to give average citizens more influence over the fate of society rather than less. However for that to happen we all need to fight ignorance and promote the spread of education. It has to become cool again to read books (or .epub/.mobi’s lol)
The best way to resolve the the corruption issue is to not allow any individual to hold power, instead having a distributed system.
More of a community-driven government. Sort of like these workers owned companies. We should not delegate away our decision-making power. We should ourselves make the decisions.
Although this post is in English it does neither concern the ASU nor KU or any other English speaking countries, in particular. It’s a general post addressing a world wide phenomenon.
;)
Libertarian Police™ Department
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
One of the best copy-pastas ever written. Gets me laughing every time.
It’s also popular in libertarian circles because it’s funny as fuck.
One of my favorite copypastas.
This is awesome. You might also like Fry and Laurie’s Private Police
This is fucking gold
Unpopular opinion: obvious stuff that 99% of the people here will agree with.
It’s true that it’s not really an unpopular opinion (especially here), but it’s still thoughtful and well articulated. I thought it was more interesting than most posts.
True, I didn’t mean it as an insult to OP, just pointing out the ol’ tradition of posting very popular things on the forum for unpopular opinions
It is a timeless part of our online heritage.
I gotchu bro.
It’s been my experience that libertarians are just conservatives that are too cowardly to commit to the bit.
I’ve encountered three stripes of Big-L Libertarians online (thankfully, they don’t seem to exist in Oz, they’re mostly Americans with too much free time):
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The Libertarian who is just a walking tax grievance. All he cares about is not paying taxes, it was how he got introduced to libertarianism, everything else is rationalising this point.
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The Libertarian who treats it like a model train set in his basement. Everything works perfectly in his head, all the systems snap together, and he doesn’t much care how it relates to an actual railway network in the real world. Libertarianism is more a neat little thought experiment for him than anything else. They have varying levels of commitment to implementing these ideas in the real world.
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Actual fucking psychopaths. Social Darwinists. These guys are the ones who go on about “freedom”, but they’re engaged in sleight of hand. When they say freedom, they mean the freedom of the strong to exploit the weak, and the freedom to starve in the gutter. They all seem to imagine themselves as temporarily-embarrassed millionaires and captains of industry, or ranchers who get to print their own money and turn people living on their land into neo-feudal serfs.
None of them have a satisfying answer for how their utopian power vacuum is supposed to be stable. Some know it isn’t, but can’t give the game away.
And of course any time any of them are presented with evidence of deregulation or privatisation having a negative human cost, they’ll also claim there’s a magical inflection point where things just weren’t deregulated or privatised enough: you have to give them everything they want first, then their theories will start to work, pinky-promise. And sometimes the psychos will say the quiet part out loud and will chide you for daring to bring morality and human suffering into an economic debate.
And yes, a lot of this language is gendered. No, it is not unnecessary. Yes, they are almost always dudes. No, I don’t know why.
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Libertarianism denies humanity. Exalting the individual as the basic unit of society is the political equivalent to a spherical cow in a vacuum. The human mind and body deteriorate in isolation; we need others to even think or be healthy.
The individual in isolation also happens to be the weakest political unit. It’s almost like the ruling class invented the an ideology for the serfs to demand feudalism. An ideology that not only rejects collective action, but short circuits any attempt. A group of libertarians is called an impasse.
Prioritizing the rational individual causes irrationality in society. Tens of thousands of rational decisions to go home at the same time lead to the irrationality of traffic.
Is that an unpopular opinion? I thought that was the whole appeal, hence why most billionaires are libertarians.
That’s also basically the moral of the story of bioshock.
Settle down, there, Braveheart 😂
🤣 😅
Well, I wish it was more popular.
I love the concept of government, it’s a state mechanism that when it works correctly, society advances and everything works. The problem it, it require constant citizens involvement in order to keep it in check.
That’s pretty much any organization you can imagine. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Is this really unpopular? I think it’s a very based anarchosyndicalist standpoint.
ASU nor KU
Are you French? Because they have some acronyms backwards (like UE)
Probably not French, USA is still USA (if anything it would be ÉUA) and UK is RU (Royaume Uni).
Companies are usually small dictatorships or even tyrannies. Handing them the power over all of society will only benefit the owners of these companies. The rest of society will basically be reduced to the status of slaves as they have no say over the direction of the society they maintain through their 9to5s.
Well said. It’s so weird how gullible people can be.
Libertarianism: “fuck you, got mine” disguised as a legitimate political ideology
Republicans that like to smoke weed.
The problem is that no single person can educate themselves strongly enough on every potential topic. That’s why we’re supposed to have representatives to spend all day in a specific area of expertise. I could be jobless, and study this stuff all day every day, 24/7 and STILL not be educated enough to vote on a bill and claim to understand all of the nuances and interactions with society that would ripple out from that decision.
And have you seen society? Do you REALLY want some of these idiots voting? They don’t even care to educate themselves - so it’s easy to influence them with advertisements and campaigns.
The simple answer to this is that bills have no reason being drafted in language or length that cannot be reasonably explained to a layman.
In fact it is very well known that some legislation is drawn up with the intention of obfuscating its purpose, or some detail therein.
You raise some excellent points!
Incompetence is definitely a problem. I would counter that by saying: Just because somebody is competent, doesn’t mean they have good intentions. I mean somebody could be competent enough to do the right thing, but have bad intentions. In that case the competence of the representative does the voter no good.
You are right, like Churchill said 5 minutes of conversation with anybody are the best argument against democracy. And if you are horrified by some of the people who are voting, are you not at all worried of being ruled by such types exclusively?
