[empath75]

Libertarians who talk about how the state just gets in the way of innovators like Gates forget how hard it is to start a business when the central government fails and people start hacking away at each other with machetes instead of programming computers.

[_fq4v]

Okay, but this is a strawman, because a basic tenet of libertarianism is that a government is necessary to forcefully (if necessary) prevent others from trampling on your individual rights. You are describing anarchy, not libertarianism.

[anigbrowl]

In theory yes, but in practice most libertarians involved in politics want to ruthlessly prune government down to courts for arbitration of contractual disputes, and police for enforcing property rights.

What you are describing is not anarchy, for that matter. Anarchy means absence of rulers, which is not the same thing as chaos and warlordism. Political anarchists are concerned with the establishment of systems that disallow concentrations of power or wealth that enable oppression.

Libertarianism is not exclusively capitstic. Philosophical anarchism can include autonomism, autarchism, and market anarchism, for example: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/anarchism-libertarian...

It's doubly wrong to describe the situation in Rwanda as anarchism because the genocide that occurred there was not due to some lack of contractual or property relations, but planned, engineered, and carried out because of tribal animosity, partially pursuant to grievances stemming from a particularly brutal period of Belgian colonialism and subsequent civil war(s). That genocide was highly organized by social elites of one tribe over a period of about a year. To maintain otherwise is either product of ignorance or bad faith, so I hope you'll abandon this erroneous position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

[_fq4v]

I haven't said anything about rwanda. I wad only adding nuance to your extremely blanket characterization of libertarianism which clearly calls for a government of some kind.

[anigbrowl]

If you read back up the thread, the whole context of people hacking each other with machetes arose from speculation on how well Bill Gates would have done had he been born in Rwanda. I default to assuming that people read the threads to which they are commenting, and that it's not necessary for everyone to restate all the context every time.

[empath75]

I have in fact read from libertarians that the government has no business doing such a thing and that's the rightful place of private militias and police to enforce.