I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Maybe it is for crypto bros and whatnot, but generally speaking, I think libertarians just think governments should largely treat adults like adults instead of children.
I consider myself libertarian, and the policies I support most would increase my taxes and “investments” in my local community. For example:
balance the budget - would pretty much require taxes to be raised because there’s no way we’ll be able to cut enough with the state of politics as it is
create a negative income tax bracket (NIT) - replace many tax credits and welfare programs with a cash based system; adults should use the cash as they need, instead of what the government thinks they need; this is largely a formulation of UBI
as part of NIT, eliminate the social security tax cap
I also think we should abolish laws and policies that keep people on unequal footing, such as legalizing or decriminalizing recreational drugs (it’s better for a young father/mother to be with their family instead of in jail), ending qualified immunity, etc.
We should also change our education system so all students have the same access to school choice. We could do this by eliminating school buses in urban centers, making mass transit free for students, and requiring cities to ensure all students have access to most schools in the city through better routes and whatnot. If a child thinks they’d be better off at another school, they should be able to work with their counselor to get there, even if their parents are uninterested. We should also provide alternatives to the college track in K-12 schools, such as by allowing an apprenticeship to partially replace regular school so students can learn an in-demand school by the time they finish school.
And so on. Libertarians tend to have different solutions to problems than either major party, that doesn’t make this solutions worse or somehow intent on beating down the poor, it’s just a different perspective that in many cases can add to the wider discussion.
But maybe John Carmack is the bad form of “libertarian” who just wants what’s best for himself. IDK, but I can speak for myself.
I think technical-minded people tend to gravitate towards libertarian ideologies because they tend to underestimate the importance of human relationships to large scale systems. You can see it in the stereotype of the lone programmer who dislikes commenting or documentation, collaboration with other programmers, and strongly negative views towards their own project managers or their company’s executives. They also tend to have a negative view of customers/users, and don’t really believe in spending too much time in user interfaces/experiences. They have a natural skepticism of interdependence, because that brings on extra social overhead they don’t particularly believe they need. So they tend to view the legal, political, and social world through that same lens, as well.
I think the modern world of software engineering has moved in a direction away from that, as code complexity has grown to the point where maintainability/documentation and collaborative processes have obvious benefit, visible up front, but you still see streaks of that in some personalities. And, as many age, they have some firsthand experience with projects that were technically brilliant but doomed due to financial/business reasons, or even social/regulatory reasons. The maturation of technical academic disciplines relating to design, user experience, architecture, maintainability, and security puts that “overhead” in a place that’s more immediate, so that they’re more likely to understand that the interdependence is part of the environment they must operate in.
A lot of these technical minded people then see the two-party system as a struggle between MBAs and Ph.Ds, neither of whom they actually like, and prefer that problems be addressed organically at the lowest possible level with the simplest, most elegant rules. I have some disagreements with the typical libertarians on what weight should be assigned to social consensus, political/economic feasibility, and elegant simplicity in policymaking, but I think I get where most of them are coming from.
I think you’re painting with too broad of a brush.
Libertarianism is a very large tent, and it includes a lot of people from both major parties that have decided to stick with one of the two so they don’t “throw their vote away.” I’m guessing you mostly have direct experience with one type of “libertarian,” and assume that because most of the libertarians you know fit a certain mold, that the majority of libertarians in the world fit that mold as well. It’s just like asking a Fox News viewer what liberals think, the sample will be quite biased.
On one extreme, you have libertarian socialists like Noam Chomsky who come from academia, and on the other end you have anarchocapitalists from an economics background like Murray Rothbard, and everything in between, as well as some even more extreme. What unifies them, broadly speaking, is a rejection of coercion.
And libertarianism absolutely relies on human relationships to function. Where it differs is that libertarians often disagree with the notion that a centralized government is the best way for those conversations to happen. Many libertarians prefer natural relationships like community organizations, businesses, and neighborhoods that are selected through competition and common interest vs other similar organizations. For example, instead of having one school system organized from the top down to give students an equal education, you could have multiple competing schools that parents and students can choose from, and the ones that parents and students prefer succeed and the others fail. The alternative is direct involvement of parents with the education system, which just ends up giving more power to the minority who have the time to get involved (i.e. probably not the type you’d want to get involved, at least in my experience). It’s a lot easier to switch schools than to try to effect change in a given school.
So libertarians generally believe that individuals should be allowed to make their own decisions instead of delegating to some central authority. To use your software development analogy, it’s the idea that people should cluster around projects that interest them instead of being grouped arbitrarily based on need. You’ll get a lot more out of someone that’s internally motivated than someone who is externally motivated.
