He is a real libertarian. I don't agree with him on everything, but he is legitimately a libertarian. I wouldn't say he's a great libertarian thinker, he is a politician. I would not say that his views epitomize libertarianism as a whole. His views represent one view within libertarianism.
If you carefully read my comment you would notice that I do not think socialism is a bad thing. If you read my comment carefully you'd notice that I favored an even more socialist version of Obamacare (single payer universal healthcare).
Unions and cooperatives are voluntary socialist organizations
Governments are involuntary socialist organizations. I should not have implied that Obamacare was socialist because it was involuntary. I meant to say that what made it socialist was the fact that it is a large group of people participating, but the reason for this participation is government enforcement. I do not mean to imply that this forced participation is bad. I think it is necessary.
I don;t think capitalism works everywhere. I don;t think socialism works everywhere.
One place where I think socialism works great is in software and open source. I am actually an open source contributor and advocate.
Well libertarianism is not a party. There is a Libertarian party, but this is only a small subset of people describing themselves as libertarians. In fact after the last election the national Libertarian party was taken over ex-republicans and a lot of people left in response.
While I don;t think it is conclusively proven that charity will *never* be a viable option for social safety net, I would say that for now this is probably true. But you don't need to advocate for a charity only solution to be a libertarian (although many do). Just like you don't need to be a communist advocating complete monetary equalization to be a progressive. These are 2 extremes on the same spectrum.
I would agree that we need regulations (in the form of taxes and social programs) in order to provide equality of opportunity to the poor. But many regulations are a direct result of corporate lobbying. Surely you don't think those regulations are good. I think we can probably remove a good chunk of laws as well as shrinking/focusing the scope or removing many government agencies that are not cost effective. For example I don;t think the government should be subsidizing corn farmers, bankers, and oil companies.
what is the meaning of a democrat? Someone who believes in democracy? What is the meaning of a republican? Someone who believes in republics? These terms have long departed from their original meaning, if they ever had one. What I am saying is that libertarian kind of still means what it's latin roots would suggest. Maybe that's about to change, but I would rather it didn't.
I am not arguing for no regulations. No regulations would be anarachy. I am arguing for minimal and effective regulations.
Maybe repealing Glass Steagall was a bad idea given the current environment at the time.
I don't think this is necessarily a case for government regulation. Part of the reason for corporations getting too big to fail is because of other government regulations. Corporate lobbyists successfully pass laws to give corporations advantages, and then we pass more laws to give them some disadvantages to even things out. All of these laws usually have unintended consequences.
Libertarians don't want to only remove the laws that hinder corporations. They also want to remove the laws that gave corporations unfair advantages in the first place, the ones that made the restrictive laws seem necessary.
Our laws are already so complicated that only the rich can afford the lawyers required to understand the law. This is why the rich pay a lower tax effective rate than the middle class. It's because of all the loopholes created by legal complexity.
The "libertarian wing" of the republican party are not libertarians. They are republicans that only care about 1 libertarian principle and take it to the extreme to the exclusion of all the others.
Deregulating without thinking is not a libertarian ideal. Doing anything without thinking is a bad idea. I don;t think it's fair to attribute the bad decisions by republican politicians as natural results of libertarian ideology.
Our laws are a giant cluster fuck. Republican and Democrat politicians repealed one law to benefit their friends. This is not sensible deregulation regardless of your ideology.
The debate over more laws vs less laws misses the point. We need effective laws first and foremost. Once we have that, we can worry about minimizing waste by removing unnecessary laws or optimize our society by adding more laws.
Yes, but it does not depend on every single decision to be rational to work. The more decisions that are rational, the more it works.
The idea that the market should be controlled, is based on the idea that a small group of elected officials can be smart enough to control something as complex as a market.
I don't think either assumption works perfectly, however I think free markets work a hell of a lot better than government control. I think governments can effectively control small subsections of markets, but this is expensive and difficult. Sometimes this is in everyone's best interest, but free markets are the best default option, until a compelling case can be made for government control.
The word selfish has a lot of connotations. It can refer to people who are willing to exploit others for their own gain, but it can also refer to people who are motivated help others because it makes themselves feel good.
Free markets working are not predicated on only this 1st sense of the word selfish. Even when people donate to charity, but they do so in a way that maximizes the effect their money has on the goals they are trying to accomplish, this is a free market at work.
