O/T: I’ve been watching a good amount of stand up comedy via the internet lately and I was scouring the web for someone besides Joe Rogan to give my funny bone a good tickle with a libertarian sensibility. Anyone have any leads?
Also, more relevantly to this thread, while googling for “libertarian comedy”, I found the following article that espouses some of the most misguided views of libertarianism that I have seen in a good while–did you know that you’re a hypocrite? I know it’s petty and, well, impossible to dissect every stupid article that one discovers in the dark shadows of the interweb, but this one got under my skin because I felt it to be a personal assault that I was barraged by while innocently searching for intelligent dick jokes.
By that article’s reasoning, if you ever drive on government roads, eat in a restaurant, stay at a hotel, or any other number of things that are somehow regulated by the government, you’re not a “true libertarian”. The thing is, being a libertarian isn’t the same as being entirely self-reliant - at least not in my opinion. So the “Mr. Self-Reliant” of the article is a glaring strawman.
You could easily play the same game with statists. Call out their hypocrisy of wanting State control of (whatever they want state control of…e.g. health care) and then how they claim the State has no business in (whatever they think the State has no business in…e.g. gay marriage). If the state has business in one aspect, why not the rest? Is that not the same blanket they’re saddling libertarians with?
And then, this imaginary line they draw between what is justified aggression and what is oppression…it’s location is necessarily completely arbitrary. How do they justify not only the aggression itself, but also where they draw that line?
They can’t. It’s basically just whatever they feel. This is why they constantly have to use ambiguious fuzzy words like “reasonable amount”, “bad behavior”, “excessive wealth”, “lack of character”, “should have known better", “undue prosperity”, and the insufferable “fair share”, just to name a few.
Isn’t the state university hospital not just another service provider? Perhaps not one you like, but he certainly is. However he touches on an important point and that is that libertarians could well do practicing more of what they preach. Making real life decisions in favor of Liberty and turning their back away from oversubsidized institutions.
I’d have a couple of things in mind. This could be seasteading, secession, moving to a place with less restrictions and taxes, home-schooling, alternative currencies, etc.
Just doing the things that lead to more liberty. Otherwise this would all just remain an academic exercise.
What is the public spending percentage in the US right now, by the way.
…because it’s so easy to pay taxes in alternative currencies.
Getting thrownin a cage for attempting to transact in gold does not lead to more liberty. In fact, I would argue, getting thrown in a cage is kind of the opposite of “more liberty”.
What does that even mean? Libertarianism is the last ideology that is going to tell you what to do with your life. Libertarians don’t preach except about strictly political things and then only to push for a situation where politics is abolished.
The HuffPuff article doesn’t touch on any important point. Libertarians do not have the tinniest need to blush when calling an ambulance etc. Calling or not-calling the ambulance is completly irrelevant as to ones libertarian credentials. Doing either makes you neither more, nor less libertarian. The piece is a complete shot in the dark.