Notice that your comment is framed from the perspective of what Libertarians believe, and analyzing from that context. Mine is different: analyzing a specific type of personality common in tech careers, and analyzing why that type of person tends to be much more receptive to libertarian ideas.
I’m familiar with libertarianism and its various schools/movements within that broader category. And I still think that many in that group tend to underappreciate issues of public choice, group behaviors, and how they differ from individual choice.
Coase’s famous paper, the Theory of the Firm, tries to bridge some of that tension, but it’s also just not hard to see how human association into groups lays on a spectrum of voluntariness, with many more social situations being more coercive than Libertarians tend to appreciate, and then also layering Coase’s observations about the efficiencies of association onto involuntary associations, too.
Then at that point you have a discussion about public choice theory, what the group owes to defectors or minority views or free riders within its group, what a group owes to others outside that group in terms of externalities, how to build a coalition within that framework of group choice, and then your nuanced position might have started as libertarianism but ends up looking a lot like mainstream political, social, and economic views, to the point where the libertarian label isn’t that useful.
Ok, I think I you’re saying that tech attracts self important people that self identify as libertarian.
The opposite is also true, in that it attracts self important people who self identify as socialists. Both think other people should follow their ideals because their ideals are obviously good for society. The difference is that the “libertarian” thinks they’ll get more of what they want with fewer rules, and the socialist thinks that more rules (and the right people) is what’s needed.
But I think you’ll find that if you put either in power, they’ll make similar changes (at least on the libertarian to authoritarian spectrum), but they’ll both justify them as being “good.”
The problem, imo, isn’t with a specific ideology, but the self importance that causes them to openly push their political opinions in a setting where that just doesn’t apply, like a workplace. Unless you’re working in journalism where your political biases could impact your work output, it’s just not relevant.
public choice theory
At a certain point you trade market failures for government failures, or vice versa. The bigger a government gets, the more susceptible it is to special interests. The smaller it gets, the less effective it is at correcting market failures.
Libertarianism, to me, isn’t an end goal (there is no libertarian utopia), but a direction that attempts to solve problems with more liberty rather than less. Sometimes it’ll misstep, and sometimes it’ll look like the two major parties, but the approach is usually the same: how can we solve a given problem with more liberty rather than less.
And that’s the difference. Conservatives want to solve problems by preserving some set of values, and progressives want to solve problems by adding some new government service.
And yeah, there are a lot of questions to resolve, but they’ll be addressed from the perspective of liberty. Public choice is certainly one of those problems, and it’s at least partially resolved by libertarian paternalism, but again, it’s a process instead of a destination.
Replying to say I appreciate your discourse and can empathize with some of your views. I think it’s important to level set, and that level currently is your perspective and identification of a libertarian is one data point, and some of your perspective includes some nice, popular opinions:
Everyone wants policies and rules that empower, not limit. (Don’t treat me like a child).
Hell yeah, balance the budget, nobody wants their money going to waste, that’s a no brainer.
Drugs clearly won the war, and the program did what it was intended to do: throw minorities in jail and destroy families. You’re against it, so am I.
Now, instead of outright providing counter arguments to the things I’m not on board with, I’d like to suggest a route where instead of divesting from resources under the banner of “choice”, what if we invested resources into communities into the way they’re built? For example why bus students from a poor district to a rich one when you should leverage equity to bring communities up to par? I think that solves more problems than it adds.
Anyway, I’m sure the libertarian community is pretty diverse and I’m sorry for generalizing them. Again, I appreciate your perspective.
why bus students from a poor district to a rich one
For the same reason that universities have different curriculum despite all being accredited. It’s less a case of which one is better funded, but more which one has the program you want.
I think kids (and adults) do better when they have a say, and I also think they do better when they’re learning things they’re interested in.
My ideal is for a city to have multiple schools all with different emphases. Maybe one focuses on fine arts, one on STEM, and one on debate/communication. They’d all cover the same core curriculum (e.g. Common Core), then add what makes them special on top. Then students and parents decide where to go, and the counselors help figure out transportation. If we do it right, kids will have employment prospects right out of high school because they gained specialized skills through their school track.
I’m not suggesting we divest anything, I’m suggesting we change the funding model to get the same dollars to work better. If we can combine school and city buses, we save money that can instead go toward attracting better teachers or providing specialized equipment. But more importantly, we can have schools specialize without excluding lower income students whose parents can’t afford to take them to school every day.
