Liberals are corrupt, hateful, immoral and taking the country in the wrong direction

I see the connection. Even the National Review sees the connection. The libertarian to fascist pipeline is such a real thing. I mean I've seen so many examples sin my personal life from being in Marine infantry.


And like I said before there is a simple reason for it. Both libertarians and fascists have the same end state goal: maintain the existing economic and social hierarchy. Any existing with divide is a good thing. Social and economic classes are good for society. All things libertarians and fascists believe strongly in.

Notice everytime libertarian fights for "limited government". It's only when govt is tasked to tackle any wealth inequality issues when Libertarians b**** about "big govt"... They only b**** about it when govt spends money in programs to alter economic and social hierarchies.

 

I think part of the problem is that Libertatianism in the US is strongly tied to the Rightwing. Historically there have been as many Left leaning Libertarians, many who were interested in things like drug legalization, anti Vietnam
War and etc.. As politics has evolved we have a combination of economic conservatives who are also religious conservatives taking up the Libertarian mantle.

 

Maybe there is some history of libertarians having some leftists views and advocating for things like drug legalization but the history of libertarians just ending up fascist is a long history. I mean look at the Business Plot in the 1930s. All wealthy titans of industry, all of whom would self label themselves as libertarians having Nazis sympathies and scheming a plot to overthrow FDR because he wanted to help the poors too much. Good ol Smedly Butler saved the day though.

But it's a long history and I don't think it's really a new phenomenon.

 

Did the people in the Business Plot actually call themselves “Libertarians”?

I think you’re looking at a modern view of those who claim Libertarianism and projecting that backwards in history to make an abolutist argument that all roads lead to either Communism or Fascism. Libertarian being associated with the current Right therefore leads to Fascism. Libertarian is a utopian ideal that doesn’t work in practice which is one reason it’s been adopted by many in the Right. That doesn’t mean it’s completely Right wing and historically it is in opposition to original
Conservative views of monarchy and religion. Even in the US 40 years ago many Libertarians were hippies who opposed the corporate world and in addition to drug legalization were for things like urban agriculture. In their view the government with large corporations where making laws and regulations to prevent things like that.

 

Yes, the likes of JP Morgan and others involved in the Business Plot were libertarians, Libertarians obsessed with government overreach and handouts, the same raison d'etre of modern libertarians.


Look at where the heart and effort of most libertarian activism is. Their anti drug enforcement rhetoric isn't the rhetoric we take libertarians seriously with. It's not the topic they will die on a hill for.

Government spending to help the poors is the hill libertarians die on. That's the issue they care about significantly more than "removing driving license requirements" or "legalizing weed". Those are the cute endeavors libertarians want to associate with to not make them just look like abject mustache twirling wealthy lords that just want to keep their wealth.

 

The same right wing that believes in a very stratified society with distinct social and economic classes?

Why is libertarianism so closely tied with the right wing?

Oh I know... It's because libertarians and the right wing have the same raison d'etre:

To maintain and keep the existing social and economic hierarchy. When you have that same overarching goal, a lot of those views and policy agendas will naturally align.

 

Did they call themselves “Libertarians”? I honestly don’t know but I suspect they didn’t.

That isn’t what Libertarians have historically been. 20 years ago a Libertarian convention was filled with more people who were pro drug legalization. Even in 2016 the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson’s primary issue was mar1juana legalization.

Yes the current Libertarian movement has been taken over by Right leaning people that doesn’t mean it was always that way.

I think the lack of historical and philosophical understanding of many of the terms that are thrown out is a big problems with our debates. There is a lot to criticize Libertarianism on but saying it is the same or inevitably leads to fascism I don’t think that is one. Anymore than saying supporting LGBTQ inevitably leads to Socialism.

 

related

https://lawliberty.org/compassionate-libertarianism/

Libertarianism in the Modern State
by Andrew Koppelman
JULY 10, 2023

G. Patrick Lynch’s critique in this publication of my book, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed is generous, but with reservations. He praises the book for its openness to libertarian ideas, but then complains that I have misconstrued some of my sources (Hayek and Locke) and neglected other important ones (Mises and the public choice argument). He thinks that my work shows “the danger of applying thinkers who were writing in different contexts to contemporary policy debates.”

I argue in the book that neither Locke nor Hayek foreclose the possibility of redistribution of resources to address urgent human needs, as more doctrinaire libertarians such as Rothbard, Nozick, and Rand do. The book grew out of the Obamacare debate, where, I argued in my earlier book, The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform, the central issue was whether such redistribution was morally legitimate. My claim that minimal-state libertarianism had infected that controversy was vindicated in 2017 when the Republican-controlled House embraced proposals that would have taken insurance away from between 22 and 32 million people, using most of the money saved for massive tax breaks for the rich. Sen. Rand Paul and House Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows explained that their core complaint about “Obamacare-like subsidies” was that the beneficiaries would get “other people’s money.” (The House bill was too draconian for the Senate to stomach, Obamacare remained in place, and the issue helped the Democrats retake the House in 2018.)

