Third Party People Say the Darndest Things!

Too bad that individuals don’t get to determine the level of tolerance of the rest of society.

govt can’t tell us what to do on the stuff we like but can tell all those people we hate they can’t do the things we hate; but also govt CAN pass laws that make it shittier for the people we hate. that’s the only things govt can do

My memory of Libertarian views at that time was LGBTQ = evil, sex with underage girls is Aok.

Also, government spending on the roads I drive on is good and just. Government spending on roads I don’t drive on is theft.

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There’s traditionally been a wide range of views among libertarians. It can be helpful to think of the Nolan chart, where libertarianism vs authoritarianism is orthogonal to the “left” vs “right” of more mainstream political quarterbacking.

On the roads bit, there’s typically a preference in principle to tolls/private roads, or at least user fees to public highways funded from general tax revenue…but yes, many folks claiming to be libertarians will get uncomfortable when they consider what that means to them, and my own flavor of “libertarianism” dilutes on the subject when it comes to acknowledging that there’s a gap between how the world can function in reality, and how it would need to function in libertopia. (I.e. the government’s going to build and maintain the roads, but I do have a strong preference that construction and maintenance be funded via mechanisms directly linked to the use of those roads rather than the whims of general taxation/the general fund.)

On LGBTQ, the libertarian stance is supposed to be “as long as the folks involved are able to give consent and have done so, it’s not the state’s business”, but some right-leaning non-anarcho libertarians do forget to differentiate “what I think the government’s stance should be” from “what my religious views inform me about ‘morality’”…particularly when it’s convenient for them to do so.

In one of my prior comments, I had thought about mourning how some of the current crop of people who hide under the “libertarian” banner don’t even bother to acknowledge the Non-Aggression Principle, which is supposed to be a core libertarian philosophy…but the fact that there’s plenty of wiggle-room in interpreting the NAP forces me to concede that that lack of acknowledgement by that current crop isn’t particularly meaningful in the real world.

Aside from the unsavory associations, the reason I have to put qualifiers and dilutions on my association with libertarianism is that I have to admit that libertarianism requires certain unrealistic assumptions to actually work. In a libertopia, people have to be rational, well-informed, capable of making decisions with good foresight, and generally be decent individuals…and reality is quite different.

Regarding roads: well, they were already built… the cost of maintenance needs to be addressed, though.

I complain about the many roads past dead/dying communities in Newfoundland and suggest that we should tear some of them.up or downgrade them.