So, anecdotally, the school I had to go to didn’t have a robotics program, or laptops to lend out to students, but other schools (probably in other districts) did. My colleagues today who did have those things, have experiences that are different from mine as a result, arguably better as they had earlier exposure.
My school did offer sports and orchestra I participated in, and with people closer to where I lived where I could hang out with before and after school.
I don’t think being sent to a school farther away in a different community would be an ideal solution, or necessarily make me a better person as a whole. Besides being treated like an outsider and the unavoidable stress and time loss that comes with travel, I would probably be stressed out and struggle to be happy in that environment.
Again, I’m speculating but school isn’t just about what job you want to have, it’s about exploring and developing, not only as an individual but also as part of a community. I think my ideal is one where communities have more access to opportunities, rather than limiting opportunities to specific locations. To clarify that location matters a lot, and I think history (redlining as an example) provides guidance to that.
Either way, it sounds like we both would like folks to get access to the resources they want and need so I’m cool with that.
I miss seeing policies from other libertarians like this!
So fucking sick of the ancaps and how most people view libertarians as just an extension of conservatives that want small government now. They pretty much took over r/libertarian the last few years and pushed out the “socialist” libertarians.
Yeah, I hate that sub. It was okay ~5 years ago, but the last few years it’s basically just nonsense.
Essentially, if you don’t see libertarian socialism and anarchocapitalism as valid extremes of the same ideology, your view of libertarianism is flawed. Anarchocapitalists view private property as their core principle, and libertarian socialists don’t recognize it at all, yet they both consider themselves libertarian. The focus should be on the anti-authoritarian nature of libertarianism, which imo revolves around the Non-Aggression Principle, not property rights. Yet when I look at that sub or most “libertarian” crypto bros and whatnot, they look more like fascists than libertarians.
My favorite libertarian “spokesperson” is Penn Jillette, and his main focus is on the use of force. A quote:
My question is: What would I personally use a gun to accomplish? I would use a gun to stop a rape. I would use a gun to stop a terrorist attack. I would not use a gun to build a library. My morality is such that if I’m not willing to use violence myself, I’d never use violence because I’m a coward, but theoretically if I’m not willing to use violence myself then I can’t condone the government using violence.
You end up having to draw a line somewhere. I just draw the line towards more freedom.
So that’s it for me. When it comes to a policy, I look to see if there’s a way to solve the problem with more freedom.
I don’t like the NIT, but I see it as an improvement over welfare programs because it gives people more choice in how to use those allocated dollars. I don’t like raising taxes, but the alternative to solving budget problems is screwing with monetary policy, and to me that’s worse because most people don’t understand monetary policy. And so on. I want transparency and simplicity from government, and generally lean toward freedom when faced with a decision.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Maybe it is for crypto bros and whatnot, but generally speaking, I think libertarians just think governments should largely treat adults like adults instead of children.
I consider myself libertarian, and the policies I support most would increase my taxes and “investments” in my local community. For example:
I also think we should abolish laws and policies that keep people on unequal footing, such as legalizing or decriminalizing recreational drugs (it’s better for a young father/mother to be with their family instead of in jail), ending qualified immunity, etc.
We should also change our education system so all students have the same access to school choice. We could do this by eliminating school buses in urban centers, making mass transit free for students, and requiring cities to ensure all students have access to most schools in the city through better routes and whatnot. If a child thinks they’d be better off at another school, they should be able to work with their counselor to get there, even if their parents are uninterested. We should also provide alternatives to the college track in K-12 schools, such as by allowing an apprenticeship to partially replace regular school so students can learn an in-demand school by the time they finish school.
And so on. Libertarians tend to have different solutions to problems than either major party, that doesn’t make this solutions worse or somehow intent on beating down the poor, it’s just a different perspective that in many cases can add to the wider discussion.
But maybe John Carmack is the bad form of “libertarian” who just wants what’s best for himself. IDK, but I can speak for myself.
I think technical-minded people tend to gravitate towards libertarian ideologies because they tend to underestimate the importance of human relationships to large scale systems. You can see it in the stereotype of the lone programmer who dislikes commenting or documentation, collaboration with other programmers, and strongly negative views towards their own project managers or their company’s executives. They also tend to have a negative view of customers/users, and don’t really believe in spending too much time in user interfaces/experiences. They have a natural skepticism of interdependence, because that brings on extra social overhead they don’t particularly believe they need. So they tend to view the legal, political, and social world through that same lens, as well.
