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.
Wasn’t the state of healthcare at the time somewhere between useless and actively harmful? Not much use in regulating what the experts of the day are completely wrong about.
Anyway my issue with much of the argumentation you’ve presented here, despite there being many reasonable points, is that most libertarians seem to simply not care at all whether their predictions of how well unfettered capitalism will go are realistic or true. It’s just talking points to them, because if they weren’t true, it would still be justified to favor absolute property rights over everything else. That’s what they really care about, the justice of no one getting to touch their stuff, and it outweighs everything else.
Which is frustrating, because despite their rare willingness to drill down into specifics, it’s a clear point of biased disingenuousness. If the only thing a point means to someone is that if it is made one way others might be persuaded of their cause, the incentive is to only understand it that particular way, and never realize or admit if it’s wrong.
My issue with the core ethos is, a person’s ability to opt out of things very often depends on how poor they are, and so if property is liberty, it’s only liberty for those with the property.
The state of healthcare in the 1960s through the 1990s? I mean, it wasn’t that bad. Life expectancy at the time was rising very quickly in developed countries–and in Hong Kong.
Libertarians can drive me crazy too, and I agree that a lot of them are driven by ideology, not practicality. And a lot of them can’t even make these arguments in defense of their own beliefs–they just come at it from a simple moral POV (“taxes are violence!”). But that’s not unique to libertarians: most people hold to ideologies they don’t fully understand, which is why they defend them rabidly with insults and attacks, instead of just explaining why they believe what they do. “I believe we should do this because it’s right, and I’ll get mad if you try to explain why it’s impractical, impossible, or counterproductive!” is an attitude I hear more often, if anything, from the Left.
And, well, in a libertarian world, your ability to opt out of things may depend, to some extent, on your wealth–but (they would say) it’s easier for people to get wealthy in general. And as I pointed out in my original post…well…no, it’s not really true. I opt out of Facebook and Microsoft and other ‘monopolies’, and I’m just fine. Why would that change? But I really, actually can’t opt out of the state, and the bigger the state gets the more restricted we are. So, the solution to “if the libertarians got their way, some people would be more free than others” is “we should significantly restrict freedom overall, for everybody”?
I was thinking of the 1800s, overlooked that you also were referring to more recently