| HN Mirror

A huge amount of capital-L Libertarian philosophy centers around advocating things that can be broadly defined as "antisocial behavior". For example, Rothbard was highly in favor of total parental ownership of children as chattel slaves (including sale), and assassination markets are a recurring theme in such ideologies. It's a fantasy Mad Max scenario where everyone can imagine themselves as the warlord and not the slave begging for a cup of water.

(whereas soft libertarianism tends to be "Republicans but with legal drugs")

And more generally speaking Libertarians tend to take a "try and stop me" philosophy to all such problems (including any tragedy-of-the-commons situations). And of course they insist that you stop them without using your "statist" laws, so this becomes a de-facto argument for anarchy or rule of the richest/strongest. It's deliberately creating a scenario in which nobody will be able to stop whatever travesties occur and rationalizing that it should happen because that's what the market decides.

Obviously this example pre-dates modern Libertarianism a bit, but nothing epitomizes Libertarianism quite as well as Crassus. Crassus owned a fire brigade back in Roman times, and when your building caught fire he'd make you an offer. You can either sell your property to him for pocket change and his brigade will put it out, or you can watch it burn to the ground. Unsurprisingly people usually chose the "pocket change" option over "nothing", and he became immensely wealthy.

Libertarians tend to imagine themselves as Crassus and think this sounds like a great idea - many of them are probably excitedly muttering about free-market fire brigades and fire insurance at this juncture. But past people weren't stupid, they reacted to the same pressures we do. The same drives to take long-tail risks that are improbable but have huge downsides exist today. And in the horrible statist world this is a completely solved problem - you pay property taxes that fund the fire department and nobody loses their house to a freak accident, or gets ripped off at a moment of disadvantage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting

You can see a modern example of this today in Colorado Springs, where Libertarianism is huge and taxes are so low they can't fund basic services. Now you have to pay to turn your street lights on. Same thing is happening with fire brigades in some areas - if you don't pay a separate premium the fire department won't come put out your house.

So yeah, welcome to Libertopia, coffee is over on the left, sex slaves are down the hall and on your right. Don't worry, the sex slaves definitely aren't going to be you or any of your loved ones. If they are, the transaction was probably approved by their new owner's friendly neighborhood Arbitration Corporation as repayment for your debts. Don't worry, you'll always retain the option of a "kinetic appeal" of your case from Blackwater - if you've got the cash.

This sounds like a great idea to Libertarians because there's no force or coercion at all, since Libertarians uniquely define force/coercion as coming from the state. Whereas having to pay tax is like ten megahitlers on the oppression scale.

People have hated paying taxes since time immemorial. Even Jesus had to tell people to shut up and pay their taxes. Libertarians are just pretentious enough to try and build a whole philosophy around it, with hookers and blow (literally: it's not a coincidence that Libertarian philosophy spends so much time on slaves and legal drugs).