Spotted at Balloon Juice.
What is debated within libertarianism? Nothing that challenges the rich or corporations. Ever. The best you get is something like Bleeding Heart Libertarians, where people struggle to find contractual grounds to object to a boss saying “have sex with me or you’re fired.” In other words, internal libertarian debate amounts to working hard to justify absolutely elementary human morality, not to question the moneyed or the powerful.
Too many Libertarians seem to think they’re rugged individualists, like the America frontiersmen who staked their own land, cleared it, put fences around it, and then raised animals and grew their own food, and took it to market.
Well, they ain’t!
In reality, most of them are entitled leeches, born into well-off families, who want to be far, far-better off, and respect their economic betters like the sycophants they are, hoping to either be noticed and appreciated, or to allowed to go along for the ride.
And if Ayn Rand is your hero, then you either know nothing about her and her life, and little about human psychology and nothing about societies, and your other hero’s are sociopaths, psychopaths, and/or serial killers.
“I got mine! Go get your own,” may have worked at some level on the frontier. But something tells me that all of those frontiersmen hero’s were less like Libertarians, and more like socialists, when either attacked by the indigenous tribes, or faced some sort of ecological disaster.
A Libertarian is a euphemism for a selfish prick.
cund – your first paragraph is a great sum-up of libertarianism – reality is not its strong point. I’d only add that whoever said that no man is an island was right, whereas the libertarian suffers from the delusion that each man is an island – independent, self-sufficient, self-determining.
If the libertarian really believes his own rhetoric he should be ranting against government financed railway systems, highway systems, airports, sea ports, schools, nation-wide electrical grids, phone systems, a military, fire departments, police departments, public utilities (lights, gas, water), dams, bridges…it’s a long list. (I lived in a fifth-world country which had none of the above, and of course, had no income tax system. I would invite all libertarians to live in 1976 Yemen as exemplifying their idea of an ideal country.)
Agreed. But libertarians are easier to stomach than the religious whack jobs that dominate almost 100% of the GOP these days. At least libertarians can SOUND rational from time to time, and many CLAIM to understand the concept of individual liberties.
“Libertarianism” is a misnomer; the proper term should be “propertarianism”, as property is their one consistent concern.
“What is debated within libertarianism?”
According to the GOP, there is no debate within a party, there is only blind following and signing of pledges or annihilation.