I begin my book by describing the public discourse concerning a 2010 episode when a fire department let a house burn down because its owner had forgotten to pay his insurance fee. Lynch asks if this is “a useful way to open a review and critique of libertarian thought and its impact on public policy in recent decades.” Everyone who debated the episode at the time, however, understood that the issue was the same as that presented by the then-pending Obamacare proposal: ought there to be public provision against such misfortunes? The 2017 Republican repeal draft was the functional equivalent of what the fire department did. Lynch asks whether the department’s action “was the result of libertarianism run amok.” But the Republican bill certainly was.

I argue that this position is some distance from that of Hayek and Locke. I don’t overlook the harshness of Locke’s social welfare policies: “The destitute could be forced to work; the work wouldn’t pay much.” I also argue in some detail that, whatever Locke may have believed, the logic of his contractarianism dictates social policy that looks more like the more generous liberalism of John Rawls. Lynch thinks that I’m speculating about whether Hayek “would have approved” of the basic scheme of Obamacare, in which coverage is expanded by subsidizing the private purchase of insurance. But I’m not speculating or making inferences from his “general view”: I show that Hayek proposed precisely that in 1960, as a substitute for the British National Health Service, which put doctors on the state payroll.

Hayek would certainly have quarreled with some aspects of Obamacare. (Harrison Griffiths, at the Institute for Economic Affairs, makes a similar complaint.) Part of the corruption of libertarianism that I describe is the displacement of Hayek by less defensible, more doctrinaire forms. I write: “There had been responsible Republican proposals to maintain broad coverage using more market-friendly mechanisms.” In the event, those proposals got little Republican support. Had the Republicans been willing to negotiate with Obama, they might have moved the law in that direction. With respect to this issue, the party was in the hands of the Rothbardians.

My book surveys libertarian responses to redistribution and regulation, both of which elicit far more flexible and sensible responses from Hayek (at least until his late writings) than from other leading writers, such as Milton Friedman. I cover Mises briefly, comparing his rigid, evidence-insensitive praise of markets unfavorably with Hayek.

On regulation, Lynch claims that my book “ignores … all of public choice.” Public choice theory claims that government will inevitably be captured by special interests, often presenting this as an argument, or at least a powerful presumption, against regulation. In the book, I say that this theory is sometimes right, but “is falsified whenever the state delivers broad benefits to unorganized citizens at the expense of organized groups. And, although capture does happen, the theory is constantly being falsified. Consider the fact that the air you’re breathing and the water you’re drinking are both cleaner than they were when the Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970.” I also note, at the end of the book, that the operational effect of this presumption has been to cripple the capacity of the United States government to address the ongoing catastrophe of climate change. I repeat what I said there: “Regulation is just a kind of law, the kind that agencies are authorized to promulgate. It makes no sense to be against regulation as such. Law can be good or oppressive, but one needs to get into the specific case for any measure before one can tell.”

I repeat what I said to Rachel Lu when she interviewed me for this outlet, “the shift that has happened over time in libertarian thought is the view that the smaller the state is, the better the state is, the more free we are. The larger the state, the less free we are.” And this shift matters. “While there are lots of elements of the Republican party that don’t embrace that view, if you look at the track record of the Republican Party, the last time they held the presidency and both houses of Congress, what they actually managed to accomplish was enormous tax cuts for the rich and gutting the regulatory apparatus, the administrative state.”

This is not a recipe for liberty. I’ll conclude by repeating what I say in the book about the danger that this state of affairs presents to principled friends of human freedom, the sort of people who read this publication:

I use the term corruption in two related senses. It sometimes means an accidental transformation in which the original message is garbled, as with corrupted computer code. It also means, more invidiously, the abuse of authority for personal gain. Both meanings are relevant here. Malign interests have benefited by garbling the original meaning of libertarianism. The ideology of small government attracts two very different groups: principled ideologues … driven by philosophical commitment, and predators who want to hurt people without interference from the police. As libertarian rhetoric becomes more common, the second group increasingly likes to masquerade as the first.
​

​

 

Did they call themselves “Libertarians”? I honestly don’t know but I suspect they didn’t.

That isn’t what Libertarians have historically been. 20 years ago a Libertarian convention was filled with more people who were pro drug legalization. Even in 2016 the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson’s primary issue was mar1juana legalization.

