[PrestonSturges]

My Mom is aware of who John Stossel is and figures if he's on Fox he's impartial and wicked smart. I explained that whatever credibility Libertarianism ever had is pretty much gone at this point, which is how it's ended up on Fox.

I know there are some Libertarians here, and I promise (maybe) to not heap ridicule and abuse on them just this once.

Anyone want to try to put explain this to Mom? And if someone else wants to mock Libertarians, feel free, but I'll try sitting this out......

[bratticus]

Just say, "Mom, Libertarians are incompatibilists who reject causal determinism." I'm sure she'll understand.

[PrestonSturges]

I've never thought to explain it in philosophical terms, but Wittgenstein's approach of making questions into intractable word problems seems like it's part of it. There's definitely a 19th century Continental influence there.

[careinke]

If you take the good parts of the Dimocrat platform, the good parts of the Repuglican platform, and throw the rest of the ignorant stuff out the window, you get a Libertarian.

Or how about:

If you are a Dim, you want personal freedom and financial slavery.

If you are a Repug, you want financial freedom and personal slavery.

If you are a Libertarian you get both personal and financial freedom.


Of course you are a Dim so you will never pass this on to your mom anyway.....

[PrestonSturges]

Stossel was on, and his arguement about everything is that everything has unintended consequences, so we shouldn;t do anything. All in his trademark sing-song almost whiney voice. He said credit card regulation was bad because people would use loan sharks, so I guess leaving the credit industry alone would fight organized crime (presumably with no unintended consequences). Then he was mocking health care reform (using GOP talking point "Oamacare") saying that health care costs have gone up, as if they weren't before.

Sure it was incoherent giberish, but if Stossel was just spouting incoherent gibberish, that wouldn't be too much a problem. But he's clearly a total sell-out peddling strict far right GOP talking points. It's not as if he'd ever go out on a limb advocating gay marriage, abortion, legalizing pot, or anything else a South Carolina politician in full race baiting campaign mode would disapprove of. Does Stossel get to advocate legalizing prostitution on Fox News? (insert joke here) Does he get to advocate legalizing prostitution off Fox News? And he calls himself a "Libertarian," so I wonder how people feel about that.

Or not to pick on Stossel, there's Rand Paul and his very cozy relationship with very authoritarian people.

Is there anybody out there that describes themselves as a "libertarian" not on the GOP payroll or sucking up to ultraconservative religious groups?

[BasilBoy]

Not all libertarians are of the Fox News types. There is also left-libertarianism...

[eastbay]

Tell her if she loves the idea of open borders she'll love the libertarian philosophy.

[Kristen]

A libretarian is simply the belief that "every x (person) has a right to do as they choose as long as they don't interfere with every other x's (peoples) same right.

[PrestonSturges]

Stossel is promoting a laissez-faire approach that says the individual is on some sort of level palying field with the rest of the world, which is a absurd fantasy. According to people like Rand Paul, government regulation makes coal mines less safe, because it prevents the suposedly all powerful market place from putting deadly mines ou of business. Despite a total lack of any supporting evidence, they ignore our current race to the bottom as well as previous economic bubbles, monopolies, and all sorts of avoidable disastors.

It probably pays very very well to claim that the health insurance industry is powerless to haggle over prices with someone needing heart surgery. I mean, that's got to pay truckloadfs of cash, and whoring yourself to the highest bidder sure is "libertarian" I guess.

Big business has done a terrific marketing job in rebranding laissez-faire economics as "libertarianism."

It's worth noting that the french were so taken with laissez-faire economics that it led to the French Revolution. Maybe it worked after all, if chopping peoples' heads off counts as "libertarian."

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('careinke', 'I')f you take the good parts of the Dimocrat platform, the good parts of the Repuglican platform, and throw the rest of the ignorant stuff out the window, you get a Libertarian.

[Asterisk]

Libertarians are republicans who like to smoke pot and think prostitution should be legal. They also think that if businesses want to exclude blacks or Mexicans, that is their right and the "free market" will dictate whether they succeed.

It is the right of a business owner to exclude blacks, and it is the right of patrons to not patronize that business if they disagree with that philosophy.

That is libertarianism in a nutshell.

Keep in mind, a "free market" does not exist and has never existed. All employees drive to work on government funded roads with government funded stop lights. The business knows that if someone vandalizes their restaurant, they will be punished via the government funded police department and if there is a fire, the government funded fire department will extinguish it. Not to mention government mandated construction codes that insured the building that houses the business is safe, etc. etc. etc.

Libertarianism is just an absurdity.

[Novus]

Libertarians are some of the biggest sheep around. What is so great about be ruled by unelected plutocracy? Imagine if your Christmas dinner was served Libertarian style. First person in line takes all the food and everyone else has to pay or work for him as slaves if they want to eat. Think you got what it takes to be first in line? Well I got news for you. The person who got there first was there before you were even born. It is not a level playing field and new will be. Without some form of government to slap the hand of the fat cat pig from taking the whole turkey you will either starve or become his slave. Libertarianism makes exactly zero sense in a world of finite resources.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BasilBoy', 'N')ot all libertarians are of the Fox News types. There is also left-libertarianism...