I would not be worried about being “ruled” by those types, so long as we had protections in place that actually had teeth. We need a foundation where people doing shady shit are put in jail, especially if they reside in a place of power.
The FBI actually did a bribery-sting operation on our congress long ago and like half of congress failed it. So what happened? They made it illegal to run those sting operations on congress. That immediately should be repealed and congress-critters should be held accountable for their actions.
Well the US got trump because of a degenerate electorate : sufficiently detached from the issues by distraction and/or ignorance that they are unable make an informed vote .
If you don’t actually understand why you got Trumped, making shit up to explain it is the wrong approach and just leads to another Trump or worse.
Subsidies for big business, regulatory capture and other forms of corporate rent seeking are all things libertarians are against. For big L libertarians you even have party platforms.
regulatory capture
I thought Libertarianism promoted the removal of government regulations and allowing companies to do as they please. Basically let the markets regulate themselves. For example not having environmental regulations instead hoping customers vote with their feet. Am I misunderstanding Libertarianism?
No, not at all. Right Wing libertarians are just embarrassed capitalist. That haven’t found the one thing that makes them want to come out in the open as fascist or a conspiracy theory enthusiast. Actual libertarians, those on the left. Are equally concerned about people’s freedom “from” things. As they are people’s freedom “to do” things. They’re opposed to large many level government, that obfuscates while at the same time consolidating power. Not government itself.
Actual libertarians are just as horrified by the brutality and cruelty of under regulated corporations, as they are large government behemoths.
The origin of libertarians and left libertarianism is inconvenient though. And something never touched on outside poly sci courses. Pretty much any libertarian you’ve likely been exposed to would fall under the neo-libertarian moniker. Like the neo liberals and neo conservatives. Right wing reactionary groups forming in reaction to the red scare of the mid 20th century. Right wing libertarianism itself has its origins in the 50s and 60s. Murray, rothbard, Milton Friedman, Frederick Hyak and a few others are generally seen as the fathers of it. Where actual libertarianism’s origins go back another 100 years.
But when it comes to who has the wealth and resources to promote their ideology. Wealthy thieves always win out in the end. And they largely set the standards by which we are all educated.
set the standards by which we are all educated.
Maybe one of the reasons people hate education these days.
Definitely. The only reason to hate education. Is because you cling to something that you can’t logically or factually defend. That education would only highlight.
Also knowledge is power, what happens when we become too knowledgeable? Does it become easier or more difficult to exert power over us? /r (rethorical queston)
It can depend, since it’s a large ideological umbrella. Big L (party) peeps tend to prefer environmental damage be handled as damaging property, so it’d be hashed out in the courts. Some minarchists are fine with certain types of regulation anyway.
Voting with your feet would be for things that aren’t just straight up violation of your rights.
“I’m against murder, but I leave loaded guns around daycares.” Corruption is the natural state of things at scale. I realize that this isn’t necessarily your opinion that you’re voicing but libertarians always strike me as equal parts naive and willfully malicious.
I’ve got feet in both left and right. I’m much more anti-corporatist than most. Large corps are only possible due to limited liability and shit like IP. I’d like to see those laws gradually changed so that risk they take on isn’t covered by the rest of us.
I’m not a genius or a magician so I’m not 100% sure how exactly to implement things, but trade and governance are technologies and if we eliminate adverse incentives we should be able to steadily grow as a society.
Abolition of IP and limited liability while simultaneously pushing for reduced regulation is just going to increase incentive and capacity for political capture and massively boost corporate power. It’s leaving guns at a daycare and feigning shock when toddlers grab hold of them. The US government is already partly proxy to many companies. Offering them the opportunity to adjudicate their own actions further by removing safeguards is equal parts naive and malicious.
Those are both reductions in legislation/regulation.
… which will incentivize more regulatory capture and accelerate us into a dystopia. Don’t worry, I finished your thought.
I went a bit too hard with the alliteration and decided to trim a couple of words that may have clarified my meaning. “…for even further.“ It was meant to draw the line where libertarians cease to make sense. Reasonable ideas to horrifically shortsighted step toward dystopia.
I’m down with alliteration. If you can make it fit it’s worth it.
I was referring to IP being regulation that must die. Farms subsidies. A lot of zoning trash. The regulations that made trucks so much more popular. Not all regulation is beneficial. I’m talking about removing regulatory capture shit that only serves to entrench large corporations.
In our current society a sudden shift would suck horribly regardless of direction. Some libertarian ideas require analogous private structures in some instances and it’s reasonable to want to see that.
It’s kind of unreasonable to analyze any political ideology assuming it happens overnight.
We should absolutely subsidize farming as otherwise we’d be purchasing food from outside the US more or less exclusively. That’s a national security concern, in the very least. Breaking up the gigafarm structure with regulations is a better option, starting with a robust and well intentioned reporting structure for h1 visa holders to report mistreatment. It’s a real shitshow…
I apologize, but there’s a small textbook’s worth of conversation to have around this and I promised myself that I would avoid internet dissertations. Especially after an internet detox. So I cut it off there. Libertarian-style deregulation would be either helpful or horrifying in many of your examples but unpacking it would definitely require the sort of time that I’m not willing to offer. In short, I agree on some points and balk at others.
How can anyone take it seriously now of all times? Libertarianism in the modern day is being fronted by hack stand up comedians who ran out of material so they went with the political shtick to stay relevant. They don’t actually believe in anything other than enriching themselves
What comedians are you referring to?
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Community driven, worker owned decision making? Maybe you could check out Democratic Confederalism?
