Does this sound reasonable? Don't know much about libertarians so just asking?


This article found here:
http://www.compulink.co.uk/~morven/libertarian.html

Why I am not a libertarian
Geoff's homepage -> Anti-liberty rant
Last update: 29 September 2005

"How many Libertarians does it take to change a light bulb?" Answer: "None. The free market will take care of it."

"Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do." - Bertrand Russell

"There isn't much point arguing about the word "libertarian." It would make about as much sense to argue with an unreconstructed Stalinist about the word "democracy" -- recall that they called what they'd constructed "peoples' democracies." The weird offshoot of ultra-right individualist anarchism that is called "libertarian" here happens to amount to advocacy of perhaps the worst kind of imaginable tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny. If they want to call that "libertarian," fine; after all, Stalin called his system "democratic." But why bother arguing about it?" - Noam Chomsky

Warning: touchy libertarians with no sense of humour will almost certainly be offended.



Introduction
I am not a libertarian because libertarianism panders to the worst aspects of human nature - greed, selfishness, the desire to dominate - and ignores all others.

This remark may surprise many libertarians, not to mention those who don't know what "libertarianism" actually means. The fact is, however, that the real agenda of libertarianism is the removal of all restrictions on the acquisition and use of power, the complete deregulation of business, and the entrenching of the domination of the weak by the strong. The connection with "liberty", in practice, is spurious - libertarianism equates liberty with property and restricts it to those who can either afford to buy it or acquire it by force.

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What is libertarianism?
If you ask ten libertarians to define libertarianism, you'll get twenty answers. This obviously makes providing a useful working definition here tricky, but I'll try; for a fuller list of typically libertarian values, with much provocative criticism, see Why is libertarianism wrong? by Paul Treanor, or esr's typically well-written libertarian FAQ.

Libertarianism is, or purports to be, effectively a strange blend of a left-wing emphasis on personal liberty and a right-wing emphasis on economic (in practice, corporate) liberty - thus the two-dimensional diagram which makes up the biased and deeply flawed Nolan test, aka "the world's smallest political quiz". (Personally, I prefer the political compass; it's a lot larger and has no inbuilt agenda.) It favours small government (none at all in the case of its anarcho-capitalist subsect), strong or sovereign property rights, unregulated free markets, a strong emphasis on individualism, and a complete disdain for collectivist actions which benefit society as a whole. In other words, it's the kind of political philosophy you'd expect from a spoilt child and a ruthless businessman bent on profit above everything else.

Some pieces of libertarianism are appealing on their own, although such pieces are also found in other philosophies, and others are mostly harmless in isolation. The combination of them all, however, is heavily flawed and deeply suspect, which - in a twist worth of 1984 - predicts exactly the opposite of what it superficially promises. Here are some reasons why.


The political perpetual-motion machine
Libertarians sometimes talk about breaking up concentrations of power. In practice, what they mean is breaking up the power of government, presumably with the intention of leaving behind small concentrations of power which cancel each other out. This is the political equivalent of a perpetual-motion machine, with no state of lowest potential energy; of course, it won't last, and the resulting power vacuum will sooner or later be filled, as any student of history will tell you. The result will be the replacement of a government which (however imperfectly) represents the people by, effectively, a mafia responsible to itself only. Libertarians might find this desireable, but I don't.


Republicans who want to smoke pot
Of the two types of liberty - personal and corporate - which libertarians claim to support, it is corporate liberty which is more important to most libertarians. This is plain from the contempt with which they regard liberals, the main political grouping which supports personal liberty - a contempt often indistinguishable from the hate-filled rantings of the likes of Ann Coulter. It also follows logically from the fact that, whenever personal and corporate liberty are in conflict, corporate liberty will always supersede personal liberty - for the simple reason that, in the absence of government, corporations have more power than individuals. In this context, libertarianism is essentially an extreme form of free-market capitalism which pays lip-service to individual liberty.

On this topic, a correspondent who described himself as "an anarchist (the real kind, not the Murray Rothbard kind)" sent me a link to Archimedes by Mark Twain, which (he says) was "written during that Libertarian Golden (more correctly, Gilded) Age, post-Civil War robber baron-era America" and "pretty aptly describes, in my opinion, what the world would be like under their property despotism".