As I said, free markets don;t work at perfect efficiency. Things like rationality, and better informed people affect the efficiency of a free market, but under most circumstances it works better than if prices were controlled by a government. Just try to imagine a world where politicians were deciding the prices of everything from potato chips to computer chips. It would be a disaster.
Well "classical liberalism" and "libertarianism" are the ideological products of the enlightenment and have led the the greatest improvement in quality of life and equality in human history. Yeah we have some corruption and greed. We don't conquer other territories in order to rape their women and turn their populations into slaves anymore. We have somewhat of a respect for human life and the rights of people to determine their own destiny.
You can point to the Koch brothers as the epitome of libertarianism, but this would be like pointing to richard nixon as the epitome of democracy.
I think these principles are quite open to interpretation, which is why many self described libertarians disagree on the specifics.
I would say that at a minimum equality of opportunity means that there should be no laws mandated or protecting any kind of discrimination, and at most this might mean actively ensuring some basic level of access to things like education and healthcare.
I don't think full blown equality of outcome could be considered a libertarian position (i.e. equally distributing wealth between everyone, or mandating that every school be public and equally funded, etc), although I do personally happen to believe in single payer universal healthcare.
Where libertarianism starts to diverge from liberalism is when we get into this idea that in order to have equality of opportunity, you need to take money form the rich and give it to the poor. To the degree that this should happen is the primary disagreement. Regardless, this is why most views shared by libertarians are actually in common with those shared by liberals. They are very close on the evolutionary tree of political ideologies.
There are lots of people nowadays, usually former republicans now calling themselves tea party libertarians that don;t really believe in things like marriage equality, ownership of your body, decriminalization of victimless crimes, etc. They just don't want to pay taxes. These people are not true libertarians. Not in some abstract sense, but because libertarians by definition believe in liberty. And these people don't believe in liberty (at least not in liberty for anyone but themselves). These are just greedy fuckers. I really don't like the idea of these people co-opting a term that incorrectly implies that they stand for liberty.
Notice how none of the people you mentioned are on this list. I am not saying I agree with all of them. But this would be like me writing of socialism as a failure because it's greatest thinkers, Nancy Pelosi and George Soros, can't seem come up with a good plan to solve the world's problems.
Ron Paul is not a libertarian thinker. He is a politician. David Koch is a lobbyist. Ayn Rand wrote some popular fiction books on the subject of libertarianism. Actually she claimed to be an objectivist and not a libertarian, but I am willing to say she was a libertarian adherent even if not a great libertarian thinker.
Yes the bill avoided the use of the word "tax" because certain people were willing to vote for the bill if it did not create any new taxes but were willing to vote for the exact same thing that if it was not called a tax. These people don't deserve to be representatives in congress because they don't have the critical thinking skills necessary to create effective laws that govern the entire country.
I would say that the difference is that the term "libertarian" is not an amorphous blob like "democrat", or "republican". It is a word for an ideology that actually does still have a meaning.
If 4 billion new people that worship Thor started calling themselves Chirstians, that wouldn't immediately change the definition of Christianity to people who worship Thor. It would just mean that now a big chunk of self described Christians are not actually Christians.
Maybe if these Thor worshipping Christians held their stake long enough the definition might change in practice, but I don;t think enough time has passed to really cede the term libertarian to these crazy people that seem to be dominating the conversation for the last 5-7 years.
Libertarianism as an ideology has been around since the 18th century.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I never made an assumption that humans make choices based on selfish desires. I suppose this could either be completely true or completely false depending on the details of how you define selfishness. Until you do, I don't even think it is a coherent statement.
Also, your claim that people can not win court cases against corporations because they have an army of good lawyers basically just admits that our justice system is completely broken and beyond repair. If this is the case, then we have bigger problems than clean air and water.
Any solution to something not directly related to the justice system should assume a functioning justice system. If the justice system is broken then that is a separate problem that needs to be fixed.
Imagine if we made a law that said that the punishment for a hate crime was to be executed by an angry mob. And the reason for this punishment is because we can't trust jurors to come to the right decisions in our corrupt justice system.
"The EPA should be eliminated" and "The EPA has provided clean air and drinking water" is a false dichotomy. Yes the EPA has done things to make air and water cleaner. This doesn't mean that our EPA in its current incarnation is the best solution to having clean air and water. The EPA also causes a lot of harm.
