The tenets of libertarianism put foward on this site are the ramblings of some childish self centered individual that when cornered, go on the attack calling names and chiding the poster for being Naive. I will attempt to de-bunk these childish assertions:
This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.
Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?
Libertarians rightly concede that one’s freedom must end at the point at which it starts to impinge upon another person’s, but they radically underestimate how easily this happens. So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.
Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while declining to live up to the difficult portions. They flout the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental failing of libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail whenever tried, just like Marxism.
Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?
In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of running down accumulated social capital and storing up problems for the future. So even if libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question.
Furthermore, if limiting freedom today may prolong it tomorrow, then limiting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the day after and so on, so the right amount of freedom may in fact be limited freedom in perpetuity. But if limited freedom is the right choice, then libertarianism, which makes freedom an absolute, is simply wrong. If all we want is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional liberties. There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties.
Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has been possible at certain times in history to do just that by assuming debts one could not repay.) And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.
Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished. They claim a “natural order” of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical proof that this would happen. Furthermore, this means libertarianism is an all-or-nothing proposition: if society continues to protect people from the consequences of their actions in any way, libertarianism regarding specific freedoms is illegitimate. And since society does so protect people, libertarianism is an illegitimate moral position until the Great Libertarian Revolution has occurred.
And is society really wrong to protect people against the negative consequences of some of their free choices? While it is obviously fair to let people enjoy the benefits of their wise choices and suffer the costs of their stupid ones, decent societies set limits on both these outcomes. People are allowed to become millionaires, but they are taxed. They are allowed to go broke, but they are not then forced to starve. They are deprived of the most extreme benefits of freedom in order to spare us the most extreme costs. The libertopian alternative would be perhaps a more glittering society, but also a crueler one.
Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.
The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. Libertarianism itself is based on the conviction that it is the one true political philosophy and all others are false. It entails imposing a certain kind of society, with all its attendant pluses and minuses, which the inhabitants thereof will not be free to opt out of except by leaving.
And if libertarians ever do acquire power, we may expect a farrago of bizarre policies. Many support abolition of government-issued money in favor of that minted by private banks. But this has already been tried, in various epochs, and doesn’t lead to any wonderful paradise of freedom but only to an explosion of fraud and currency debasement followed by the concentration of financial power in those few banks that survive the inevitable shaking-out. Many other libertarian schemes similarly founder on the empirical record.There's lots more, but I'll save it for the next post!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Dude, we've taken a vote..... and decided that you need to stop getting high.

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"There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for 'melancholy of relationships past'. It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music".- Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry

Maybe I should start, as I havent been stoned since I started posting! And there you have it, you've taken a vote, all the libs have voted to stop the incessant truth telling about libertarianism. I can see why the rich guys want to be left to their taxless demise, but a young dude like you with a family to support, I don't get the lib thing! Anyway, I guess I'm the only voice of reason on this site. Someone has to tell the viewers there is an alternative to greed by rich plutocrats. I'm awfully concerned why there are not more concerned individuals here. Does everyone on this site agree that greed and profit are the driving force in living free. I just don't get it. seems to me someone would agree with me a little. Has this site been so contaminated with the prophets of greed that there is no counter posting allowed. To be told that my posts are childish and naive because I question the libertarian creedo is extremely annoying, and if that is the way you guys want to play then i will extend my libertarian bashing to almost every post!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

I'm not sure what a "plutocrat" is, but I don't wanna be one, especially since pluto is officially not a planet anymore. Which is probably a conspiracy anyway... didn't Wal-Mart buy pluto for outsourcing?

Anyway, I ain't no plutocrat, you venusian diplomat.

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"There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for 'melancholy of relationships past'. It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music".- Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry

Med sez ...

"I just don't get it. seems to me someone would agree with me a little."

Welcome to reality, Med. You're not the first Marxist/Communist/Socialist/Totalitarian who found himself surprised on the various cannabis boards when the awakening finally comes, that not all cannabis users favor the Welfare State Entitlement Mentality of the left.

You can post all the exaggerated essays regarding libertarian thinking you want and it will be to no avail. The postings you are making are confusing libertarianism with anarchy. Big difference between the two. If you want to read the writings reflecting true libertarianism, read our founding doucments and the liberty documents that preceeded them.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

Sorry Med. I am not rich (far from it), but I don't want the governments help. The best way the government can help me is to stay out of my life and away from the money I do have.

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"An unexamined life is not worth living"
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I knew it, another plutocrat, Spend wisely. I've never said I wanted the government into anyones business except a fair and balanced budget, by taxing the richest among us to balance the poorest among us. Believe it or not, I am far from poor and would be willing to pay my fair share. Even though I,ve been a working stiff all my life, I've made some investments in stocks and property so I am far from poor, I live a modest life style and spend as wisely as I know how, sometimes I get carried away like on my little yellow deuce, but it is also an investment! Hey the less the government fucks with me the better. I just believe the money could be better spent than on wars and Pork and over bugeted military spending. We spend something like 50 times the next nearest military spending country. There is a venue of common sense that libertarianism doesn't address, and that is what about the least among us. Jesus said, how you treat the least among you is how you will be judged. In that regard, Libertarians come up way short! So spend wisely, and help somebody less fortunate than you. I don't want to give away my charitable position. I'll Just say this, my wife keeps me charitable and I'm always doing something for someone else, even if I don't exactly get it at the time, but afterwards I feel real good about it. It's soul cleansing! BTW, Plutocrat: Government by the wealthy; a controlling class of the wealthy! RE Merriam-Webster!!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

"Jesus said, how you treat the least among you is how you will be judged."

And where did Jesus ever say to stick a gun into the ribs of another to extract charity from those who are better off?

"I've never said I wanted the government into anyones business except a fair and balanced budget, by taxing the richest among us to balance the poorest among us"

Bullshit, Med ... you have continually rallied for a larger, more intrusive government. You see anyone who strives for excellence, who works hard and accumulates assets that are above average as milk cows, from where socalists like yourself can suck off the teats in order to "Make the world a more compassionate place."

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

To Vi : Well, looks like you've finally come off your rocker, or to be more explicit, gone nuts. Now you are putting words in my mouth and raving against them. There is no point to discuss with you further as you are so distorted to reason that one might as well post to the moon!

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Words in your mouth? How ridiculous can you get? You said this:

"I've never said I wanted the government into anyones business except a fair and balanced budget, by taxing the richest among us to balance the poorest among us."

And yet, you have continually called for turning over our entire medical care system to the federal government. You are a socialist/communist ... and not only that, you are disingenuous at best.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.