Why Are So Many Nerds Libertarians?

BrendanMcGrail writes "Why do so many nerds seem to lean toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum? As a leftist, I know there are many people who share my ideological views, but have very little in common with me in terms of profession and non-work interests. Is the community's political bent directly tied to our higher than average economic success?"

Comments

More than just "left" and "right"

[goldspider]

If you see political ideologies as a one-dimensional spectrum, you aren't paying enough attention. Educate yourself.

Re:Since when are libertarians left wing?

[Colin Smith]

I can attest that libertarians (or ultra-liberals as we tend to call them where I live) are considered only a few pennies short of insane, but I can easily understand why they are prevalent in the American (USA) society. Actually. Libertarianism is very similar to classical liberalism. Most of those who call themselves liberal today are in fact social democrats, not liberal at all.

"To put it succinctly, the libertarian believes in the freedom of individuals to pursue their lives as they see fit, as long as they cause no harm to others, with minimal governmental interference."

Quoted from :http://nvnv.essortment.com/libertarianwhat_rcrx.h tm

Quick Point

[Bastardchyld]

Mod down. Not only is he just spouting the same cliche talking points that have existed forever, but they are also completely baseless claims. Not to mention that not a single person here is an actual libertarian, because most don't seem to truly understand what it means to be a libertarian. It's not just "socially progressive and financially conservative." It's a lot more complicated, and frankly insidious, than that. Disagreement is not a category for Modding. If you would like to debate one or more of his points then please do... Don't just say you said this and this is wrong. Come up with actual points of your own...

So Mod Parent Down, Mod Grand Parent Up.

I don't agree with everything that the Grandparent said, however he was well spoken and backed up his statements with evidence (however anecdotal).

Re:Because we all know

[Anonymous Coward]

> *** Spoiler if you haven't finished Atlas Shrugged ***
>
> I have just spent way too much time googling for a comic that someone once linked in a /. comment. It was possibly titled "Atlas Shrugged, the sequel", or "Atlas Shrugged, Part II", or similar. It tells the story, in approx. one page, of how the story continued after all the Atlas heroes had settled down in their mountain seclusion: after some bragging of how they finally had gotten rid of all the useless people, they discover that they actually have no clue how to do all the mundane every-day tasks these people had done for them, like actually producing metals, cooking, or cleaning up. They all end up having to work the fields, muttering about how much it sucks. It was hilarious, and an extremely to-the-point comment on the shortcomings of Rand's "philosophy".
>
>It was hilarious, and an extremely to-the-point comment on the shortcomings of Rand's "philosophy".

You're after Bob the Angry Flower.

BTAF is one of the funniest web comics I've ever read, but Stephen Notley mustn't have read the book too closely. The cartoon's still funny, but you have to ignore the fact that he got it precisely wrong.

*** spoiler warning ***

One of the key plot points in Atlas Shrugged is how John Galt (and other characters) managed to hide themselves when recruiting followers from the rest of society. They did so by working precisely the sorts of menial jobs that the BTAF cartoon implies they couldn't. They gave society what it wanted: their labor. They withheld from society what it needed: their mind.

Atlas Shrugged is about what happens when genius goes on strike. You can pass laws that force a man to work, but you can't pass laws that force him to invent. Suppose you're a nuclear researcher. If you're a capitalist (in the Randroid, "never take a dime from the government, and never owe it a dime in taxes" sense), a nuclear power plant provides you a much better return on investment. A nuclear bomb, by contrast, is only useful to a non-profit operation. To a capitalist, nuking a city is a terrible waste of potential (or actual!) customers, employees, and factories. To a government, it's just a policy decision to be made for the greater good.

Would WW2 have been lost (apart from a few million more casualties in the invasion of Japan) had the nuclear scientists of the day simply gone on strike, working at burger joints, riveting aircraft together, or casting bullets and turning shell casings on lathes, and passing on the really interesting jobs until after the war was over?

(Where Rand fails is that although she's half-right -- you can't compel genius to invent -- she's just as half-wrong, in that one of the hallmarks of genius is that not even the genius can compel himself not to invent. People like Teller had to invent the H-Bomb, even though WW2 was over, and the Cold War had barely begun. Open source developers had to invent Linux, GCC, and so on, and would have invented something much like it even in the absence of non-Free UNIXes and Microsoft.)

As for the literary criticism, it's valid -- but only up to the point. Stop assuming it's a novel, and start assuming it's a philosophical system masquerading as a novel, and the cardboard characters become much more forgivable. Much like the animals in Animal Farm, they're not there to entertain you, they're there to make a point. The scariest thing is that the talking heads on the TV sound more and more like her villains (and Orwell's) every day.