Libertarians Piss me Off
I’m really sick of libertarians.
First off, it’s a dodge. Look, I don’t necessarily like the two party system any more than you do, but like any bipolar thing, you’re either one or the other. If someone put a gun to your head and made you pick a party, you’re going to pick one. In the United States, if you want your vote to have any meaning no matter how slight, you have two choices. You, the libertarian, are not thinking outside the box or rebelling against a flawed system, you’re just giving yourself a soap box to stand on at parties when your friends ask for your political alignment. Boring.
Second, the entire concept is stupid. I am not going to go through the trouble of dissecting their official talking points, instead I’m going to respond to the ideas that the self-proclaimed libertarians that I know in real life claim to be libertarian ideals. I’m sure I’ll get at least one libertarian commentator who claims that my libertarian friends aren’t true libertarians… please, spare me. If the concept of a libertarian is too vague for self-identifying libertarians to get it right, my point that libertarianism is f’ing stupid is only furthered.
The entire libertarian world view seems to boil down to the idea that “personal freedom” is paramount. In practical terms, “libertarians” generally believeve that individuals should be allowed to do whatever they want at all times “as long as it doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights.” Thus, libertarians are usually in favor of legalizing all drugs, they are typically pro-choice, they are usually pro-gay-marriage, etc. etc.
In other words they are liberals who justify their liberal ideology with the personal liberty angle. But they don’t want to associate with other liberals, possibly because they are against welfare. Libertarians are often against all taxation of any kind, which sometimes leads actual liberals to think that libertarians are actually conservatives because they don’t want to pay for social causes.
In my view, libertarianism can be caricatured with a simple South Park quote: It’s my hot body, I do what I want!
When I start to confront libertarians with anarchy, which is essentially where the libertarian path leads, of course they are anti-anarchists. Of course we should have laws and rules, but they should only be limited to regulating actions and circumstances that involve two or more individuals. This line of thinking is so easy to derail. It is impossible to exist in society wherein you do not constantly affect other individuals in some way, and whether that way is positive or negative can only be determined at the point of impact.
Every time I get in my car and drive somewhere I interact with other drivers on the road. Every time I buy something in a store I impact the cashier, the owner of the store, the maker of the good that I buy, my wife when she sees what I’ve brought home. Christ, every time I take a breath in a crowded elevator I’m minutely affecting the people around me.
We interact with each other all the time, no matter what we are doing.
Liberatarianism boils down to a few select issues, almost always drugs, in which the libertarian wants to be free to smoke pot all day long because “it doesn’t affect anyone but me.” The truth is, he just really wants to smoke pot without worrying about a community service sentence, and he constructed some elaborate ideological framework to justify his pot habit.
When push comes to shove it’s just a matter of degree: non-libertarians are slightly more restrictive on so-called “personal” freedom than libertarians are. Usually, the line in the sand is simply that society-at-large makes illegal anything that we determine will harm the individual doing it even if it doesn’t harm anyone else whereas the libertarian will not. While there are certainly things that today are illegal that probably shouldn’t be because the amount of harm they do to an individual is dubious (or at least no worse than other things that are presently legal), this doesn’t prove that the approach is wrong. Most reasonable people would agree that we, as a society, have a responsibility to protect each other from harm from any source including one’s self.
When I’m in the mood to derail a libertarian, I like to use the example of a house fire. Suppose Larry the Libertarian is at home in his house when it catches on fire. The fire department rushes to the scene. Should the brave firefighters remove Larry from the house?
If we were all libertarians, the brave firefighters couldn’t decide what to do. Are they certain that Larry didn’t exploit his God-given right to burn down his own house with himself in it? Did Larry accidently drop his lit bowl on the carpet, and is instead desperate for rescue? If the brave firefighters pull an unconscious Larry out of his smoke-filled house only to discover that Larry was committing suicide, then the brave firefightes infringed on his rights. If, instead, the brave firefighters sat on their hands because it isn’t their right to protect Larry from himself when the truth is that lightning struck Larry’s house, the brave firefighters have committed gross negligence.
Of course if we were all libertarians we probably wouldn’t have a fire department. Look after yourself, chump.
Okay, okay. I have to go off on a tangent here, lest I be called out for being inconsistent.
“But Evan,” cries Tim, “you are against socialized medicine and welfare for the same reason: look after yourself, chump. Doesn’t that make you a libertarian douche?”
No, Tim, because there’s a key difference here, a difference that I wish more people would learn to appreciate. The chance that I will need medical care at one point in my life is very close to 100%. The chance that I will need the fire department is very close to 0%.
Well eureka! Then it makes more sense to cut the fire department and instate socialized medicine, right? Everybody needs medicine, but only a very tiny number of people need the fire department!
No. Because I know with certainty that I will need medicine, I can prepare to afford it well in advance, the same way that I know in 8 hours I wil lbe hungry so I better think about where my next meal is coming from. I can’t say for certain that I will never need the fire department, but I still have fire insurance anyway.
Now look. Tim was only 21? 22? when he got very unlucky and racked up some serious healthcare bills, and I can understand why he’s pissed. I am considerably older than that and have been working at a lucrative, well-paying job for many years but even I could not afford Tim’s bills without liquidating a lot of assets (e.g. my house), so my thesis that I should be responsible to “prepare to afford” medical bills is somewhat preposterous since medical emergencies (and bills) can strike anyone at any time (that’s why insurance works the way it does, and that’s how I prevent myself from being in Tim’s shoes).
