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.
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):
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.
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.
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.