[fidgewidge]

This book isn't about libertarians. It's about anarchists.

"Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government ... They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity."

Nobody who knows anything about libertarians and is trying to accurately represent it would write that, because the whole reason it exists as an independent thing from anarchism is that libertarians do not want to eliminate the government. They have very clear ideas about what exactly the government should do and that role is much less expansive than in a socialist country or even in America of today, but it's not literally nothing and it certainly doesn't involve living in tents. That's much closer to the Occupy Wall Street crowd in behaviour than libertarians.

[doctor_eval]

OK, but US style right-libertarianism is also known as anarcho-capitalism [0], and the line between that and anarchy - which resists hierarchy, not organisation - is pretty thin. The main difference is that anarcho-capitalism, unsurprisingly, deeply favours those who own property.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

[fidgewidge]

Libertarianism isn't the same as anarcho-capitalism. If some people are claiming they're the same thing then, well, see above.

[doctor_eval]

Just because you say it isn't, doesn't mean it isn't. And if you read the link that I referred to, which talks at length about the relationship between anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism, maybe you wouldn't be so glib with your arguments.

While there may be differences between libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, I've struggled to see them in practice, and in my experience the definition of these terms can be varied depending on who you talk to.

In any case, the two systems are birds of a feather, and neither of them are appealing unless one already holds substantial material wealth.

[fidgewidge]

"While there may be differences between libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, I've struggled to see them in practice"

I don't think either are actually implemented in practice at the moment, although you can argue that certain aspects of certain politicians or their agendas lean libertarian, and that some societies have in the past been a lot more libertarian than they are today.

The primary difference is this: anarchists of any kind, ancap or not, see no role for the state whatsoever. Libertarianism requires a state to exist, but has a very clearly defined set of roles for it such that anything outside those roles is considered more properly the role of the private sector. At a minimum, the state is expected to implement:

- [Border] defense (armies, navies, passports)

- A violence monopoly within their territory (police, courts, jails, laws against murder, abuse, etc). Yes, this doesn't always sit easy with the US specific gun culture, but the "out" is to say you can own a gun only for self defense, hunting and overthrow of an out of control state, which doesn't infringe on this principle.

- Contract law (civil law courts, ability to levy financial penalties)

- Property rights (land registers, stock markets, bond markets and other financial infrastructure, also quite often IP rights)

- Sufficient taxation to fund those things and subsequent state functions

- Anti-monopoly enforcement

And a bunch of other things that are less well agreed on, but in some interpretations might involve attempts at limiting externalities.

So a libertarian state still has a relatively extensive civil service, it would still have a parliament or congress, tax authorities and so on, but it's smaller and more tightly focused than a non-libertarian state. It is actually implementable in the real world, today, without violating any of the known basics of human nature or government. Libertarians accept that some current roles of the state have evolved for sound reasons but propose that those roles can be done equally well or better by the private sector (e.g. instead of bank bailouts you have narrow banks). We know such countries can exist because they have also existed in the past, for example the early US government was much closer to this ideal than the current one.

Ancaps on the other hand propose a theoretical society that has no government at all yet is also peaceful and prosperous. No such society has ever existed, not even anything close to it, and there are many obvious open questions with no known answers. It's very different.

[braingenious]

FWIW, the book synopsis that you quoted does not say that libertarians built a tent city, it says that freedom-loving citizens built a tent city. New Hampshire’s state motto is “live free or die”, and that value of freedom is one of the reasons that NH was chosen by the libertarians to build their utopia.

It’s a very rich and complex story about many different people, and arguing with a handful of sentence fragments from a summary does nothing to impugn the quality of the journalism.

[fidgewidge]

Yes it does. Why do you insist on stupid word games? The entire book claims to be about libertarians who moved to one specific place - that is literally in the title - and is using "freedom-loving citizens" to refer to them. It's literally about a "town" where nobody else is living, who else is it going to refer to?

It’s a very rich and complex story about many different people

It's about "a barely populated settlement with one paved road" that was taken over by anarchists. Not surprisingly they ended up living in tents, as anarchists are wont to do.

I edited out a comment in my original post asking why some people insist on lying about libertarianism but then took it out, thinking it was overly harsh. Now I wish I'd left it back in. I don't believe you're arguing in good faith, the misrepresentations in that post are just so blatant.

[tracker1]

I think that government should exist to implicitly ensure essential infrastructure. What is essential is up for debate, but generally can include, common defense, upholding contract law and enabling transportation, trade and commerce. In this day and age, I think internet, telephone and radio communications would be included as well.

Anarchists will often identify as Libertarians, as there are also left-leaning Libertarians that I don't really get as well. I'm a bit more pragmatic in terms of a from where we are standpoint in that I think there are less intrusive solutions to many problems than full regulation or more government. I think the crux is starting by holding those that are responsible for these things (corporate or banking execs and boards) liable for their decisions and actions, which doesn't happen currently, and most Libertarians I know would celebrate.

[colinsane]

> Anarchists will often identify as Libertarians, as there are also left-leaning Libertarians that I don't really get as well.

of the anarchists i’ve met i have yet to hear any accept the label of “Libertarian”. most of the handful i know used to be Libertarian but then passed through that into anarchism as they chased some ideal of rights/freedoms that turned out to be incompatible with the Libertarian views toward property rights.

[tracker1]

Yeah... I'm moderately active in some Libertarian groups, so do see a lot of left-libertarian and anarchist views, though I don't quite share them... I'm probably a bit more conservative/statist than a "pure" libertarian, again on the point of pragmatism. But I do believe we've become so statist, and I feel propping up corporations is an extension of the state, not limited because of it (executive/board liability especially).

I just feel there's plenty of room for closer to libertarian solutions without expanding govt, and in some cases actually reverting to prior state in terms of dealing with certain issues. The lack of accountability is probably the single biggest issue I've seen in the past few years. The lack of limits on patents and production around patent protection, extension and licensing is also very concerning.