Also when it comes to air and water in particular, TO say "Ron Paul would get rid of the EPA" is misleading. Ron Paul's actual position is that state analogues of the EPA would exist instead and be able to control the environments in each state. Maybe you disagree with making enviromental protection a state issue rather than a federal issue (I know I do), but please don't mischaracterize Ron Paul's position by implying that he doesn't want any form of government regulation to protect the environment.
Most people calling themselves are idiots. Most people in general are idiots. This doesn't mean that libertarianism as an ideology is devoid of merit.
This would be like me saying math doesn't work. Over 99% of people who try to do math are terrible at it and don' understand how it really works. Sure there is the 1% that claims to understand math better than everyone else, but they have just lost touch with the masses and what mainstream math is.
I know a lot of liberals (me included) reject the bush era practice of equating expertise with elitism. I value expertise and knowledge. I don't care if 99% of libertarians are idiots. Why not? Because there are people with very good libertarian ideas. No ideology isn't mostly comprised of idiots. Having only intelligent adherents shouldn't be the benchmark for an ideology.
There are these republicans who go into poor neighborhoods asking uneducated people on welfare how Obamacare works, in an attempt to make an entire ideology look bad. This is intellectually dishonest. So is representing the entire specturm of libertarian ideology as the narrow view of of one group of people calling now themselves libertarian.
You can't claim "no true Scotsman" just because now there are a lot of tea party retards who call themselves libertarians.
I have been a libertarian since 1998. I was a bit naive back then (I was 18 and more of an idealist), but I will not concede that the entire libertarian ideology is reducible to this current crop of tea party retards who don't give a shit about most of the ideals of libertarianism.
The free market has no solution to the tragedy of the commons.
Neither does major league baseball. That doesn't mean that major league baseball sucks. It just means that major league baseball should be in charge of what it is good at and not solving the tragedy of the commons. There is lots of problems the free market doesn't solve. It solves 1 problem which is figure out how much goods and services should cost through supply and demand without any oversight. If you have a different problem then you need a solution beyond just the free market.
Anyone who claims the free market is the solution to everything is an idiot. Anyone who claims the free market isn't a good solution to anything is an idiot.
Any mature libertarian perspective acknowledges the tragedy of the commons. Even the acknowledgement of a limited government is a concession that there is such a thing as a public good that is worth preserving even if it is limited.
It is possible to believe in preserving public goods and still be a libertarian that doesn't want the price of corn to be set by the government.
The problem with you is that you want big government to control everything so that our whole economy collapses under crippling debt and the Chinese take over as the new dominant super power and the zombie Karl Marx is reanimated to rule over the new world communist utopia.
Well considering that whether we call it a penalty or a tax doesn't change how it actually works, I don't see the need to revote on it, unless we really want to point out how stupid certain congressmen are for changing their vote based on semantics.
Obamacare is socialist. It is socialist in that it forces people to participate in it against their will. Unfortunately it is also very crony capitalist in that it keeps private insurance companies as middlemen regardless of the fact that they are just parasites.
Obamacare would probably be better if it was more socialist (i.e. single payer). I can even think of some ways to make it more capitalist and still be better (e.g. ones that remove the tie between employers and healthcare).
The problem with Obamacare is not that it is socialist. The problem is that it has a bunch of benefits to particular special interests that don't deserve them. But that was the cost of getting it past. It was a Pareto-efficient move to payoff the health insurance companies in order to remove their power. It would have been great to just cut them out completely, but there wasn't enough public outrage to overcome how much money they had.
If you are a corporatist it does not mean you want *every* corporation to control the government. It just means you want to be part of the group of corporations that does. In fact it is important that most corporations are losers to concentrate wealth at the top.
A warlord doesn't want democracy. A warlord wants the world to be ruled by warlords. This doesn't mean he wants every warlord to succeed. He wants most to fail, so he can be as near to the top of the food chain as possible.
I would like to point out the false dichotomy of the outcomes of any social/political/economic syetem as "perfect utopia" vs. "complete failure".
Even with it's flaws, the United States has been been a success story for capitalism. Yes there is corruption, etc, but compared to what came before (e.g. totalitarianism, fuedalism, etc), the US is like a utopia.
