[mcguire]

Mary Mazzio:

"...But the thing that shocked me most about making this film was that those guys who ran Backpage, back in the day they were rabble-raising libertarians, yet, at some point, my view is that maybe the money became so outrageously intoxicating, perhaps there was this notion that the sale of children was simply collateral damage.”

I'm a little unclear about what she was expecting. To my knowledge, libertarians are not find of enforcing their morals on others.

[samscully]

A core Libertarian value is individualism. So something like trafficking would be anathema to any Libertarian. Furthermore, I'm sure many would acknowledge that under a certain age it is not credible that any child has the ability to choose prostitution.

I'm not a Libertarian myself, but wanting to reduce the power of the state doesn't mean you believe in slavery.

[pcthrowaway]

No, but being libertarian does mean you believe, to varying degrees, that many issues of freedom are not responsibilities of the state.

[elefanten]

For most libertarians, it is a fundamental right to not have others interfere in your life. That's why murder, rape, kidnapping would all still be frowned on.

Being made a child sex slave is a pretty major violation of your liberty.

[MichaelGG]

Murder, rape, kidnapping all violate the NAP. Morals aside, child prostitutes are no different than child models, actors, etc. All child professions can be coerced and share the same decision issues of child consent vs parent's rights and so on.

[ljf]

No different? The outcome of being a in bad play or modeling a terrible jumper is very different to being raped and abused. This about the abuse and slavery - are you OK with that? Just hand waving and saying 'other things are kind of bad' doesn't negate the impact that this has on individuals, and that people have been profiting from this abuse.

[MichaelGG]

Prostitution doesn't have to have abuse and slavery. I'm not excusing the BP people, just saying the consent issues are the same for any child labour.

[ljf]

If you are a Libertarian then you believe that free will is key to our interactions, trafficked people are not able to use their free will, therefore they cannot enter into contracts, and therefore should not be something that libertarians allow... But sounds like these guys didn't care about anything except their own freewill, and that of the people that were financing them.

[tomjen3]

Libertarians would not interfeer with prostitution, but they would very much object to selling somebody else for sex.

[leggomylibro]

Theft of agency is the biggest crime that there is; I don't see how any political group wouldn't object to that sort of thing.

But I could definitely see a Libertarian deciding something along the lines of, "we should err on the side of being permissive." But come on, you don't see big casinos systemically looking the other way on backroom games of Russian Roulette.

[nebabyte]

Of course not. Who would want to clean up that mess?

[pyre]

Maybe she was confusing "radical libertarians" with "radical liberals?"

[matt4077]

Do you really think someone could spend two years on a documentary without realising such a mistake?

[nuklearwanze]

a radical libertarian would basically be an entrepreneurial anarchist - but what would a radical liberal look like.

[nyolfen]

john brown