libertarians are NOT republicans. We libertarians do not trust reps or dems or any "big govt" types. We can clearly see that govt, even well-meaning govt, does things in an inefficient and usually counter-productive manner. Thus, we trust individuals and sometimes VERY local govts who we know and can watch and interact with to govern us. No wars except strictly defensive, no handouts to ANYONE, corporations, charities, other countries, or individuals. Individuals and private groups can of course help anyone, even other countries, they want, using their own donated money and efforts. And, of course, we don't want big-brother telling us what not do ingest, or not to gamble except on govt lotteries or pay for consensual sex, or what we can't do on Sunday etc. etc.
On all this, permit me a word or two in answer if you will.
First --
There are many Republicans who identify as market libertarians, whether you are offended or not by that fact, and there are many more Republicans who make anti-tax and anti-government arguments and policies that are shaped by precisely the same texts with which libertarians identify. That is simply true, whether you take responsibility for the results or not.
Second --
You will forgive me for lacking sympathy for your arguments about inevitable government inefficiency when those arguments keep cashing out in the real world as support instead for vast bloated corporate bureaucracies and crony capitalist profit-taking, especially in a world where the monumental legacies of public infrastructure investments are all about us, including where they are no longer maintained and have been left to crumble because they have been looted and privatized by people inspired by magical market thinking of the kind in which you are now indulging.
Third --
Again, you will forgive me if I refuse to share in your contempt for "well-meaning" citizens seeking to collaborate through the legitimate agencies of representative governance to solve shared problems when the alternative on offer instead is so often at best the neglect of such shared problems or at worst their creation or exacerbation by those who are not well-meaning at all but only interested in parochial profit-taking. That may not be how it plays out in Ayn Rand novels or Friedmanian fables, but back here on planet earth the results on the ground are far less coddling of your fanciful assumptions.
Fourth --
While I am happy to hear that your libertarianism has made you personally skeptical of war-making, you must forgive me yet again when I declare those who fancy the world a war of all against all make unsteady allies in anti-militarism I fear, especially to the extent that war-making is so profitable and so many "market libertarians" declare profit-taking the key to both ethical and instrumental optimality. Again, it is not that I disbelieve you, but I mistrust you. If you are as appalled by war as I am, as you say that you are, you will no doubt respect such a sentiment.
Lastly --
To declare taxes a kind of involuntary charitable donation is, I fear, to testify to so profound an ignorance or confusion about governance that it is hard to know how to proceed in a discussion with you. The nonviolent adjudication of disputes, including disputes as to what counts as violence, fall to institutions different in character from for-profit ventures or loving intimate ones, for they must be equitable in the face of the ineradicable diversity of the peers who share the world.
We are born in societies that precede and exceed us, speaking languages which speak us as much as we do them. We do not choose to care about choosing, we do not decide to value autonomous decision-making, we do not hit upon our individuality individually, but in company and in concert with others, upsetting though that may be to you. We are interdependent beings whatever our independence, we none of us are capable of making the world on which we depend ab initio, we none of us could form alone the conception that we would be better off in solitude. We are none of us the sole authors of either our treasures or our tragedies. We rely on the collective heritage of our history, on the shared resources of our planet, on the sustaining effort and investment of our colleagues peers and fellow citizens.
If you would speak seriously of politics you really must set aside these facile intuitions of a worldly rugged individuality, of competition yielding optimal political outcomes as though they were engineering problems, you much cast off these absurd analogizations of national economies to household economies, of public investments to private charities, of well-informed non-duressed consent to whatever passes for a market transaction according to incumbent elites at the moment. To indulge in such consoling fancies is to speak as a child, it is not yet to assume a place at the table where politics as a distinctive discipline with a distinctive substance and distinctive problems are discussed.
I realize that here in America you can get away with talking such nonsense, given the debased state of our public education and public discourse, heck, you can talk like that and be counted a paragon of clarity to those who are in denial of the civic, fiscal, and environmental problems that beset us or who parochially benefit from our distraction from these problems -- but that is because Americans are very anti-intellectual and long insulated from the consequences of their unjust and wasteful behavior and are terribly superficial and lazy in consequence.
That all this ignorance and arrogance and sloppy-thinking truly matters after all is quite clear by now from the catastrophic state of paralysis we are in even when solutions are so clear at hand as well as in the debased state of our discourse even when so many so clearly want seriously to participate in matters of public interest. Until you either see sense or, failing that, can be marginalized into comparative harmlessness "frankania," I fear you are not just not part of the solution -- though your country and your planet could sure use you right about now -- but you are a part of the problem. That is why I do this.
UPDATED, with another exchange from the same Moot with "frankania."
[HE] Well Golly, Dale, You sure convinced me. From now on I will pay my taxes, avoid doing anything that is against the law (all 120,000 pages of laws) stop smoking grass, stop playing poker with my buds, apply for food-stamps and move back to the USA (which I left in 1988). Good luck, amigo!
[ME] Thanks, good luck to you, too. Democrats struggling to end the racist war on (some) drugs could use your assistance on marijuana legalization (about which I have written here several times). My partner and I fortunately remain gainfully employed for now, unlike so many victims of the deregulatory corporatism of Reagan and Gingrich and Bush, who spent more time talking like you do than not. In consequence, we have no need of food stamps yet -- although I do understand macroeconomics enough to know that the material transportation/energy/education/communication infrastructure and legal/normative infrastructure of law on which I do depend cannot arise or be maintained spontaneously from parochial for-profit calculations. As for playing poker, I believe that is played across the USA even under Obama's skeery islamofemicommunazism. If the nice homophobic science-denialist anti-government GOP keeps at it, we may have soon to join you in some more sensible foreign country, but I for one would prefer to make change here where I was born, where I am a responsible citizen, where our vast resources render even a last minute effort at planetary problem-solving worth serial humiliations and frustrations in the meantime. Again, best to you, d
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