I don't know where this idea that the free market requires no maintenance (i.e. that it "regulates itself") came from. It's true that the free market regulates it's own prices for goods and services, but that doesn't mean that it is the solution to every problem a society faces. I've heard people claim that everyone would become murderers and thieves in a free market. I don't think any sensible persons definition of a free market includes removal of a justice system.
We can have a free market even if the government is in charge of preventing and punishing criminals and fraudsters. In fact it actually works better when people are able to make more informed choices due to removal of fraud and coercion.
The fact that you choose Ayn Rand to be the representative of libertarianism in general is your problem. This is probably why your view of libertarianism is very juvenile.
Yes there are a lot of crazy people claiming to be libertarians lately. That doesn't mean that the entire spectrum of libertarian ideology is flawed.
I could say that liberal philosophy as expressed by Karl Marx is flawed. It assumes that people will all be willing to work hard regardless of how much they are paid, and will never attempt to exploit this system.
This would not only be an unfair characterization of liberalism, but also an unfair characterization of Marxism. The fact that there are many Marxist ideologues out there does not change this.
I am a libertarian. I recognize terms like "public good". I don't think everything should be privatized. A libertarian who thought *everything* should be privatized would just be an anarchist.
Furthermore, libertarianism today is basically what classical liberalism was during the enlightenment. It was the progenitor of the modern liberal/progressive movement. Yes tehre are people out there who call themselves libertarians but are really just people who don;t want to pay taxes, just like there are people out there who call themselves socialists, but really just want to mooch off rich people. This isn't an accurate representation of the ideology they claim to represent.
Core libertarian ideals include:
Autonomy, Freedom as a virtue in itself (The denial of a freedom must be justified rather than the granting of freedom)
Legal equality of opportunity (e.g. as opposed to equality of outcome)
Equality under the law (e.g. gay marriage)
Ownership of ones own body (e.g. legalization of drugs)
Decriminalization of victimless crimes(e.g. prostitution)
Free markets as a tool for economic efficiency
Maybe you don't think some these are ideals that should be limitless. Well I don't either. Just because some simple minded people calling themselves libertarians want to relive Atlas Shrugged doesn't mean that is all there is to libertarianism.
Slashdot Mirror
He is a real libertarian. I don't agree with him on everything, but he is legitimately a libertarian. I wouldn't say he's a great libertarian thinker, he is a politician. I would not say that his views epitomize libertarianism as a whole. His views represent one view within libertarianism.
If you carefully read my comment you would notice that I do not think socialism is a bad thing. If you read my comment carefully you'd notice that I favored an even more socialist version of Obamacare (single payer universal healthcare).
Unions and cooperatives are voluntary socialist organizations
Governments are involuntary socialist organizations. I should not have implied that Obamacare was socialist because it was involuntary. I meant to say that what made it socialist was the fact that it is a large group of people participating, but the reason for this participation is government enforcement. I do not mean to imply that this forced participation is bad. I think it is necessary.
I don;t think capitalism works everywhere. I don;t think socialism works everywhere.
One place where I think socialism works great is in software and open source. I am actually an open source contributor and advocate.
Well libertarianism is not a party. There is a Libertarian party, but this is only a small subset of people describing themselves as libertarians. In fact after the last election the national Libertarian party was taken over ex-republicans and a lot of people left in response.
While I don;t think it is conclusively proven that charity will *never* be a viable option for social safety net, I would say that for now this is probably true. But you don't need to advocate for a charity only solution to be a libertarian (although many do). Just like you don't need to be a communist advocating complete monetary equalization to be a progressive. These are 2 extremes on the same spectrum.
I would agree that we need regulations (in the form of taxes and social programs) in order to provide equality of opportunity to the poor. But many regulations are a direct result of corporate lobbying. Surely you don't think those regulations are good. I think we can probably remove a good chunk of laws as well as shrinking/focusing the scope or removing many government agencies that are not cost effective. For example I don;t think the government should be subsidizing corn farmers, bankers, and oil companies.
what is the meaning of a democrat? Someone who believes in democracy? What is the meaning of a republican? Someone who believes in republics? These terms have long departed from their original meaning, if they ever had one. What I am saying is that libertarian kind of still means what it's latin roots would suggest. Maybe that's about to change, but I would rather it didn't.
I am not arguing for no regulations. No regulations would be anarachy. I am arguing for minimal and effective regulations.
Maybe repealing Glass Steagall was a bad idea given the current environment at the time.
