Kyle M
Member
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2016
- Messages
- 1,407
Maybe I shouldn't call you an extremist libertarian. I should just say that while I agree with the spirit that runs through libertarianism, I cannot wholesale go with it in practice. I detest big government, because it takes away from the individual's capacity to better himself, and as extension, to better society. But if government is about individuals working towards a common good, and not about individuals living off the largesse of a community chest where parasites outnumber those who actually work, I am not against government. That is a lot to ask for, and I'm not even sure if such a government exists among the many countries that dot the planet. But I don't think there is any country that is libertarian in practice either. It would be nice if you could be the president of such a country. I'll be the press and I'll savor the reporting of how unlibertarian you have come to be as the president.
I understand where you're coming from I really do, but I want you to consider one possibility: that you don't know much about the libertarian philosophic tradition, and that you assume or connote things that aren't true about it, judging my statements from that incorrect perspective. Think about it.
By the way, government has never been about individuals working for the common good. Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard is illuminating on this subject. Or perhaps it's a semantic issue, and we would be better off using the term "the state," since government can mean voluntary, self-government. In a libertarian world, there would be government, in the sense that individuals would come together and decide on common rules for things. They would not, however, have the legal authority to go to other people who don't want to be in their covenant and violently force their rules on them. That is the only, and most important, difference between statism and libertarianism, or power and market as Rothbard put it, or the political vs. economic means of interaction as I believe Nozick put it.