I can only speak for America, but here they’re all a bunch of corporate-sponsored anarchy LARPers.

If you mean the Statesian, pro-capitalist kind, it’s mostly a silly ideology pushed by small business owners and other highly individualist classes that are nonetheless pushed towards the working classes by competing against ever-growing monopolies.

The left wing version, I disagree with as you can’t dismantle the state without removing the basis of the state, class, and you can’t remove class without collectivizing production and distribution. Small, local cells loosely organized in a decentralist fashion would still result in class struggle and thus a form of state to hold one class over the others. That said, the leftists are valuable allies at times despite disagreements.

Libertarianism is a lie for people that want a high trust society without putting in any of the effort and cooperation that it requires. For people who expect things to naturally work while still saying “fuck you got mine”.

In Poland most libertarians are at best petty bougie failchildren thinking they would be billionaires when they grow up, those that do grow up without touching grass (or too dense to feel the grass) are usually turning into unhinged austrian cultists with monarchist and nazist inclinations. Deeply unserious people

Naive idiots at best genocidal Maniacs at worst.

Left libertarianism is great and serves as an effective counterbalance to many issues. Right libertarianism is often foolish at best and rarely includes the freedom to do things like live your life as you please

I share most of the opinions expressed about it already expressed in this thread, so I’ll add one: whenever I’m exposed to libertarian media (podcasts, articles, etc), I’m really struck by just how surface-level the analysis is. It’s like, for anything going on in the world, they simply try to tie it back to “biG gOvErNmENt” and shoehorn everything into that. They won’t even show their work of how they get from A to B. I get that once you start applying dialectical materialism to your analysis of the world around you, other analyses can seem vulgar. But tbh even your typical liberal worldview seems more thought out than libertarians.

As an example, a libertarian I know was complaining about how California is going eliminate plastic carrier bags at supermarkets. I just asked “ok, then how else are we going solve the problem of plastic bags everywhere?” They just sorta shrugged off the question and said the government has no business banning bags.

I actually was a libertarian briefly a long time ago. It was the fact that it offers no real solutions for the biggest problems we face as a species was why I eventually abandoned it.

Left wing (actual OG) Libertarianism is great. Right wing Libertarianism is basically a bunch of antisocial/intellectually lazy people who think the ideal society is one where everybody has a few acres of land with a little shack that they built themselves where they subsist on potatoes, carrots, and chicken eggs and stockpile gold and silver to trade with another libertarian twice a year.

It’s something you either grow out of by 14, or you grow into a guy with a cheap suit, who takes himself way too seriously, and happens to knows the age of consent in every state by heart while having some very creepy opinions on it.

I think Libertarianism is incompatible with the way that humans operate as a society. Almost all flavors of libertarianism puts an individual’s right to live as they choose as long as that doesn’t violate the rights of others through force or fraud. Humans like to associate themselves into groups, and in almost any group there will be an imbalance in power, whether that’s economic power, physical power (strength), or even something as abstract as eloquence or how outgoing you are. The issue then becomes that someone somewhere has to enforce the right to not be forced into giving up rights. In the classical construction of how libertarians view government, it is very easy to become more powerful than those meant to enforce limits on power. Even in our current political system, you see this when companies will spend more on their anti-trust court cases than the entire FTC spends total in a decade. Libertarianism has no mechanism to keep the enforcer the most powerful party involved

Either incredibly selfish /self centered people, incredibly uninformed on the real world, or a combination of both.

Pedophiles trick children into thinking they’re libertarians because cops are bad and weed is good

“libertarians generally advocate for minimal government regulation, believing that businesses should operate freely and regulate themselves through voluntary exchange and competition. They argue that over-regulation can stifle innovation and economic growth.”

So in my opinion, they are dumbasses. Yeah let’s get the Nestles and Monsanto’s of the world to regulate themselves. Honestly just unserious people with no critical thinking skills in my opinion.

I see it as an unstable economic model; it will either devolve to capitalism with monopolies capturing most if not all sectors; or devolve into communism with a single state-like entity controlling everything. At which point; no matter which way it went; it will collapse under its own weight.

The way it swings will depend on the people who are there at the start.

The modern version of libertarianism that we see most of; is based off some really bad assumptions:

• (1) the market is perfect
• (2) barriers to entry are irrelevant
• (3) monopoly is not bad
• (4) humans are rational actors
• (5) if the market can’t address the issue, it is irrelevant

(1) The market is perfect:
This leads to the assumption that all regulation is bad; and that it merely works to reduce personal freedoms and the ability of the market to produce things in the most efficient way possible.

It completely ignores history and the reason regulatory bodies were created. It also ignores that the market is not a thing unto itself; but is composed of people (see 4).

(2) Barriers to entry are irrelevant:
This follows directly from (1); even the simplest business has some barrier to entry. You have to buy somethings that your business needs to run. These are real costs, and will provide a barrier. Obviously, the bigger the barrier then more entrenched players have an advantage (see 3)

(3) Monopoly is not bad:
This is a subtle acknowledgment that (1 & 2) are completely false. Basically it is a cope, that even if monopolies form; clearly this is the market producing the most efficient production framework.

This ignores history; the major monopolies that were broken up. The crazy shit that went on to protect their monopoly status.

(4) Humans are rational actors:
Most economic models assume that consumers will make rational choices; they will make the most economically rational choices. Libertarians (in my experience) love this.

This ignores so much of reality; it also assumes that the values of all are the same as their own.

There is really too much in this point to cover here. So many things that we actually do make no sense if you were a rational actor, such as brand loyalty.

(5) If the market can’t address the issue, it is irrelevant:
There are many things that the market cannot address; but in the libertarian model these things are ignored.

e.g. fire fighting; this is the classic example where a market solution didn’t work.

But equally; policing; education; major infrastructure; functional health systems. There are so many examples; where if left to a purely market solution, simply would not get done.

The only Libertarians I fuck with are Libertarian Socialists. Otherwise, Ayn Rand types are cringe as hell