I don't think this is necessarily a case for government regulation. Part of the reason for corporations getting too big to fail is because of other government regulations. Corporate lobbyists successfully pass laws to give corporations advantages, and then we pass more laws to give them some disadvantages to even things out. All of these laws usually have unintended consequences.
Libertarians don't want to only remove the laws that hinder corporations. They also want to remove the laws that gave corporations unfair advantages in the first place, the ones that made the restrictive laws seem necessary.
Our laws are already so complicated that only the rich can afford the lawyers required to understand the law. This is why the rich pay a lower tax effective rate than the middle class. It's because of all the loopholes created by legal complexity.
The "libertarian wing" of the republican party are not libertarians. They are republicans that only care about 1 libertarian principle and take it to the extreme to the exclusion of all the others.
Deregulating without thinking is not a libertarian ideal. Doing anything without thinking is a bad idea. I don;t think it's fair to attribute the bad decisions by republican politicians as natural results of libertarian ideology.
Our laws are a giant cluster fuck. Republican and Democrat politicians repealed one law to benefit their friends. This is not sensible deregulation regardless of your ideology.
The debate over more laws vs less laws misses the point. We need effective laws first and foremost. Once we have that, we can worry about minimizing waste by removing unnecessary laws or optimize our society by adding more laws.
Yes, but it does not depend on every single decision to be rational to work. The more decisions that are rational, the more it works.
The idea that the market should be controlled, is based on the idea that a small group of elected officials can be smart enough to control something as complex as a market.
I don't think either assumption works perfectly, however I think free markets work a hell of a lot better than government control. I think governments can effectively control small subsections of markets, but this is expensive and difficult. Sometimes this is in everyone's best interest, but free markets are the best default option, until a compelling case can be made for government control.
The word selfish has a lot of connotations. It can refer to people who are willing to exploit others for their own gain, but it can also refer to people who are motivated help others because it makes themselves feel good.
Free markets working are not predicated on only this 1st sense of the word selfish. Even when people donate to charity, but they do so in a way that maximizes the effect their money has on the goals they are trying to accomplish, this is a free market at work.
As I said, free markets don;t work at perfect efficiency. Things like rationality, and better informed people affect the efficiency of a free market, but under most circumstances it works better than if prices were controlled by a government. Just try to imagine a world where politicians were deciding the prices of everything from potato chips to computer chips. It would be a disaster.
Well "classical liberalism" and "libertarianism" are the ideological products of the enlightenment and have led the the greatest improvement in quality of life and equality in human history. Yeah we have some corruption and greed. We don't conquer other territories in order to rape their women and turn their populations into slaves anymore. We have somewhat of a respect for human life and the rights of people to determine their own destiny.
You can point to the Koch brothers as the epitome of libertarianism, but this would be like pointing to richard nixon as the epitome of democracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
I think these principles are quite open to interpretation, which is why many self described libertarians disagree on the specifics.
I would say that at a minimum equality of opportunity means that there should be no laws mandated or protecting any kind of discrimination, and at most this might mean actively ensuring some basic level of access to things like education and healthcare.
I don't think full blown equality of outcome could be considered a libertarian position (i.e. equally distributing wealth between everyone, or mandating that every school be public and equally funded, etc), although I do personally happen to believe in single payer universal healthcare.
Where libertarianism starts to diverge from liberalism is when we get into this idea that in order to have equality of opportunity, you need to take money form the rich and give it to the poor. To the degree that this should happen is the primary disagreement. Regardless, this is why most views shared by libertarians are actually in common with those shared by liberals. They are very close on the evolutionary tree of political ideologies.
There are lots of people nowadays, usually former republicans now calling themselves tea party libertarians that don;t really believe in things like marriage equality, ownership of your body, decriminalization of victimless crimes, etc. They just don't want to pay taxes. These people are not true libertarians. Not in some abstract sense, but because libertarians by definition believe in liberty. And these people don't believe in liberty (at least not in liberty for anyone but themselves). These are just greedy fuckers. I really don't like the idea of these people co-opting a term that incorrectly implies that they stand for liberty.
Notice how none of the people you mentioned are on this list. I am not saying I agree with all of them. But this would be like me writing of socialism as a failure because it's greatest thinkers, Nancy Pelosi and George Soros, can't seem come up with a good plan to solve the world's problems.