Society should look after people who are incapable of looking after themselves. Guess what? It already does. Tim didn’t have insurance because he was temporarily not a full time student. But he wasn’t earning income at the time, so shouldn’t he have been eligible for Medicaid, because he was, in theory, poor? I’m very strongly anti-socialized-medicine, but that doesn’t mean that I think people who are too poor to buy medical insurance should die in the streets. My problem with socialized medicine is that it gives it to people who can afford it. Well, that, and it’s fiscally implausible and I don’t want my physical health to become a campaign issue or a political tool for some DC asshole’s career growth.
My problem with things like welfare and social security is that these are both handouts for people who are capable of taking care of themselves (either through a job or by saving for retirement). Instead, they choose to rely on others to take care of them. And that irritates me.
So, to come full circle to my house fire analogy, I am incapable of putting out my own house fire, therefore, we need to have a fire department. I am not, in theory, opposed to the idea of paying the department to put out my fire, but since fires are so infrequent yet fire departments must be on call 24×7 and it is possible that they will go an entire year without ever fielding a call, the pricing model for a pay-as-you-need system is just impossible. Medicine is a very different thing.
Okay, tangent over.
Libertarianism is dumb.
Since when did the libertarian philosphy embrace the idea of no civil or social services of any kind? Have you really encountered someone who calls themself a libertarian arguing against fire departments? Looks like what you and Tim have in common is a love of straw-men when it comes to libertarianism (which I am not).
[...] Emach – “Libertarians Piss Me Off” [...]
If the shoe fits, wear it.
And ignorance is bliss.
I have met people who claim to be libertarians who are against pretty much everything except roads and the army.
Obviously, every ideology has extremes. Self-described liberals range from blue dogs to ardent socialists, and self-described conservatives range from John McCain to neo-Nazis.
I claim that the extreme form of libertarianism is essentially anarchy. Is that incorrect? I’m basing this off what little I read about the roughly 2 dozen variants of libertarian ideology that I’ve read about.
Am I putting up a straw man or would the person who refutes me be putting up the No True Libertarian defense, which I preemptively shut down with something I’ll now repeat: libertarianism is stupid because libertarians can’t agree on what it means.
Sure – neither can any political ideology really. Point taken. But just because other political ideologies are equally dumb doesn’t change that libertarianism is also dumb. QED.
A little circular there, homeboy.
This article is so silly. NO, most people DON’T give a flying **** enough about what someone does to themself to make a law about it, INCLUDING THEIRSELF? No. NOT including themself…
How about we put people in PRISON for doing things which harm themself, where they get RAPED, is THAT better?
Libertarianism WORKS, look at Switzerland or Sweden and how happy they are. The only problems they DO have, are from the VERY few lack of freedoms they do indeed have, that being that in Sweden gun ownership and “hate speech” is illegal (and people are sometimes arrested for speaking out against Jewish criminals, even if there are no racial undertones TO that speaking out).
A libertarian government would still have a fire department. I doubt you’ve ever actually met a libertarian saying we “shouldn’t have public fire departments”.
When you are home, by yourself, no you are NOT interacting with other people. Unless some nosy big government police state is stalking you while the welfare state comes in whenever you take a dump to wipe your hiney for you. Other than that what you do at your own house does NOT effect much anybody but you.
If someone wanted to burn their own house down that they built themself, I would say “well, are there houses close enough to it that THEY would burn too? Would this effect any friends or family or neighbors living with him?” THAT would be the deciding factor of the legality.
With no FDA around, medicine would be cheaper, because we’d be able to use drugs that actually, gee I dunno, WORK. Instead of these chemicals that just cost a bunch of money, have a crap load of side effects, etc. I don’t know WHY the FDA hates nature so much, especially when it WORKS a LOT better than chemicals do and is cheaper to produce but they just do.
Medicine would likely be affordable under libertarianism from paperwork reduction as well, or a legal system which operates on plain English instead of this lengthy legalese. The Patriot Act never woulda been passed if it was in plain English at 150 pages instead of 17,000 pages.
“And thenceforth where unto the technical official wencewhereiness on the date of the year” OH STFU
this would cut the costs of medical care in AT LEAST half.
And we’d all be making more money under REAL capitalism because we’d be able to get a job on our own instead of working for some elitist cartel of “bosses”, and we wouldn’t need government licenses and degrees to do EVERYTHING like we do in our current system. McDonalds workers could just all quit at once and make their own restaurant, they wouldn’t need a professional accountant because money system would be SIMPLE with the Federal Reserve and other corrupt private interests out of the way. And you KNOW we wouldn’t have nearly as much taxes.
So with all those factors affording medical care would be a DEFINITE, however I still think they should have something for people who get an EXTREMELY expensive diagnosis, like people who break a leg or get cancer, but hey that’s why they’re libertarians and not anarchists, they never said that noone should have ANY government help.
Idiots like you can pretend all you want that libertarian minarchism is something “new” that you can be sick of and easily dispatch its salient points without much thinking. However, its simply classical liberalism that was the majority opinion in the Western world from the late 18th century to the late 19th century onwards. Hell, even in the early 20th century, it was a majority opinion. So, your glib unthinking dismissals have ALREADY been dispatched by numerous libertarian thinkers over the centuries. You’re not so smart or special. There are much better critiques out there. Stop kidding yourself. K thanks