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Comment by gbacon | Hacker News Reader

Left and right are flavors of authoritarianism. Far right and libertarian are not synonymous.

You have no idea what you're talking about, nor do the people that responded to you it seems. Authoritarianism is completely orthogonal to the "left-right" axis of political philosophy.

There is a libertarian left (anarchism) and libertarian right (Ayn Rand style American libertarianism), as well as authoritarian left (marxist-leninist style socialism) and authoritarian right (fascism).

politicalcompass.org

I am just a random know-nothing Internet guy. Leonard E. Read, who started the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), has better credentials.

“Left” and “right” are each descriptive of authoritarian positions. Liberty has no horizontal relationship to authoritarianism. Libertarianism’s relationship to authoritarianism is vertical; it is up from the muck of men enslaving man. But, let’s begin at the beginning …

Source: “Neither Left Nor Right,” https://fee.org/articles/neither-left-nor-right/

The kind of libertarianism the FEE think tank advocates for is what I would call right-libertarianism. And it's kind of an oxymoron because there is still a need for authority. How do you assert anyone's claim to private property without a centralised authority? The original libertarianism, which is a strain of socialist political philosophy, calls for decentralised authority and therefore also the end of the private ownership of property.

Of course, this FEE think tank, along with all the other "Libertarian" think tanks, are funded by the likes of the Koch brothers in an effort to legitimise the deregulation of their industries. There is no requirement for it to make any logical sense, just to appear as if it does so that legislation can have some semblance of an intellectual backing.

Please apply the principle of charity[0], friend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

> You have no idea what you're talking about

Please don't post like this, no matter how wrong someone else is. It poisons the commons and breaks the site rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And this itself is a piece of propaganda spread by libertarian think tanks.

Left and right are degrees of authoritarianism, e.g. libertarian is far right, and nazism and communism are far left. Nazism and communism would be flavors of authoritarianism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com