Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

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I found your comment constructive and I don't want to start an off-topic debate, just open something up to private contemplation. You, of course, have a right to your own opinion.

Many (all?) libertarians lean left on a great many social issue and consider the social part of libertarianism as important if not more important than the right leaning economic part. I think the term "libertarian right" while not an incorrect term at face value -- there are in fact right leaning Libertarians just as some Democrats are further left than others -- is miss-leading and can potential lead to misconceptions about Libertarians as similar to Republicans. I for one share much more in common with the Democrats but I am very definitely a Libertarian.

I think many of us would prefer you just use the term Libertarian and leave off left or right.

Edit: or perhaps if you were in-deed referring to the conservative party, add some clarity and say "Republicans that lean Libertarian"

Libertarians intersect with liberals only on a handful of social issues: gay marriage, drugs, and abortion. Most of the social issues near-and-dear to the left are not compatible with libertarianism. There is nothing libertarian about the Civil Rights Act of 1964--which curtailed peoples' freedom to serve which customers they chose to serve or hire which employees they chose to hire. There is nothing libertarian about affirmative action, mandating equal pay for women, mandating family leave, and subsidizing child care. There is nothing libertarian about EPA and OSHA and their extensive regulatory codes. There is nothing libertarian about pushing more educational issues up to the federal level to redirect tax dollars to lower-income school districts.

Depends on what your definition of "liberty" is and how you balance different kinds.

I guess the downvoters are saying there's only one obvious way.

"There is nothing libertarian about EPA and OSHA" is not 100% accurate. Care should be used when saying "nothing"

Many (not all, maybe not even most, but definitely a good amount) libertarians are environmentalist and see the EPA as a valuable tool to ensure that people's rights are violated.

However, in general the cause is the same but the approach is different. For example, just of those two causes should be handled by the courts (as a libertarian sees it at least) rather than through regulatory agencies.

To rephrase, Libertarian's generally agree people should be safe at work. They just disagree with the top down approach to solving that issue.

> Many (not all, maybe not even most, but definitely a good amount) libertarians are environmentalist and see the EPA as a valuable tool to ensure that people's rights are violated.

In certain narrow situations where there is an identifiable property right at issue (e.g. dumping waste on private land). But there aren't a lot of libertarian theorists espousing a general "right" to untouched wilderness, preserving endangered species, or having clean rivers.

> To rephrase, Libertarian's generally agree people should be safe at work.

Libertarians generally believe that the level of safety in the workplace should be set by the market, rather than by a regulatory agency. I.e. if a workplace is known for being unsafe, it won't be able to hire employees (or will have to pay a premium for employees to take on the extra risk). Liberals in contrast believe that the government should impose a safety floor on all workplaces, irrespective of the market.

> there aren't a lot of libertarian theorists espousing a general "right" to untouched wilderness, preserving endangered species, or having clean rivers.

To me, this is where the libertarian philosophy loses its internal consistency. For two reasons:

1) There is no such thing as a closed system, so land use is fundamentally social

2) For the most part, all existing property deeds were obtained by force, not through the voluntary agreeing to contracts, so no one who holds a deed really has any kind of moral claim on it.

Libertarians have to fall back on some other political system (manifest destiny, kraterocracy, democrasy, etc) to resolve the land use question. But to me land use is the foundation of all property law and the fact that Libertarianism has nothing to say about it makes it largely useless as a foundational political system. It's a nice thing to think about, but it can't be relied on to answer basic questions.

I like this notion of "political compass" : https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2 (not unique to this author), in which liberal vs conservative (left vs right) is an axis , but with a second one authoritarian vs libertarian i.e. more government intervention vs less government intervention is another axis.

Essentially this highlights the difference between your particular policy opinions and your enthusiasm for having a government enforce those policies on everyone.

This is fair comment. I'm also a libertarian and wouldn't really consider myself to be "right". I suppose most Americans would consider me to be left on social issues and somewhat right on economic issues.

On the other hand, in my experience, libertarians are pretty far from being liberals, and even farther from being typical Democrats. Personally, I share even less with typical Democrats than with typical (non-Trump and non-Evangelical) Republicans. I do share a lot of social beliefs with people who consider themselves to be liberals first and foremost, and agree with them about some of this nation's greatest challenges. I've found typical Democrats to be against drug legalization and only with great hesitation have started supporting LGBT rights, when most libertarians were supporting gay rights 40 years ago (in the sense that gays rights mean that gays have the same rights as everyone else, because what people do in the privacy of their homes is not the government's business).

Anyway, I think it's fair to say that there's support for BI from two different parts, if not sides, of the political spectrum.

But fair point about there being left libertarians and right libertarians, I don't really disagree. I mean, Chomsky calls himself a libertarian, but is definitely "of the left" (and I happen to disagree with him on a lot of issues, yet share some of his core beliefs about the dangers of government and authoritarianism). I'll take more care in the future.

> On the other hand, in my experience, libertarians are pretty far from being liberals, and even farther from being typical Democrats.

To be fair I think "The Libertarian Left" would also be miss-leading. We defy the left and right labels :)

Yes, it's confusing to some in the US because Democrats are basically what "moderate Republicans" used to be in the 1980's. As even Obama pointed out. (http://www.salon.com/2016/05/17/noam_chomsky_the_democratic_...)

By world standards, not to mention many past US standards, the two presidential candidates (and the current president) are clearly right-wingers.

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