Libertarianism or classical liberalism (these are slightly different perhaps but overlap) had a lot of popularity until sometime over the last decade it seems, when “left” and “right” seem to have become more impatient and seem to want more “authoritarian” implementations of the worlds they want to see.
At the same time perhaps “freedom” may be more popular than ever, I haven’t been monitoring it as closely.
From what I remember on the right, there were big losses with the Ron Paul / Rand Paul / Libertarian Presidential candidates which may explain some of the loss of momentum. Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign was basically sabotaged from what I remember; Rand Paul couldn’t compete for the GOP presidential nomination with Trump; Some of the Libertarian Party’s candidates like Gary Johnson were saying blatantly anti-libertarian things, showing a lack of an understanding of libertarian philosophy.
The left seemed to just support authoritarianism against Trump (for example, the left used to be more anti-war but since Trump became anti-war, the left seems to be more supportive of interventionist foreign policy as a result), and I’m not sure what drove other support for authoritarian measures (growing poverty? Anyone have insight?).
So anyway, do you like “freedom” and are you for “libertarianism” or against it or have some arguments in either direction?
What are your thoughts on the topic?
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I have yet to see a compelling libertarian policy that wasn’t just bad for most people and good for the wealthy. It’s not “freedom”, it’s moving from government rules to corporate rules. At least a government has a semblance of accountability to me, a corporation has none.
well government is run by the same people who run the corporations, so we don’t often view it as having much accountability; taxes go to pet projects of the corporate owners, and regulations favor said bad corporations
Then my choice is I pay taxes that pay for roads or I pay the same amount to 20 different road companies in tolls. If it’s all the same then I may as well have a single point of annoyance.
My impression is Libertarianism relies on everyone doing the right thing in a form of equilibrium, and I just don’t think that could ever work. People will always organize themselves to gain an edge, powerful groups will then exploit weaker ones, etc.
I suppose this is a problem with any political philosophy, not unique to libertarianism: are the current governments run by good people, doing the right thing? It’s not powerful groups running the show exploiting the population?
While not perfect, that’s why governments usually try to have a system of checks and balances. There’s also the tug of war between private businesses, corporations and the government. You will always have an imbalance in favor of one or the other, it’s a delicate balancing act, but at least there is that attempt to balance things out.
Pure Libertarianism would just let the pieces fall where they may, with any one entity becoming as powerful as it can be. Eventually you will end up under the authoritarian rule of some mega corp who owns almost everything.
Libertarianism works as a general philosophy that sits in a basket of governing philosophies, but can’t work well on its own.
First, we live in the least libertarian era of all time. Taxation at the level we see would be considered tyrannical, kings would hang for the level of taxation we see. Governments micromanage our lives to an extent previous eras couldn’t possibly imagine. When people try to imagine a more libertarian world, it isn’t really possible at this point because government is so baked in.
Second, corporations are government entities. They exist as entities because government created that superstructure. It could change that superstructure and has, to make them more powerful. When people say “government need to control everything because corporations will otherwise” it’s a misnomer since they’re both government.
The world would be a lot better with much less government. There’s been times when more than one dollar of government money is spent for every dollar spent by the private sector. This has a destructive effect on the world. Even in the so-called “private sector”, the largest companies are the companies best able to leverage government largesse, not the companies best able to sell products and services to customers. People are pissed off at Elon Musk, but internet companies like PayPal grew on government, Tesla was built by government dollars and its stock price is puffed up by inflation, SpaceX is almost exclusively selling to governments, it’s a veneer for taking taxpayer dollars. Same with most other massive companies. (More later)
Now part of that basket is also going to be popular social programs whether I like it or not – for example, the fact that the current government of canada is evil and incompetent doesn’t have any bearing on the fact that the single payer healthcare is quite popular. There are public goods that are worth pooling resources to create, and even libertarians believe in some common goods such as military.
That being said, there are good arguments against government too.
Single payer healthcare doesn’t mean government run healthcare. It means that the market provides insurance and it is paid for by the government. The individual actors are private entities with their own freedom.
Progressives believe that capitalism creates greed, and that’s backwards: Greed always exists, under every single system. The thing capitalism does is it systematizes it. If you want more, then under capitalism you have to do something to get more, and that usually means serving others in some way. Under most other systems, if you want more then you just need to step on innocent people.
Free market capitalism without the burdens of government tend to be blind. Minorities got power through commerce long before governments or universities recognized that those people could be useful if empowered. Women got jobs before they got the vote, and so on. People talk about the “Jim Crow south”, but Jim Crow laws were laws, not anything imposed by capitalism or business. Just getting out of the way was what needed to happen.
Often the people who do a thing are the people who know the most about how to do a thing. State planning has in eras like ancient egypt and ancient sumer been able to engage in large scale planning that worked for a long time, but first, the megastates that formed were unable to deal with changing conditions such as we saw during the bronze age collapse, and when those states fell the individuals were powerless to help themselves, leading to mass suffering. We also know that many times bureaucrats aren’t competent, and so the most manmade deaths in history didn’t happen during some war, they happened due to central state planning by incompetent bureaucrats. When left to their own devices through mechanisms like liberalism, instead of being harmed, individuals found ways to thrive.
Many people think our anti-libertarian utopia is perfect, but in reality there are some very bad indicator – according to many scholars, we’re facing birthrates well below replacement levels in the majority of the world’s countries – asia, europe, australia, north and south America, with the only region with lots of population growth being Africa, and I’ve heard reasonable arguments that such conditions are going to be temporary and are being bolstered in part by material conditions brought about by the massive amount of capital held by baby boomers who are slowly having to liquidate that wealth to live off of. Some really rough times are going to be ahead, with relatively tiny youth populations having to support multiple retirees, and an overproduction of elites who are all jockeying for power in a system that’s already top heavy. We’re in an era where Gen Z (and presumably Gen Alpha after them) are facing historic levels of mental illness and historically low levels of wellness by several measures. The whole world order is about to change, and it’ll probably be into something completely different in response to the catastrophic failures of the bureaucratic state.
My hope is that the next phase will look at the eras of massive governments and reject that, bringing something considerably more libertarian. People cannot live by money alone, and we need connections to the people around us, to our local communities, to our spiritual sides, and I don’t think you get any of that by reliniquishing control to a heartless soulless bureaucratic machine.
That being said, you can’t just eliminate government. The times libertarianism works is when you don’t need government, and that happens when you have institutions other than government that are strong, such as religion or other social institutions that can bring people together and help support prosocial actions and oppose antisocial actions.
