Political Memes

"Your Freedom ends were my Freedom starts"

The thing is that in the real World with all its complexity, in most cases somebody has to judge on were each person's Freedom actually starts and the judgement has to be made based on rules which apply to all (lest people can just "buy" more Freedom). This is especially bad on situations of "big gain for me, small loss for lots of people" - i.e. Negative Externalities (such as Polution) - and "if one does this it's fine, if many do it we're all fucked" ones - i.e. Tragedy of The Commons.

You can seldom follow the "polution" around to figure out all who get impacted and by how much and add it all up to determine if it exceeds people's Freedom boundary or not. Further, the Tragedy of the Commons problem (which also applies to some cases of Polution) means that just one or two poluters are fine but many poluters is too much, by which point you get to the whole "should the first poluters be allowed to polute but not later ones?".

(For example: how exactly would one make sure the total of CO2 emissions does not exceed what the Earth can take without forcefully limiting each individual's emissions of CO2 using rules?)

This is how in practice you end up with general impositions from Society on all Economic agents, a.k.a. Regulations - they're the only efficient way to deal with problems whose impact is distributed (Negative Externalities) or practices which only become a problem if multiple people engage in them (i.e. Tragedy Of The Commons).

(PS: I suggest you actually go read all about "Negative Externalities" and "Tragedy Of The Commons" in Wikipedia: it's quite the eye openner, IMHO)

As with everything (even the seemingly great idea of "Everybody should have the same" of Communism) the problem is in the details, the further away from "just two people" the situation the worse the problem and the more unlikelly it can be arbitred in a feasible way with simple principles.

Like Communism, Libertarianism is a pure principled position that doesn't actually work in the real world and quickly crumbles and gets subverted once the complexity needed to work in it get added.

This is how the whole focus on "Tax" came to be: it's a subversion of Libertarianist thinking for political benefit of those who have unassailable first mover advantages in things like Wealth and Asset Ownership (and who would be the most taxed of all) which is even a mainly inherited advantage rather than the product of their personal merit (for example, Musk, Gates and Bezos were all born to wealthy families): it's only by denying the requirement for general - i.e. by an society-wide organisation with power, a.k.a. the state - rule-making and rule-enforcing to deal with things like Negative Externalities and Tragedy Of The Commons and denying the higher efficiency and broad productivity gains of Society-wide investment in some things (but not all) such as Education, that you can justify a state that collects very little or no taxes since it has little or no machinery (if it does nothing, it needs no funds), and denying those needs is a wonderful recipe for societal or environmental collapse, or simply for that society to end up so far behind other societies it eventually gets conquered.