Unrestricted force
The "Zero-Aggression Principle", one of the foundations of libertarianism, forbids the use of force or fraud except in response to a use of force or fraud. Significantly, this fine-sounding principle fails to actually define either "force" or "fraud", nor does it give any indication about how much of either is permissible in response. In a civilised society, these would be laid down in law and enforced by government; in a libertarian one, however, the details would be left to specific circumstances - opening the way for psychotic individuals, or ruthless corporations, to use unlimited force on anyone they don't like under the slightest pretext. Libertarians might point to private law courts, but these are merely guarantors of justice for only those who can afford it.
Another example of the woolly libertarian concept of "force" is the common assertion that government taxes are the "theft" of "your money" acquired by force. By the same argument, so is any action taken by the utility company against non-payment of your bill. Do libertarians want to have services without paying for them, or just those provided by government?


Then there's the matter of protecting oneself. Libertarians favour the use of private protection forces instead of government-provided police; what this would lead to in practice is corporate thugs responsible only to their employers, with a corresponding lack of protection for those unable to afford it. By the libertarian conceptions of "force" and "defence", you are perfectly able to shoot someone who accidentally trespasses on your property, bury the body - or hang it prominenly from the nearest tree - and refuse access to anyone who wishes to investigate the trespasser's disappearance.


The fallacies of "the free market"
Essential to libertarianism is the idea of all services (except, for some libertarians, national defence) being provided by an unregulated free market. There are two big problems with this.
First, there is no such thing as a completely free market. Removing all regulations merely creates a free-for-all in which the powerful will eventually shut out the weak: it's not too far-fetched to imagine a company lowering prices to drive the competition out of business, thus establishing a monopoly, and threatening retaliation against anyone who subsequently tries to compete (construing such competition as "force" threatening profits, see above). Either libertarians actually want this to happen, or they have to accept the existence of regulations - implemented and enforced by a government - to prevent it happening.

Second, "all services" includes transport infrastructure, heating, power, education, healthcare, welfare, and care for the worse-off generally. If these are provided by private businesses, there's nothing to stop them being restricted to those who can afford them; and what, exactly, is the point of leaving the poor to starve, freeze, unable to leave their homes, and unable to afford an education with which they could get a decent-paying job? Libertarians might argue that charity would provide for such unfortunates; but how would they gurantee that there would be enough charitable funds for the purpose without resorting to wishful thinking, especially since libertarianism is essentially a selfish philosophy which disdains altruism?


The fallacy of "natural rights"
Libertarians argue that human beings have "natural rights" which are acquired at birth and cannot be taken away. That this is bogus is easily demonstrated by considering one such right, the right to own property: if you own something, and I can exert more force upon you than you can defend against, I can take it away from you, and you can't get it back. Another example is the right to free speech, which does not exist in many countries. What libertarians won't acknowledge is that human beings have no natural rights whatsoever - such rights as we have are artificial constructs of society which are granted and, ideally, guaranteed by the government of that society.

In any case, the rights which libertarians principally cherish are those which restrict other people's freedom to do things: the right to defend one's property, which will surely be used to restrict the freedom to travel; the right to do as one wishes with one's property, which predicts parents putting their children up for sale in prostitution, in pornography, or simply for money; the right of free association, which inevitably leads to the worst types of prejudiced discrimination. Nowhere do you hear libertarians mentioning the right to safe shelter, clean food and water, a safe working enviromnent, or a decent education.

"Freedom", "liberty", and "rights" are three concepts which overlap considerably but are meaningless on their own. The point is that an instance of any of them is always accompanied by "to" or "from", such as "freedom from exploitation" or "the right to eat". Thus, whenever a libertarian talks about them without further qualification, beware: the chances are that he or she doesn't mean what you think.

Abdication of responsibility
With any right goes the responsibility to use that right properly, although some libertarians have tried to convince me otherwise. One of the fundamentals of libertarianism is the right to do what you want provided that nobody gets hurt; but, in the absence of any means to enforce this proviso (i.e. a government), it becomes "provided that you can prevent anyone taking action against you". You can imagine utility companies adding clauses to their contracts declaring that the customer accepts breaks in service for unspecified lengths of time, or employers threatening employees with dismissal if they dare to make any claims related to health and safety.

Hatred of government
A characteristic feature of much libertarian ranting is the assumption that governments are inefficient, bloated, corrupt, mendacious, power-hungry and so on; and that anything a government does, a private individual or business can and will do better. In actuality, while the caricature has some basis in reality, it completely ignores the fact that private individuals and businesses are just as capable of any of these undesirable characteristics.
Together with this hatred of government goes a contempt for any action which is intended to benefit society at large, such as the provision of education for all; this in turn derives from nothing more than a dislike of paying taxes and a refusal to consider that one has any responsibility to the society of which one is a part. Some libertarians might argue, as Th@tch*r did, that "there is no such thing as society, only individuals"; such people are directed to contemporary Somalia or the events immediately following the devastation of New Orleans for real-world illustrations of societies without government.