Ron Paul is not a libertarian thinker. He is a politician. David Koch is a lobbyist. Ayn Rand wrote some popular fiction books on the subject of libertarianism. Actually she claimed to be an objectivist and not a libertarian, but I am willing to say she was a libertarian adherent even if not a great libertarian thinker.
Yes the bill avoided the use of the word "tax" because certain people were willing to vote for the bill if it did not create any new taxes but were willing to vote for the exact same thing that if it was not called a tax. These people don't deserve to be representatives in congress because they don't have the critical thinking skills necessary to create effective laws that govern the entire country.
And you are one of the naive idiots who thinks that a free market necessarily means no regulations at all.
I would say that the difference is that the term "libertarian" is not an amorphous blob like "democrat", or "republican". It is a word for an ideology that actually does still have a meaning.
If 4 billion new people that worship Thor started calling themselves Chirstians, that wouldn't immediately change the definition of Christianity to people who worship Thor. It would just mean that now a big chunk of self described Christians are not actually Christians.
Maybe if these Thor worshipping Christians held their stake long enough the definition might change in practice, but I don;t think enough time has passed to really cede the term libertarian to these crazy people that seem to be dominating the conversation for the last 5-7 years.
Libertarianism as an ideology has been around since the 18th century.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I never made an assumption that humans make choices based on selfish desires. I suppose this could either be completely true or completely false depending on the details of how you define selfishness. Until you do, I don't even think it is a coherent statement.
Also, your claim that people can not win court cases against corporations because they have an army of good lawyers basically just admits that our justice system is completely broken and beyond repair. If this is the case, then we have bigger problems than clean air and water.
Any solution to something not directly related to the justice system should assume a functioning justice system. If the justice system is broken then that is a separate problem that needs to be fixed.
Imagine if we made a law that said that the punishment for a hate crime was to be executed by an angry mob. And the reason for this punishment is because we can't trust jurors to come to the right decisions in our corrupt justice system.
"The EPA should be eliminated" and "The EPA has provided clean air and drinking water" is a false dichotomy. Yes the EPA has done things to make air and water cleaner. This doesn't mean that our EPA in its current incarnation is the best solution to having clean air and water. The EPA also causes a lot of harm.
Also when it comes to air and water in particular, TO say "Ron Paul would get rid of the EPA" is misleading. Ron Paul's actual position is that state analogues of the EPA would exist instead and be able to control the environments in each state. Maybe you disagree with making enviromental protection a state issue rather than a federal issue (I know I do), but please don't mischaracterize Ron Paul's position by implying that he doesn't want any form of government regulation to protect the environment.
And to you Ron Paul = libertarianism?
Most people calling themselves are idiots. Most people in general are idiots. This doesn't mean that libertarianism as an ideology is devoid of merit.
This would be like me saying math doesn't work. Over 99% of people who try to do math are terrible at it and don' understand how it really works. Sure there is the 1% that claims to understand math better than everyone else, but they have just lost touch with the masses and what mainstream math is.
I know a lot of liberals (me included) reject the bush era practice of equating expertise with elitism. I value expertise and knowledge. I don't care if 99% of libertarians are idiots. Why not? Because there are people with very good libertarian ideas. No ideology isn't mostly comprised of idiots. Having only intelligent adherents shouldn't be the benchmark for an ideology.
There are these republicans who go into poor neighborhoods asking uneducated people on welfare how Obamacare works, in an attempt to make an entire ideology look bad. This is intellectually dishonest. So is representing the entire specturm of libertarian ideology as the narrow view of of one group of people calling now themselves libertarian.
You can't claim "no true Scotsman" just because now there are a lot of tea party retards who call themselves libertarians.
I have been a libertarian since 1998. I was a bit naive back then (I was 18 and more of an idealist), but I will not concede that the entire libertarian ideology is reducible to this current crop of tea party retards who don't give a shit about most of the ideals of libertarianism.
The free market has no solution to the tragedy of the commons.
Neither does major league baseball. That doesn't mean that major league baseball sucks. It just means that major league baseball should be in charge of what it is good at and not solving the tragedy of the commons. There is lots of problems the free market doesn't solve. It solves 1 problem which is figure out how much goods and services should cost through supply and demand without any oversight. If you have a different problem then you need a solution beyond just the free market.
Anyone who claims the free market is the solution to everything is an idiot. Anyone who claims the free market isn't a good solution to anything is an idiot.