I think the modern world of software engineering has moved in a direction away from that, as code complexity has grown to the point where maintainability/documentation and collaborative processes have obvious benefit, visible up front, but you still see streaks of that in some personalities. And, as many age, they have some firsthand experience with projects that were technically brilliant but doomed due to financial/business reasons, or even social/regulatory reasons. The maturation of technical academic disciplines relating to design, user experience, architecture, maintainability, and security puts that “overhead” in a place that’s more immediate, so that they’re more likely to understand that the interdependence is part of the environment they must operate in.
A lot of these technical minded people then see the two-party system as a struggle between MBAs and Ph.Ds, neither of whom they actually like, and prefer that problems be addressed organically at the lowest possible level with the simplest, most elegant rules. I have some disagreements with the typical libertarians on what weight should be assigned to social consensus, political/economic feasibility, and elegant simplicity in policymaking, but I think I get where most of them are coming from.
I think you’re painting with too broad of a brush.
Libertarianism is a very large tent, and it includes a lot of people from both major parties that have decided to stick with one of the two so they don’t “throw their vote away.” I’m guessing you mostly have direct experience with one type of “libertarian,” and assume that because most of the libertarians you know fit a certain mold, that the majority of libertarians in the world fit that mold as well. It’s just like asking a Fox News viewer what liberals think, the sample will be quite biased.
On one extreme, you have libertarian socialists like Noam Chomsky who come from academia, and on the other end you have anarchocapitalists from an economics background like Murray Rothbard, and everything in between, as well as some even more extreme. What unifies them, broadly speaking, is a rejection of coercion.
And libertarianism absolutely relies on human relationships to function. Where it differs is that libertarians often disagree with the notion that a centralized government is the best way for those conversations to happen. Many libertarians prefer natural relationships like community organizations, businesses, and neighborhoods that are selected through competition and common interest vs other similar organizations. For example, instead of having one school system organized from the top down to give students an equal education, you could have multiple competing schools that parents and students can choose from, and the ones that parents and students prefer succeed and the others fail. The alternative is direct involvement of parents with the education system, which just ends up giving more power to the minority who have the time to get involved (i.e. probably not the type you’d want to get involved, at least in my experience). It’s a lot easier to switch schools than to try to effect change in a given school.
So libertarians generally believe that individuals should be allowed to make their own decisions instead of delegating to some central authority. To use your software development analogy, it’s the idea that people should cluster around projects that interest them instead of being grouped arbitrarily based on need. You’ll get a lot more out of someone that’s internally motivated than someone who is externally motivated.
Notice that your comment is framed from the perspective of what Libertarians believe, and analyzing from that context. Mine is different: analyzing a specific type of personality common in tech careers, and analyzing why that type of person tends to be much more receptive to libertarian ideas.
I’m familiar with libertarianism and its various schools/movements within that broader category. And I still think that many in that group tend to underappreciate issues of public choice, group behaviors, and how they differ from individual choice.
Coase’s famous paper, the Theory of the Firm, tries to bridge some of that tension, but it’s also just not hard to see how human association into groups lays on a spectrum of voluntariness, with many more social situations being more coercive than Libertarians tend to appreciate, and then also layering Coase’s observations about the efficiencies of association onto involuntary associations, too.
Then at that point you have a discussion about public choice theory, what the group owes to defectors or minority views or free riders within its group, what a group owes to others outside that group in terms of externalities, how to build a coalition within that framework of group choice, and then your nuanced position might have started as libertarianism but ends up looking a lot like mainstream political, social, and economic views, to the point where the libertarian label isn’t that useful.
Ok, I think I you’re saying that tech attracts self important people that self identify as libertarian.
The opposite is also true, in that it attracts self important people who self identify as socialists. Both think other people should follow their ideals because their ideals are obviously good for society. The difference is that the “libertarian” thinks they’ll get more of what they want with fewer rules, and the socialist thinks that more rules (and the right people) is what’s needed.
But I think you’ll find that if you put either in power, they’ll make similar changes (at least on the libertarian to authoritarian spectrum), but they’ll both justify them as being “good.”
The problem, imo, isn’t with a specific ideology, but the self importance that causes them to openly push their political opinions in a setting where that just doesn’t apply, like a workplace. Unless you’re working in journalism where your political biases could impact your work output, it’s just not relevant.
At a certain point you trade market failures for government failures, or vice versa. The bigger a government gets, the more susceptible it is to special interests. The smaller it gets, the less effective it is at correcting market failures.
Libertarianism, to me, isn’t an end goal (there is no libertarian utopia), but a direction that attempts to solve problems with more liberty rather than less. Sometimes it’ll misstep, and sometimes it’ll look like the two major parties, but the approach is usually the same: how can we solve a given problem with more liberty rather than less.
