It seems like many libertarians wish their actions didn't affect others, e.g. spreading disease or releasing greenhouse gases. It would be easier because then we wouldn't have to make hard choices, we wouldn't have to admit that people's actions can harm others and that fact doesn't mean we can disregard each other's rights. Just pretending like our actions don't have costs for others is the easy way avoiding the issues.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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Sounds like Libertarians broke Libertarianism, mostly by being so opposed to evidence and science.
Yup, this right here from the blogspam:
he not only failed to challenge the core of Covid ideology—that other human beings are pathogenic so we need to restrict our freedoms and isolate
It was pretty well demonstrated that COVID was spread via airborne particles and the best way to limit exposure and spread was to keep people away from each other. Unfortunately, people are selfish and don't understand risk well. So, actual enforcement was necessary.
And this guy gets funnier.:
As a final and devastating blow to the traditional understanding of market mechanisms, advertising itself became corporatized and allied with state power. This should have been obvious long before big advertisers attempted to bankrupt Elon Musk’s platform X precisely because it allows some measure of free speech.
Free speech and freedom of association goes both ways, bucko. When X decided to give platform to Nazis, advertisers are free to say, "ya, fuck you" to that platform. And that shows up again in:
Similarly, Tucker Carlson’s show at Fox was the most highly rated news show in the US, and yet faced a brutal advertising boycott that led to its cancellation.
Turns out advertisers don't want to be associated with Russian assets. Ironically, that's a case of the free market working the way libertarians claim. Someone does something bad and the market punishes them for it. Unlike the major failure of markets which was stage 4 smog alerts in the '70's because no one gave a fuck about air quality. So, the EPA was created to actually deal with a "tragedy of the commons" problem which the "free market" would have continued to ignore.
This is not how markets are supposed to work but it was all unfolding before our eyes: big corporations and especially pharma were no longer responding to market forces but instead were currying favor with their new benefactors within the structure of state power.
No actually, it is. The advertising boycotts weren't about "state power", it was about companies responding to their potential customers. When major market segments are basically saying, "we don't want to associate with Nazis", companies respond. Again, that's actually libertarian ideals in action.
...while Koch-backed FastGrants cooperated with crypto-scam FTX to fund the designed-to-fail debunking of Ivermectin as a therapeutic alternative.
And, we're back to the "pants on head" , anti-science idiocy. It's funny that this guy seems pretty well read on history and economics, but is falling for all of the anti-vax crap, hard.
It should go without saying that lockdown is the opposite of libertarianism, regardless of the excuse. Infectious disease has been around since the beginning of time. Are these libertarians just now coming to terms with this?
Or maybe, they have actually read a history book on the Black Death and were hoping to avoid repeating the joys of cities running out of places to put dead bodies and just shoving them in empty buildings.
Honestly, if one’s libertarianism cannot manage to oppose decisively a global lockdown of billions of people in the name of infectious disease control, complete with track-and-trace and censorship, even though the disease had a 99-plus percent survival rate, what possible good is it?
Libertarianism isn't broken despite Tucker's thoughts to the contrary. There are many libertarians that believe in science.
Oh? Then why did so many self-proclaimed libertarians resist any measures to help minimize the spread of a highly contagious disease that ended up killing over 1M people in the US alone, not to mention the tens of millions more that ended up hospitalized? And why, with the benefit of hindsight, is the author of this particular article decrying any attempt to minimize the spread, including such minimal measures as wearing a mask?
So many. How many is so many? A majority? A minority? You realize libertarians aren't a monolith following groupthink ideology right? Libertarianism itself is nothing more than a philosophical statement that human interactions be voluntary. Are you a libertarian? If so, what do you believe? If not, what is your opinion regarding individual autonomy?