Any mature libertarian perspective acknowledges the tragedy of the commons. Even the acknowledgement of a limited government is a concession that there is such a thing as a public good that is worth preserving even if it is limited.
It is possible to believe in preserving public goods and still be a libertarian that doesn't want the price of corn to be set by the government.
The problem with you is that you want big government to control everything so that our whole economy collapses under crippling debt and the Chinese take over as the new dominant super power and the zombie Karl Marx is reanimated to rule over the new world communist utopia.
Well considering that whether we call it a penalty or a tax doesn't change how it actually works, I don't see the need to revote on it, unless we really want to point out how stupid certain congressmen are for changing their vote based on semantics.
Obamacare is socialist. It is socialist in that it forces people to participate in it against their will. Unfortunately it is also very crony capitalist in that it keeps private insurance companies as middlemen regardless of the fact that they are just parasites.
Obamacare would probably be better if it was more socialist (i.e. single payer). I can even think of some ways to make it more capitalist and still be better (e.g. ones that remove the tie between employers and healthcare).
The problem with Obamacare is not that it is socialist. The problem is that it has a bunch of benefits to particular special interests that don't deserve them. But that was the cost of getting it past. It was a Pareto-efficient move to payoff the health insurance companies in order to remove their power. It would have been great to just cut them out completely, but there wasn't enough public outrage to overcome how much money they had.
It is clear that the Constitution's use of 'the People' meant actual human beings.
Or at least the human beings who were white men that owned property...
If you are a corporatist it does not mean you want *every* corporation to control the government. It just means you want to be part of the group of corporations that does. In fact it is important that most corporations are losers to concentrate wealth at the top.
A warlord doesn't want democracy. A warlord wants the world to be ruled by warlords. This doesn't mean he wants every warlord to succeed. He wants most to fail, so he can be as near to the top of the food chain as possible.
I would like to point out the false dichotomy of the outcomes of any social/political/economic syetem as "perfect utopia" vs. "complete failure".
Even with it's flaws, the United States has been been a success story for capitalism. Yes there is corruption, etc, but compared to what came before (e.g. totalitarianism, fuedalism, etc), the US is like a utopia.
I don't know where this idea that the free market requires no maintenance (i.e. that it "regulates itself") came from. It's true that the free market regulates it's own prices for goods and services, but that doesn't mean that it is the solution to every problem a society faces. I've heard people claim that everyone would become murderers and thieves in a free market. I don't think any sensible persons definition of a free market includes removal of a justice system.
We can have a free market even if the government is in charge of preventing and punishing criminals and fraudsters. In fact it actually works better when people are able to make more informed choices due to removal of fraud and coercion.
The fact that you choose Ayn Rand to be the representative of libertarianism in general is your problem. This is probably why your view of libertarianism is very juvenile.
Yes there are a lot of crazy people claiming to be libertarians lately. That doesn't mean that the entire spectrum of libertarian ideology is flawed.
I could say that liberal philosophy as expressed by Karl Marx is flawed. It assumes that people will all be willing to work hard regardless of how much they are paid, and will never attempt to exploit this system.
This would not only be an unfair characterization of liberalism, but also an unfair characterization of Marxism. The fact that there are many Marxist ideologues out there does not change this.
I am a libertarian. I recognize terms like "public good". I don't think everything should be privatized. A libertarian who thought *everything* should be privatized would just be an anarchist.
Furthermore, libertarianism today is basically what classical liberalism was during the enlightenment. It was the progenitor of the modern liberal/progressive movement. Yes tehre are people out there who call themselves libertarians but are really just people who don;t want to pay taxes, just like there are people out there who call themselves socialists, but really just want to mooch off rich people. This isn't an accurate representation of the ideology they claim to represent.
Core libertarian ideals include:
Autonomy, Freedom as a virtue in itself (The denial of a freedom must be justified rather than the granting of freedom)
Legal equality of opportunity (e.g. as opposed to equality of outcome)
Equality under the law (e.g. gay marriage)
Ownership of ones own body (e.g. legalization of drugs)
Decriminalization of victimless crimes(e.g. prostitution)
Free markets as a tool for economic efficiency
Maybe you don't think some these are ideals that should be limitless. Well I don't either. Just because some simple minded people calling themselves libertarians want to relive Atlas Shrugged doesn't mean that is all there is to libertarianism.