Yes the current Libertarian movement has been taken over by Right leaning people that doesn’t mean it was always that way.

I think the lack of historical and philosophical understanding of many of the terms that are thrown out is a big problems with our debates. There is a lot to criticize Libertarianism on but saying it is the same or inevitably leads to fascism I don’t think that is one. Anymore than saying supporting LGBTQ inevitably leads to Socialism.

The origins of Libertarianism definitely was not preserving the social order nor even in the US historically been that. Besides drug legalization Libertarians have historically supported things abortion, gay marriage and as noted during the 60’s and 70’s a Libertarian was more likely to be an anti government hippy than a businessman.

Libertarianism like many other movements has been bastardized by overarching ideology and the nature of coalition politics in the US. Similar things happen on the Left too.

 

There is no issue with understanding historical terms. You want to have polite conversations with people you disagree with and therefore you feel obliged to not have the fascist connection to libertarianism as you feel that ends conversations with people who self identify as libertarians.


The reality is the connection between far right extremism and libertarianism has a deep rooted history. You don't think the vast majority of readers of the Turner Diaries don't label themselves as Libertarians? Hell, how many George Lincoln Rockwell stans labeled themselves as Libertarians? What do you think the god damn author of the Turner Diaries saw himself as?

American libertarianism has deep roots with fascism and extreme right wing politics.

 

Yes the origins of libertarianism have always been rooted in wealthy people wanting to keep on being wealthy.

 

Libertarians never were the lead tip of the spear advocates for gay marriage or LGBTQ rights. They had a say when the social stigma towards homosexuality lowered. Why? Because it was a easy position to hold.

Which goes back to my original point, stuff like gay marriage wasn't their raison d'etre. It's a position they hold when it's safe to hold and they hold it because at least some libertarians understand basic optics and understand only fighting for causes that maintains social and economic hierarchies is not good pr.

 

https://www.salon.com/2019/01/04/he...ssentially-a-form-of-white-supremacy_partner/

Here’s why economist Brad DeLong believes libertarianism is essentially a form of white supremacy
Libertarianism "is a Frankenstein’s monster" that got its power from resistance to the Civil Rights Movement

 

Who are the two most prominent self labeled libertarians here?
@Os Trigonum and @StupidMoniker ?

When was LGBTQ activism at the top of their priority list of concerns?

Os trig for example has more shared articles posts defending the right of a professor to tell her students that Asians are bad for this country than defending LGBTQ people.

 

https://inthesetimes.com/article/ch...-maclean-book-james-buchanan-racism-education


The White-Supremacist Roots of America’s Libertarian Right

The far-right libertarian assault on democracy has hidden roots in white Southern furor over desegregation in the 1950s

 

taking the country in the wrong direction . . .

https://reason.com/2023/07/10/elite-journalists-love-big-brother/

Elite Journalists Love Big Brother
by J.D. Tuccille
7.10.2023 7:00 AM

Journalists aren't always consistent fans of liberty; over a century ago, The New York Times editorialized against self-defense rights—a tradition it continues today. Still, in the past when there was more ideological variety among elite media than now (a flaw alternative outlets seek to address), reporters from all sorts of publications generally favored free speech, opposed broad surveillance, and supported restrictions on search and seizure. If nothing else, they knew they were high on the list of targets for abusive officials. But that was then; now, elite media love Big Brother.

On Independence Day, U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty issued a powerful First Amendment decision in an ongoing case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. "If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history" he said of government pressure on social media companies to suppress speech at odds with official messaging. The judge barred further arm-twisting, though with significant exceptions. It was a clear win for free speech, which you would expect to be applauded by people who make their living from speaking and writing. That's not what happened.

Free-Speech Practitioners Who Don't Like Free Speech
"The Donald Trump-appointed judge's move could undo years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies," The Washington Post huffedin its report.

The "ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues," agreed The New York Times. Apparently, government officials are entitled to decide what constitutes truth and falsehood.

On July 5, Reason's Matt Welch appeared on a CNN panel discussion of the case to take the minority view (among the participants) that it's actually bad when governments muzzle views they don't like.

"We have a legal category of journalists for more speech regulation. It's just bizarre to me," he said.

Journalists for more speech regulation are eyeing podcasts, too, through which "misinformation about everything from election fraud to Covid-19 vaccines is reaching millions of Americans," according to Agence France-Presse. The problem is that "anybody can be a podcaster, anybody can get a microphone and start talking about whatever they want" we're warned in a piece that again assumes accusations of "misinformation" are the same as proof.

What's a Little Snooping Among Friends?
It's not just speech, either. On July 3, The New York Times weighed in on the continuing debate over domestic surveillance conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Gray Lady's take on legal snooping provisions specifically called out as dangerous by whistleblower Edward Snowden is that (did you see this coming?) they're in peril from overwrought lawmakers.