And that’s the difference. Conservatives want to solve problems by preserving some set of values, and progressives want to solve problems by adding some new government service.
And yeah, there are a lot of questions to resolve, but they’ll be addressed from the perspective of liberty. Public choice is certainly one of those problems, and it’s at least partially resolved by libertarian paternalism, but again, it’s a process instead of a destination.
Replying to say I appreciate your discourse and can empathize with some of your views. I think it’s important to level set, and that level currently is your perspective and identification of a libertarian is one data point, and some of your perspective includes some nice, popular opinions:
Everyone wants policies and rules that empower, not limit. (Don’t treat me like a child).
Hell yeah, balance the budget, nobody wants their money going to waste, that’s a no brainer.
Drugs clearly won the war, and the program did what it was intended to do: throw minorities in jail and destroy families. You’re against it, so am I.
Now, instead of outright providing counter arguments to the things I’m not on board with, I’d like to suggest a route where instead of divesting from resources under the banner of “choice”, what if we invested resources into communities into the way they’re built? For example why bus students from a poor district to a rich one when you should leverage equity to bring communities up to par? I think that solves more problems than it adds.
Anyway, I’m sure the libertarian community is pretty diverse and I’m sorry for generalizing them. Again, I appreciate your perspective.
For the same reason that universities have different curriculum despite all being accredited. It’s less a case of which one is better funded, but more which one has the program you want.
I think kids (and adults) do better when they have a say, and I also think they do better when they’re learning things they’re interested in.
My ideal is for a city to have multiple schools all with different emphases. Maybe one focuses on fine arts, one on STEM, and one on debate/communication. They’d all cover the same core curriculum (e.g. Common Core), then add what makes them special on top. Then students and parents decide where to go, and the counselors help figure out transportation. If we do it right, kids will have employment prospects right out of high school because they gained specialized skills through their school track.
I’m not suggesting we divest anything, I’m suggesting we change the funding model to get the same dollars to work better. If we can combine school and city buses, we save money that can instead go toward attracting better teachers or providing specialized equipment. But more importantly, we can have schools specialize without excluding lower income students whose parents can’t afford to take them to school every day.
So, anecdotally, the school I had to go to didn’t have a robotics program, or laptops to lend out to students, but other schools (probably in other districts) did. My colleagues today who did have those things, have experiences that are different from mine as a result, arguably better as they had earlier exposure.
My school did offer sports and orchestra I participated in, and with people closer to where I lived where I could hang out with before and after school.
I don’t think being sent to a school farther away in a different community would be an ideal solution, or necessarily make me a better person as a whole. Besides being treated like an outsider and the unavoidable stress and time loss that comes with travel, I would probably be stressed out and struggle to be happy in that environment.
Again, I’m speculating but school isn’t just about what job you want to have, it’s about exploring and developing, not only as an individual but also as part of a community. I think my ideal is one where communities have more access to opportunities, rather than limiting opportunities to specific locations. To clarify that location matters a lot, and I think history (redlining as an example) provides guidance to that.
Either way, it sounds like we both would like folks to get access to the resources they want and need so I’m cool with that.
I miss seeing policies from other libertarians like this!
So fucking sick of the ancaps and how most people view libertarians as just an extension of conservatives that want small government now. They pretty much took over r/libertarian the last few years and pushed out the “socialist” libertarians.
Yeah, I hate that sub. It was okay ~5 years ago, but the last few years it’s basically just nonsense.
Essentially, if you don’t see libertarian socialism and anarchocapitalism as valid extremes of the same ideology, your view of libertarianism is flawed. Anarchocapitalists view private property as their core principle, and libertarian socialists don’t recognize it at all, yet they both consider themselves libertarian. The focus should be on the anti-authoritarian nature of libertarianism, which imo revolves around the Non-Aggression Principle, not property rights. Yet when I look at that sub or most “libertarian” crypto bros and whatnot, they look more like fascists than libertarians.
My favorite libertarian “spokesperson” is Penn Jillette, and his main focus is on the use of force. A quote:
So that’s it for me. When it comes to a policy, I look to see if there’s a way to solve the problem with more freedom.
I don’t like the NIT, but I see it as an improvement over welfare programs because it gives people more choice in how to use those allocated dollars. I don’t like raising taxes, but the alternative to solving budget problems is screwing with monetary policy, and to me that’s worse because most people don’t understand monetary policy. And so on. I want transparency and simplicity from government, and generally lean toward freedom when faced with a decision.