Heck, pretending to play along with someone, and then turning traitor and killing them was in one of the first game trailers.
That isn't libertarianism at all. Libertarianism is you can do whatever you want, provided you do not employ force or fraud against others. There's more to it than that, but that's the core idea. Another way to say the core idea is people have inalienable rights - life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
This approach obviously has some problems to be overcome, but the idea that people are currently made to pay for things they don't need or don't use just because a majority of their neighbors want them to has problems too, like fairness.
Taxes are necessary for a functioning, modern, society. Libertarian socialists exist, for example.
Private property is not a prerequisite for happiness (and certainly not to the degree that libertarians talk about it). For example, Americans are happy that the government prevents strangers from walking across their lands. Northern Europeans are happy that they have Right to Roam, allowing them to cross private lands as long as they don't damage them.
If anything, by showing you additional ways to be happy, I was increasing the options available to you.
Not at all. I'm not telling anybody how to be happy. But I observe that most (nearly all) people need property rights to pursue the sorts of happiness they want.
Even buddhists need property rights. After all, where would they get their temple from? Who would pay to maintain it? Who would feed them? Etc.
Your right to cross other peoples' property is a property right, too.
Well, you were. You said it's hard to be pursue happiness without property rights.
Anyway, you're conflating two aspects of property rights. First, the mere concept of property rights: property exists, people use it in some manner, therefore some sort of access right is involved. Second, the actual private ownership and enforcement of property. I've never seen a libertarian argue in favour of Right to Roam over private property (or any other kind of public access right). It's a simplistic philosophy wherein the right to private property trumps any concern other than the right to be free in action - it has no answers when dealing with real-world issues like scarcity of common goods such as water supplies.
To be more specific then, when I say that libertarianism is overly interested in property rights, I don't mean the merest hint of humans interacting with property. I mean that too much of their central philosophy is based around control of private property and enforcement thereof.
Much of private property has easements on it for various purposes. Some of these are created by the landowner and sold, some are created by the government for various purposes using the power of Eminent Domain. I've seen easements for the purpose of a public trail. I don't see any particularly unlibertarian thing about it, though the government does abuse Eminent Domain from time to time.
Property rights do tend to be complicated, that's why there are lawyers that specialize in it.
One of my neighbors didn't read the title report on his house before he bought it, and discovered to his chagrin that the property behind him had an easement across his property for a driveway to access that lot when it got developed. Oops. It pays to read the title report.
This easement crosses a corner of a neighbor's lot. The neighbor asked me to sell the easement back to him or enter into a contract with him that I wouldn't use it. He wanted to put his driveway there. I refused because part of the value in my purchase of the lot is the access that the easement grants to me and the neighbor wasn't willing to pay what I considered it to be worth.
My neighbor went ahead and put a very nice driveway, stone wall and garden over my easement; if I ever decide to build on my lot I expect there might be some hard feelings when the bulldozer arrives.
You can parse my language however you want, but let's cut to the chase. There's a commune in America you can join, where you won't own anything, you share with every other member. The average length of time members stay is about a year and a half. Evidently, they didn't find happiness there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Wind_Community
And just to be clear, libertarianism means you're free to form communes if you want. You just are not allowed to force people to join, nor are you allowed to prevent anyone from leaving. You can choose the property-right-less lifestyle if you like. Isn't freedom great?
2. They're tried by a jury of their peers.
3. If found guilty, they are punished and/or imprisoned.
A moderate libertarian might simply be someone who wants lower taxes, less regulations, and the government to stay out of people's personal lives.
Nothing about those policies or viewpoints directly contradicts a normal western democracy.
Libertarianism is much easier to explain than modern American or European democracy. I don't think that makes it better, but it probably makes it more appealing.
I mean, if you deny the government's role in enforcing contracts and property rights, then you're not really talking about libertarianism anymore, you've just got good old-fashioned anarchy.
For the sake of debate I suggest sticking to what the official libertarian party platform says.
I think GP meant Libertarianism (like the US Libertarian party, more of an AnCap style ideology) which is pretty much only focused on markets and property rights (i.e. protecting the rich) and its calling cards are ignoring any kind of positive rights theory (the proper saying was life, liberty, property -- all negative. Pursuit of happiness, a positive aspirational right, was added when people realized it actually had to work in real life), lack of an account of historical economics and ignoring any kind of coercion or force except explicit physical force (the least common and most ineffective type of coercion found in modern society). It fundamentally opposes any kind of right to "pursuit of happiness" (or happiness at all) for anyone not wealthy and its ideal world is exactly the structure of Eve -- markets govern all, there are no limits on the power of the few rich who own the universe while the poor beg for scraps and generally die. Except Eve is far gentler -- there are no police to assault you if you trespass in the territory of one of the ultrawealthy and take their property, they have to protect it themselves, and death is not permanent.
It's more profitable to operate when there's no expense or regulation associated with negligence and malice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fda#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle#Federal_response
The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by the American
journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair (1878–1968).
Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the harsh conditions
and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in
Chicago and similar industrialized cities. Perhaps his
main goal in exposing the meat industry and working
conditions was to advance Socialism in the United
States. However, most readers were more concerned with
his exposure of health violations and unsanitary practices
in the American meatpacking industry during the early 20th
century, greatly contributing to a public outcry which led
to reforms including the Meat Inspection Act.
The book depicts working class poverty, the lack of social
supports, harsh and unpleasant living and working
conditions, and a hopelessness among many workers. These
elements are contrasted with the deeply rooted corruption
of people in power. A review by the writer Jack London
called it "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery."Besides, selling water colored yellow and calling it "orange juice" is fraud, and is not condoned by libertarianism. Similarly, selling poison and labeling it "milk" is both force and fraud and will get you facing murder charges under any libertarian government.
Your examples sure are clean. But the real world is dirty. What exactly is "juice?" Are you, a Libertarian, proposing that the government spend years and millions of dollars creating a U.S. official definition of "juice" for labeling purposes? What happens when inevitably companies skirt the line?
And sure if I sell you poison on purpose knowing it's poison wanting to kill you that's murder. What if I'm a company that produces milk but I cut corners and possibly some number of milk products happen to be poisonous, though I never try to poison anything? What if I build cars and realize they will explode and kill people but figure I'll make more money selling them and dealing with the deaths than a recall? What if I use my vast power and wealth to systematically suppress all knowledge about how dangerous my products are and market them as safe and "doctor-approved", watching my smoking customers die thousand after thousand? What if I sell investments I know are bad, but I lie and fake ratings for them and sell them as high-quality, defrauding people by the millions? What if I extort an entire state by manipulating its energy supply? What if I poison rivers, drinking water, give communities cancer, lie about emission test results and poison the air, create children's toys with lead all because it's more efficient? All of these examples I cited have happened, recently, in our currently non-Libertarian society, and are nearly identical to your example and nobody was charged with murder. Libertarians support fewer regulations, less oversight, more market freedom -- the freedom to do all of the above with even more impunity than they do now.
If a historian says that The Jungle is factual, then he should be able to cite facts and would not need to cite a novel. It's really poor scholarship to cite a novel as a factual source. There's no way to tell what parts of it are factual and what are "artistic license". The book has neither footnotes nor references.
I own probably close to a thousand history books, and no, history books are not written as novels. They do tend to tell a story, and they sometimes have an agenda, but they all have footnotes and references where there facts came from, and they make it possible for the reader to distinguish the verifiable facts from the historian's opinion.
> Are you, a Libertarian, proposing that the government spend years and millions of dollars creating a U.S. official definition of "juice" for labeling purposes?
The government does now. I don't see a problem with it, nor anything unlibertarian about it.
> What happens when inevitably companies skirt the line?
They get charged with fraud.
> What if I'm a company that produces milk but I cut corners and possibly some number of milk products happen to be poisonous, though I never try to poison anything?
That's called negligent homicide. There's nothing libertarian about condoning negligent homicide. No libertarian suggests that nobody will commit crimes under a free market.
And so on for your other examples.
> the freedom to do all of the above with even more impunity than they do now.
I'm afraid you've been misinformed.
To give an example of regulations that libertarians would oppose - rent control.
If you want to impugn capitalism, may I suggest "The Robber Barons" by Josephson. Josephson seems to share your viewpoint, and he wrote an actual history book of capitalism of the period, complete with an index, sources, quotations, footnotes, all the good stuff. I have complaints with his conclusions, and I think he cherry-picked his facts to fit his viewpoint, but you'd be on much more solid ground than with Sinclair.
Every modern and nearly every recent historical society has been a mixed economy. The only reason the middle class exists is because it was fought for, hard, by explicitly anti-Libertarian structures (new deal style reforms and make-work projects, welfare, healthcare, unions, minimum wages, worker protections, tarrifs, GI bill, universities, very high taxes on the rich and very high corporate taxes, publicly owned infrastructure, bailouts) fighting against or protecting free markets from themselves when they inevitably crash and burn and destroy themselves and the societies around them. Without these protections free markets would annihilate the entire middle class in a heartbeat for the sake of "efficiency" as is their nature (the middle class are by definition not the owners of capital so their concerns are not considered by a capitalist economic structure), a process that is occurring albeit more slowly in the US as we speak. Markets are very powerful engines for generating efficiency, so they are good at building economic engines (through exploitation, of course) while ignoring any and all other concerns or consequences. They are a paperclip maximizer. Not entirely useless tools, but horrifyingly murderous and dangerous ones that have a tenancy to seize power with disastrous results wherever they go.
Of course it wasn't 100%, but it was a good approximation of one. Far from destroying the middle class, it created the middle class in America. Scores of millions of impoverished immigrants arrived on the shores, and moved up into the middle class.
The income tax on the rich came later.
I've heard it claimed that the middle class was created by the New Deal, but that is not very supportable. Just look at paintings and photographs of towns and cities from the previous century. Looks like middle class to me.
If you like, take a tour of the town of Gettysburg. It's been well preserved, with quite a lot of the same structures still there from the Civil War. They look like middle class homes to me. Have a visit and tell me what you think.
And you don't want to get caught out by yourself.