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Novus', 'L')ibertarians are some of the biggest sheep around. What is so great about be ruled by unelected plutocracy? Imagine if your Christmas dinner was served Libertarian style. First person in line takes all the food and everyone else has to pay or work for him as slaves if they want to eat. Think you got what it takes to be first in line? Well I got news for you. The person who got there first was there before you were even born. It is not a level playing field and new will be. Without some form of government to slap the hand of the fat cat pig from taking the whole turkey you will either starve or become his slave. Libertarianism makes exactly zero sense in a world of finite resources.

[Asterisk]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Novus', 'Y')ou must watch people like Ed Shultz and Rachael Maddow on MSNBC too much. They'll rot your brain just as surely as the idiocy spewed from their counterparts (Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity) on Fox News.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Asterisk', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Novus', 'Y')ou must watch people like Ed Shultz and Rachael Maddow on MSNBC too much. They'll rot your brain just as surely as the idiocy spewed from their counterparts (Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity) on Fox News.

[Novus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Novus', 'L')ibertarians are some of the biggest sheep around. What is so great about be ruled by unelected plutocracy? Imagine if your Christmas dinner was served Libertarian style. First person in line takes all the food and everyone else has to pay or work for him as slaves if they want to eat. Think you got what it takes to be first in line? Well I got news for you. The person who got there first was there before you were even born. It is not a level playing field and new will be. Without some form of government to slap the hand of the fat cat pig from taking the whole turkey you will either starve or become his slave. Libertarianism makes exactly zero sense in a world of finite resources.

[BasilBoy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', '
')As a "moderate" libertarian, I have to ask -- how does this work? (I don't hear of it often).

Does this mean "I favor personal freedom and a small military"?
which makes sense to me for a left-libertarian platform.

If this means "I favor small government", that doesn't sound left at all to me, and if it means "I favor high taxes to promote social freedom", that doesn't sound libertarian (small government) to me.

If this is a stupid question -- sorry in advance.

[Oakley]

Libertarianism is the ultimate in democracy. They advocate people vote daily with their own money to acquire what they want instead of having a few people selected to make spending decisions for them.

Libertarianism advocates freedom instead of slavery. Libertarians advocate personal choice instead of government deciding how we live. Libertarians advocate government only engage in defense, not the present operation of a violent empire.

The only restrictions Libertarians advocate on our free choice is that we not be allowed to commit acts of aggression against others. It really is a "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" type of philosophy. This is why Libertarians object to government force that is not in self defense. You only have a right to use violence to defend yourself. You do not have a right to use violence to take away from someone else what you want. If we create government to act on our behalves, we can only authorize them to do what we, ourselves can do, hence Libertarians object to the use of government force for anything but defense against foreign or domestic aggressors.

Libertarians do not advocate fascism, the merging of the interest of corporations and the state. In fact there are many libertarians who advocate the end of government created corporations. Corporations, after all, are created by governments; to become a corporation the people who want to incorporate apply to a State government for a charter; without the State creating these corporations, they would not exist, and people who wanted to operate organizations in groups would be forced to operate as partnerships which the consequent unlimited liability for wrongdoing of the business that partners bear under the law. Read history and learn that the early corporations were created by Kings as grants of monopoly privilege to their friends. It is common for leftist/statist to claim that it is free markets that are responsible for the rigging of the markets in favor of those in power at the expense of the majority; this is false; it is government involvement in and rigging of free interaction among ourselves that creates the skewed distribution of wealth with poverty of the many and wealth for the politically powerful. If government by interfering with markets can effect the distribution of wealth so that the few wind up with most of the wealth, don't you think that the opposite would happen without them rigging markets and that we would have a statistically "natural distribution" of wealth if we could interact freely without force and privilege for the few?

Most Republicans are not libertarians and do not embrace the idea that freedom is a high value. Most Democrats are not libertarians and do not embrace the idea that freedom is a high value. Both Republicans and Democrats pick and choose for the rest of us what parts of our lives are to be free and what parts are to be government controlled. It matters not to them that people peacefully and responsibly live their own lives; what matters to these statists is that the population be forced to conform to what the collective decides. The problem is that the collective is always co-opted by the sociopathic few, and given the opportunity the collective will vote to take from others what they want. The way democracy works when government is involved is the old "two wolves and one sheep voting on what is for lunch". The democracy that Libertarians advocate is that you run your own life without constraints so long as you do not commit acts of aggression against your fellow man, and that when disputes arise they are settled without violence. Libertarianism is not license to do as one pleases, but rather is license to act as one pleases so long as there is not direct damage to others.

If you are interested in unleashing human potential and elevating the quality of life, you don't do it by enslaving the population.

[Oakley]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Novus', '
')
Show me people won't take more than their share in a capitalist society.