What are your thoughts on Libertarianism??

Libertarianism is a political philosophy advocating for individual liberty and minimalist government. For comparison: conservatives are frequently libertarian on economic issues, and liberals are frequently libertarian on personal issues. Libertarians believe that government should have no say in the decisions a person makes in his or her personal life and that the only right a government has is to protect its citizens. Many libertarians support the funding of education, health etc but on a state or city level, not at a federal level.

A list of policies that most libertarians support would include: legalization of drugs, legalization of all consensual sexual acts between consenting adults (including sodomy and prostitution), abolition of government censorship in all its forms (including restrictions on pornography), free trade, noninterventionist foreign policy, abolition of rent control, abolition of the minimum wage, abolition of farm and business subsidies, abolition of arts subsidies, privatization of Social Security, abolition of welfare, and drastic reduction of taxes.

What are your thoughts on libertarianism and why do you/do you not support it?? I'd love to read all of your unique thoughts. :) I myself wouldn't consider myself a libertarian at all. I think in an ideal world libertarianism would be fine however, but anyway I may explain my reasoning for this if this thread somehow manages to get a decent number of posts haha. :)

MarinaSpeaks said:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy advocating for individual liberty and minimalist government. For comparison: conservatives are frequently libertarian on economic issues, and liberals are frequently libertarian on personal issues. Libertarians believe that government should have no say in the decisions a person makes in his or her personal life and that the only right a government has is to protect its citizens. Many libertarians support the funding of education, health etc but on a state or city level, not at a federal level.

A list of policies that most libertarians support would include: legalization of drugs, legalization of all consensual sexual acts between consenting adults (including sodomy and prostitution), abolition of government censorship in all its forms (including restrictions on pornography), free trade, noninterventionist foreign policy, abolition of rent control, abolition of the minimum wage, abolition of farm and business subsidies, abolition of arts subsidies, privatization of Social Security, abolition of welfare, and drastic reduction of taxes.

What are your thoughts on libertarianism and why do you/do you not support it?? I'd love to read all of your unique thoughts. :) I myself wouldn't consider myself a libertarian at all. I think in an ideal world libertarianism would be fine however, but anyway I may explain my reasoning for this if this thread somehow manages to get a decent number of posts haha. :)

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I'm a libertarian socialist, and there are some parts of it I support and there are some I don't. I'm all for the government getting out of censorship, legalization of drugs and consensual sex, free trade, and reduced taxes but the minimum wage needs to stay (and be increased even) and well idk much about subsidies but if they are what I think they are they should stay.

I'm a social-democrat who firmly believes that a society without a peroper welfare state is a cruel one not worth living in, and a trained economist who understands that taxes and redistribution have a fundamental position in any society that aspires to any form of stability, as unequality is the biggest catalist for wars, revolutions and general violence. I also know that many activities have externalities that only a Government can actually cost- smoking and driving petrol cars damage the environment and people around the user, so if there is nobody to tax, ban, or otherwise desincentivise those activities, plenty of innocent people will end up paying for other people's bad habits. I also accept capitalism but, without regulations, companies will tend toward consolidation and market control, which goes directly against the goal of free-market competition.

In other words, while I support social liberalism in many ways, I'm entirely convinced that only countries with strong institutions, centralised governments and a serious welfare state can succeed in the long run. Countries with only some of those three can work somewhat well but will be hotbeds of inequality, protests and conflicts.

Libertarianism boils down to people who have power doing whatever they want with it and there being no legal system for people rely on to help them. It's an inherently anti-democratic system (which is bad) and has no heart. A person might not be able to kill you, bulldoze your home, or anything so extreme, but they'd be able to slander you in media or dox you, bribe people you work for to fire you, or otherwise throw their power and money around to their benefit and your detriment. They could make sure that all the good schools and hospitals and services get built only in their own area and that all the waste dumps get built in your backyard.

Esper said:

Libertarianism boils down to people who have power doing whatever they want with it and there being no legal system for people rely on to help them. It's an inherently anti-democratic system (which is bad) and has no heart. A person might not be able to kill you, bulldoze your home, or anything so extreme, but they'd be able to slander you in media or dox you, bribe people you work for to fire you, or otherwise throw their power and money around to their benefit and your detriment. They could make sure that all the good schools and hospitals and services get built only in their own area and that all the waste dumps get built in your backyard.

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What you are describing is Anarcho-Capitalism/variations thereof, which is a fringe of the Libertarian group. Most of your other complaints already happen or has happened in the past within the jurisprudence of the United States, where this political party resides.

In regards to Libertarianism, it can function, but it will doom our country to another 1920s-esque scenario in which our economy dies. To remove any and all regulations is to kill your economy, especially when people start buying stocks on loans/insuring stocks with other stocks, stock market speculation, overproduction, etc.

I'm a full libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and have been for a few years now (5-6 years I think). What's funny is that at the beginning I was a hardcore socialist. But I slowly drifted as I was understanding new things, like how the minimum wage just exclude the least productive people from the labor market, making them even poorer

Generally libertarianism is an ideology with a lot of flaws, the free market is absolutely not a solution to anything and it's incredibly easy to observe that in the US, which has so many services dominated by awful corporate monopolies that create the worst possible situation for the consumer. It's hard for me to separate the kind of liberatarian that rallies to do the equivalent of ending net neutrality in every single industry, and those who claim that ideaology to be the "extreme", since there's never any alternative offered up for what the "not extreme" even stands for outside of that

I get the idea of "the government should step back and let people control themselves" but I've never actually heard anyone point to any laws that do the opposite of that in any capacity that's unreasonable, and it generally just reads as railing against an idea/system that doesn't even exist.

BoumBoumBidou said:

like how the minimum wage just exclude the least productive people from the labor market, making them even poorer

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I couldn't really find a source for this that didn't come from something like a shady conservative think tank, but I don't even really understand the logic behind this, given that the vast body of research shows that increasing the minimum wage (particularly in places like America, where it's not even a liveable wage) does nothing but decrease poverty and make conditions better for the poorest parts of society.

I can only half see what you're talking about if you mean, say, that the poorest and "least productive" are people who rely on filling minimum wage jobs that have high turn over (Which decreases when you can actually earn a stable living from a minimum wage job) but even then just from an ethical perspective, endorsing that kind of system is pretty bad