"An intensive drive by right-wing Republicans in Congress to vilify the F.B.I. with charges of political bias has imperiled a program allowing spy agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign targets, sapping support for a premier intelligence tool and amplifying demands for stricter limits," wrote the Times's Karoun Demirjian.

The report went on to allow that many Democrats also oppose Section 702 and spying that often ensnares Americans. But the piece's overall framing is of necessary legislation freshly at-risk from "a new generation of Republicans less protective of Washington's post-9/11 counterterrorism powers."

We should have anticipated this moment. In 2013, even as the paper's own reporters helped publicize Snowden's revelations about the surveillance state, The Washington Posteditorial board sniffed that "the first U.S. priority should be to prevent Mr. Snowden from leaking information that harms efforts to fight terrorism and conduct legitimate intelligence operations." All of this journalism is fine and dandy, they suggested, but it's inconvenient for the nice people in government office.

In fact, that's probably a fair assessment of the attitude of name-brand journalists towards their friends who wield coercive power—and they are friends, if not more.

The Blurry Line Between Government and Elite Media
"The flow of faces and names between government and 'news' media has turned what was supposed to be a watchdog over the destructive power of the state into little more than a forum for political marketing and an extended battleground for factional fighting," I noted in 2019. In particular, Politico media writer Jack Shafer observed in 2018, TV news networks are heavily leavened with former (and often future) security state apparatchiks. "Almost to a one, the TV spooks still identify with their former employers at the CIA, FBI, DEA, DHS, or other security agencies and remain protective of their institutions" Shafer wrote. "This makes nearly every word that comes out of their mouths suspect."

Many elite journalists can get quotes from politicians across the breakfast table. CNN's Christiane Amanpour married former Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell married former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and Joe Scarborough (formerly a congressman) married co-host Mika Brezezinski (daughter of a former national security advisor). The Washington Post's Matea Gold is married to FBI chief of staff Jonathan Lenzner. "What to make of all the family ties between the news media and the Obama administration?" The Washington Post's Paul Farhi asked a decade ago in a query that could be posed continuously about government and media in general.

​

more

 

conclusion

Prominent journalists and government officials often meet not on the job, but in the college dorm. "Forty-one percent of senior- or mid-level Biden White House staffers — or 82 people out of 201 aides analyzed — have Ivy League degrees," Politico reported in 2012. That expands on dominance by elite colleges dating back at least to JFK. And many faces those Ivy League grads saw in the White House press room were familiar. "Almost half of the people who reach the pinnacle of the journalism profession attended an elite school," found a 2018 paper in the Journal of Expertise focused on The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. "Roughly 20% attended an Ivy League school."

To a great extent, interactions between prominent reporters and powerful officials are like private parties that never end. These people know each other, drink with each other, share attitudes, marry, and trust each other. Elite journalists have few doubts about the wisdom of their friends, for whom they do glorified public relations, to censor, spy, and coerce. About the rest of us… Who are we, anyway? Better to be safe and encourage the folks they know to keep a cap on the unseemly mob.

If You Want News, Look Elsewhere
Let's emphasize that "elite journalists" doesn't mean the folks struggling to keep your local paper alive, or determined bloggers covering official malfeasance, or reporters at alternative outlets competing with brand-name operations. They represent a range of views, often–strained relationships with the powerful, and are as vulnerable as you or I to the civil liberties violations championed by legacy media outlets.

But prominent journalists have become cheerleaders for Big Brother because they like and trust his minions more than they care about you and me. If you want support for freedom instead of authoritarianism, or even just skepticism about unrestrained government, look to reporters who aren't so enmeshed with those who wield power.
​

 

Love how the hill to die on for speech is about the efficacy of a vaccine and talking points about a pandemic.

Shows how vapid the right wing notion of free speech is. When a group of people have disproportionate power, the battles they fight for in what they regard as freedom and free speech is usually just privileged people being offended that there are limits to their exploitation.

Come back @Os Trigonum when you fight for a free speech cause that actually shakes the balance of power and hierarchy.

 

When a Libertarian shows this much effort and gumption to write articles about things like advocating for the end of law enforcement using badge numbers and replace them with actual names so that people with a monopoly on violence can be held accountable instead of hiding from their citizens when accountability needs to be done, then maybe you can alter my perception of libertarians.

But it seems like you only fight for causes that maintain a certain social and economic order.

 

When libertarians wax lyrical about freedom and truth to power, you'd hope it leads to criticism of power structures rather than spamming a NBA team message board with entirely new threads for individual petty crimes like a police blotter
@Os Trigonum