this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 year ago (89 children)

Says “I’m a libertarian but I’m not one of those crazy ones”.

My followup question is usually what’s your opinion on seatbelt laws and drivers licenses.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (22 children)

If this is what a fake libertarian is, there's no such thing as a real one. This is every single libertarian I've ever conversed with.

[–] Action_Bastid 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

You need to find yourself some Left-Libertarians.

You're usually looking for some type of Georgists or some flavor of small-scale Social/Communist Anarchy. Most of them are way more able to grok the concepts of things like "natural monopolies" or "Tragedy of the Commons" and other fun market failure states. They tend to focus more on the existence of the market itself as a tool for creating competition that drives innovation and efficiency while giving less lip service to the idea that just because you accumulated a bunch of capital from an idea that's its a good idea.

If I scam a bunch of people, I've gathered a bunch of capital, but that doesn't mean I've actually produced anything of value for anyone. If I refined chemicals in my house and dumped all the waste in my neighbor's pool, I'm not actually competing in an even market, because I've burdened my neighbor with the cost of waste remediation while I get to keep all the profit.

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[–] SupraMario 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This means you have never interacted with a libertarian then, just a ashamed conservative/republican wanting to be labeled something else.

[–] afraid_of_zombies 5 points 1 year ago

Everyone knows the True Libertarians hang out in Scotland. With the True Scotts.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When I considered myself libertarian, I was not a fan of police brutality, pro LGBTQ rights, more open border, and legalized drugs. I still hold all of those views but have gotten a lot more to the left from am economics standpoint. A lot of that is die to my econ degree.

That said, post 2016 I definitely noticed a ton of faux libertarians who were very defensive of Trump. If you voted for Trump, I don't think you can consider yourself libertarian. I think I recall hearing that the whacko New Hampshire libertarians basically took over the party. Those guys are a bunch of racist fascists.

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[–] afraid_of_zombies 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (29 children)

Generally I lean libertarian in terms of pure individual choice. Worship no gods or a million, be single or marry 20 people at once, put whatever substance you want in your own body, kneel for the flag or shed a tear, yes I will use your pronouns.

Every man a king, that's my philosophy.

The rest of the stuff yeah. I want food stamp programs, I want a secular neutral state, I want antidiscrimination laws, I dont support a company dumping pollution on us.

[–] _wintermute 7 points 1 year ago (12 children)

You just described being a leftist. Why are libertarians so afraid of being put on the progressive left? You are not a libertarian lmao

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[–] afraid_of_zombies 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I been saying it for years. Cut a self-identified libertarian and you will find a Republican who groked on that all the cute girls he is interested in aren't going to date him unless he lies about what he believes.

Here is some advice: if you are ashamed about what you believe consider changing it.

[–] wwaxwork 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Not a cute girl, but a rather plain woman so I get the memos, and generally we're not a big fan of libertarians either. There are some outliers but yeah, the ruse was not super effective.

[–] xantoxis 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

[on a date]

Her: Huh, so Libertarians think laws about pornography should be relaxed? What kind of porn exactly?
Him: ...
Her: What kind of porn, exactly?
Him: Well--
Her: I'm just kidding, I called a Lyft as soon as you said you were a Libertarian.

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[–] LEDZeppelin 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Republican * Coward = Libertarian

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As a self diagnosed math major: Republican is already a product of coward so shouldn't it be more like Republican + Shame = Libertarian?

That would work, because Republicans lack shame and Libertarians are Republicans that know that their beliefs are shameful.

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[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart 24 points 1 year ago (7 children)
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[–] MargotRobbie 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No, real libertarian takes over a town in New Hampshire only to get that town taken over by feral bears (the animal, not hairy gay men, although that would be fun too.)

https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project

[–] FlyingSquid 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's one of my favorite stories ever. I think I laughed the entire time when I first read that article. Fucking morons.

[–] MargotRobbie 6 points 1 year ago

If this was made into a movie it'll be dismissed as completely unrealistic.

Reality is absurd sometimes.

[–] afraid_of_zombies 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

not hairy gay men, although that would be fun too.)

I have had much worse neighbors.

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[–] Hextic 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Crazy republican that likes weed.

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[–] TheBananaKing 17 points 1 year ago (17 children)

Real libertarians would stand there with their hands in their pockets watching a toddler drown in a duck pond because the parents have no right to demand their labour.

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[–] MiddleWeigh 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Can we get a real libratarian starter pack? What's that look like?

[–] kameecoding 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department

here is a teaser

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

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[–] rockSlayer 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Real libertarianism looks more like anarchism. There's no strong central body (neither government or corporation), community helps each other, total personal liberty, etc. Political anarchism is generally "lib-left" on a political compass while classical libertarianism is "lib-right".

As a tangent, I very much dislike the ambiguous words we chose for the political compass, they have usage that could indicate so many different things on their own. For example, if I saw someone referring to republicans as "lib-right", I'd say no shit because both parties in the US are liberal political parties.

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[–] Cianalas 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It depends on who you ask. 10 years ago, it was mostly classical liberals that defected from the Republicans after the GOP started focusing their messaging on rallying evangelicals. Within the last couple election cycles, which IIRC is right around when they got close to having good enough poll numbers to get in a debate, the loudest group in it became ANCAPs who fight with each other about who's actually extreme enough to earn the libertarian title.

[–] grue 5 points 1 year ago

TL;DR: hippies. (At least for left-libertarians.)

[–] PsychedSy 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I appreciate you guys trying to make me feel at home here by making it seem like reddit. I was starting to worry nobody was going to tell me what I believe.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There seems to be a basic misunderstanding among both the targeted parties and the entertained parties in many posts like these.

Even when this particular post specifies "fake libertarian" in their simplistic collage of observations, many readers end up understanding it as "this is what OP and the upvoters think libertarians are like", and then it's that premise they either agree or disagree with.

It should be said thst if you're a libertarian that is genuinely liberal without the "protect sensitive people through authoritarian means"-mindset, then you're a much different type than the cop-loving "liberty is for white christian land owners"-type this meme is about.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's funny, because I watched it play out in real time on Reddit.

It all changed with the Tea Party. Not at first - a fact that the statists on both sides of the aisle want to bury is that the first couple of Tea Party protests were genuinely libertarian, and were in fact against the Bush administration.

But when Obama was elected, the Republicans moved to co-opt the Tea Party, and succeeded, and both they and the statists on the left were then more than happy to pretend that it was always a Republican thing, since as much as they might differ on the details, they both agree that the idea of being free of government entirely cannot be allowed to prosper.

And almost immediately, r/libertarian went to complete shit, as it was taken over by overt authoritarians who just want to eliminate all of the bits of the government they don't like - like gun laws and public assistance of any form - so the rest of the government can then focus entirely on punishing people for being too liberal or too brown or too smart, and they themselves can be free to just shoot anyone they want.

It took me a while to figure out that that change wasn't limited to just Reddit - that libertarianism as a whole had been co-opted by those violently authoritarian shitstains.

And it's certainly not a coincidence that the net result of that is that there's no longer an umbrella term in the US for people who just want people to be more free, and "libertarianism" has become just another variety of authoritarianism.

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