How is Liberalism any different from Libertarianism? They have two different pages…
I value individuals, but I don’t believe the Government is an effective way to do that. I mean Socialism sounds appealing, the idea of a State that values its own people. However, its impossible due to human nature. To accomplish this the Government would need to grow bigger, and trying to balance equality would generally end up doing the opposite effect and getting another group mad to where you see worker strikes of that in France.
However, I’m not an Anarchist.
Also, any philosophers I should check out who talks about the value of the individual? without sounding like some religious dude who thinks you have a moral obligation at birth to help people?
My positions haven’t changed on issues, I simply relabeled. But what path someone takes in their intellectual odyssey has nothing to do with some “official stages of libertarianism” thus implying the final destination to be Rothbard’s views. This is absolutely illogical as everyone who calls themselves a libertarian has not done so in identical or even related “stages”. Thus no “stages of libertarianism” exist.
The entire idea that there are intellectual stages that men are damned to follow in their political beliefs is just plain wrong; there is neither a single point that all beliefs tend to, nor is it necessarily done in stages. One can easily be a minarchist libertarian without resisting the “natural progress” of his ideas to anarchy.
Actually, you’re somewhat foolish for trying to paint Rothbard as the lone nut of ancap, when Kinsella, D. Friedman, Hoppe, Long, Block are all ancaps or anarchists.
It’s not about the party or man or label. It is about the ideas. The idea that it is wrong to initiate the use of force. Libertarians believe this. If you believe otherwise, that’s your deal. But you’re not a libertarian, or as stated many times already a “small government libertarian” as that is an oxymoron.
You might as well call yourself a pro-violence pacifist or an pro-monopoly free marketer.
I was almost going to defend you by pointing out that your talk of stages was probably just using words loosely, and that you weren’t really talking about “stages” in the same sense as Comte, Saint Simon, Marx and those thinker but then you came out with this shocker:
There’s no necessary doublethink involved in minarchism, much less if you defend it on consequentialist grounds!
Maybe he meant stages, as in, phases? This whole year I’ve been through three of them. I started out ‘indifferent’ pre-2008, came out Classical Liberal, moved on to Libertarian Party, then to Anarchism.
Thing to remember is, libertarianism is just a view that “the initiation of force” is immoral. How that applies to Minarchism and Anarchism, well.. you guys duke it out. It is entertaining.
Oh come on LS. It makes a lot of sense. You need a government to protect you from government. And the government is self-limiting and self-checked. If the executive branch was tyrannical, there would be no problem because the judiciary branch would check it. And if the judiciary branch is tyrannical don’t worry because the executive branch will fix the problem, and if both branches get out of control, well, let’s change the subject shall we ?