Yes, governments can be all of the above, but doesn't mean that they inevitably will be; reform is the answer, not abolition. Mark Rosenfelder has more to say on the question of whether government is evil or not; in particular, his analogy of "Government as OS" is incapable of further improvement.


Wishful thinking
Finally, there's the abstract and disconnected-from-reality nature of most libertarian thinking. The libertarian ideal of prosperity arising from fully-informed customers making rationally enlightened choices in a free market is unattainable; quite aside from the aforementioned impossibility of a "free market", human beings - unless they're devoid of emotions - aren't capable of acting rationally all the time, as the existence and continuing popularity of religion demonstrates; and, in the absence of government-enforced regulations, customers cannot be guaranteed to be fully-informed about what they're buying. Food companies, for example, resist attempts to say what's actually in what they're selling; are you supposed to evaluate statistics for death or illness for every product you consider?

Because no working libertarian society has ever existed, libertarians have to resort to thought-experiments, wishful thinking, or wilful ignorance of reality to make their points. An example is Freoland, an attempt at presenting the libertarian utopia in a form understandable by children; strictly speaking it's Objectivist rather than libertarian, but the differences are unimportant. I seriously considered debunking this laissez-faire fantasy in full, but it would have felt too much like kicking a dead horse; instead I leave this task to you, the reader.

I'm sure that your post would have been a great one. However you need to condense it to comic book proportions. As an American I have the attention span of the common house fly.

Oh and I'm a conservative libertarian. The one common thread behind most libertarians is personal choice. We just want to live our lives as we want without government busting down our doors. So long as our activities do not harm others.

That said the party encompasses a large swath of personal views some I don't agree with. Most more left of me others more right of me.

SSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

people are tryin to ......READ......



I thought you said .....Librarian



Nevermind.........

Sorry I can't condense it, it's not my article and wouldn't know where to start doing it if I had the right to.. lol

duely noted. What parts of it I scanned sound both facist and marxist leftest.

We have a broad concept of rights and realize that if a governement "gives" us the right to free speech than that government is too powerful. The power should rest with the people and government should play a secondary role, keeping the potholes filled, and the nation sercure (which should require only a volunteer military force).

A government who gives us free speech is too powerful? wow Ok, umm, then you think the people should decide what is acceptable speech? So then who inforces this acceptable speech?

And it seems to me that an all voluntary millitary force already accepts the majority beliefs in force, so that if there were abuses, then the voluntary might be less likely to speak out against a bad war. NO?

Just trying to understand what your actually saying.

Lets try it this way. A government that censures speech is too powerful. Remember the USSR had "free speech" too. The .38 cal stroke was free. Notice that "gives" was quoted.

The people already decide was is acceptable as free speech with young blacks calling each other n***** and such. However let me walk into "their neighborhood" and say such things.

That is free speech. Politicaly correct speech is not free speech becuase it prevents a person from truly communincating his thoughts.

The posting stated that rights are not basic or God given. I beg to differ. I have the power of free choice therefore I can choose to accept my rights or not. And I have the power to fight for my rights. Even die for them if required. However I'm not going to get in a long drawn out debate on this on a dating site. My I suggest googling Neal Bootz for more information on Libertarians and just peak at the Fair Tax.

Oh boy, he's a bit to radical for me, but thanks for responding.

Bortz in my opinion isn't a fair representation of Libertarianism.

Try The Agitator.com, which is Radley Balko. He writes for several different organizations and is a fairly decent model of Libertarianism.

http://www.theagitator.com/



Another would be the Freetarian, Sean Morley is also a model of Libertarianism.


http://freetarian.blogspot.com/

Reason Magazine and the Cato Institute are good places to read about Libertarian mindsets as well.

http://reason.com/

http://www.cato.org/

To understand a Libertarians stance on Economics I'll refer you to the Mises Institute.

http://mises.org/

Finally, I'll define Libertarianism.

lib·er·tar·i·an - 1:One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state.
2:One who believes in free will.

I fall in the line of Fiscal Conservative, Social Libertarian.

Do no wrong, Do no harm.