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Comment by llamataboot | Hacker News Reader

Get better friends, maybe? I noticed the same thing among capital-L Libertarians -- down to calculating the exact amount of money needed per pizza slice when buying pizza and sharing among friends. I prefer to hang out in mostly gifting/sharing circles these days ;)

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Capital-L Libertarian here, and frankly when it comes to friends I don't care about money, one big happy 'circle of mooching' as my best man labeled it.

However if you're not my friend, I have no reason to take financial risks for you however small.

Consider perhaps you are not good friends with these people.

Those people are irrelevant. They do that even with their closest friends because they all seem to be intent on not getting screwed. I'd rather share and gift extremely liberally, to the best of my abilities, among my circle of friends and even far acquaintances. Are there freeloaders in economic terms? eh, sure, but a lot of that is income dependent as well. But mostly what goes around comes around and a lot is going around -- velocity of gifting is > than velocity of money which is great. But then again I'm a small-l libertarian socialist.

>However if you're not my friend, I have no reason to take financial risks for you however small.

Technically that's not true. In the cases of con men, social engineers, and manipulators "giving free stuff" is a common psychological tactic to gain leverage over others. I.e. the sub prime mortgage scam bubble of 2008.

There seems to be a correlation between being a CS major and being a Libertarian. Or at least being an HN user and being a Libertarian.

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