Turns out there's no Libertarians

[Jimmy Woods]

Libertarianism is astrology for men.

What those results show is economic POPULISM is a very powerful tool to win over less-informed and uninformed voters. Trump ran on being for the working man and even though it's a complete lie he convinced enough people of it to win him the election.

[Sky High]

no "true libertarians" for sure and thank fuck for that. this country is in shitty enough shape as it is without a bunch a yahoos claiming never ending toll roads and a next to useless government is a good thing.

[Kellhound]

no "true libertarians" for sure and thank fuck for that. this country is in shitty enough shape as it is without a bunch a yahoos claiming never ending toll roads and a next to useless government is a good thing.

Sounds like New Jersey.

[Natylyaz]

Fascinating read at The Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. They released a new study on the 2016 electorate.

What struck me was, how few people actually identify as Libertarians. So they exist, but barely. Yet they feel so over represented on the internet. I guess having a few billionaires and well funded think tanks helps amplify the message. Which feels like it comes at the expense of the populist voters, their ideological opposites.

Here's their scatterplot of 2016 voters.



Liberal (44.6 percent): Lower left, liberal on both economic and identity issues
Populist (28.9 percent): Upper left, liberal on economic issues, conservative on identity issues
Conservative (22.7 percent): Upper right, conservative on both economic and identity issues
Libertarian (3.8 percent): Lower right, conservative on economics, liberal on identity issues

You are completely out of touch with the meaning of the word liberal.
Liberal means liberty, it means economic freedom.
Conservative has no clear meaning, does it mean we should stick to the medieval rules of business? Which are completely at odds with economic freedom.

[Shadowferal]

I believe that the closest that any country has ever been to libertarianism as an economic model was New Zealand: Rogernomics and that was a disaster.

[Z-Man]

Most self-described libertarians I've met are simply trying to justify not paying taxes. Most of their "liberties" revolve around ways to break the law without being arrested. "No government is going to tell me I can or can't put in my baby formula. It's my factory!"

Same with Ayn Rand zealots; I've yet to meet one who didn't have a government job or wasn't still living at home. Everyone thinks they're going to be a Greek philospher-king ruling over an empire of slaves, right up until they realize what the job market for philosophers looks like.

[downnola]

You are completely out of touch with the meaning of the word liberal.
Liberal means liberty, it means economic freedom.
Conservative has no clear meaning, does it mean we should stick to the medieval rules of business? Which are completely at odds with economic freedom.

Conservatism does have a clear meaning. To be a conservative is to identify and protect that which is fragile and worth preserving. Some of the objectives of a conservative are to preserve culture, order, and tradition. Obviously there are grotesque caricatures of conservatives running around in the U.S. and elsewhere, but there is a coherent and necessary mode of thinking at the root of conservatism.

[Slybak]

Fascinating read at The Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. They released a new study on the 2016 electorate.

Interesting survey, though my one quibble is any attempt to try to cleanly separate the "identity dimension" from the "economic dimension" is pretty foolish, both because economics itself has an identity component (i.e. "class"), and that identities themselves cannot be cleanly separated; white poor people and black poor people, for instance, or poor single men and poor single women, don't face entirely overlapping subsets of economic issues.

I find it interesting that the preponderance of Trump voters that were surveyed don't appear to care one way or another about the economic dimension, which seems to me to rather reinforce the idea that the whole cavalcade of "economic anxiety of the white working class" hot-takes as explanations for the Trump phenomenon were a predetermined solution in search of a problem.

Anyway, anarcho-capitalism has always been the preference of very few people in the United States, and this has been overshadowed by the fact that these very few people are also very, very wealthy and have the social capital to get their ideology promulgated through mass media.

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You are completely out of touch with the meaning of the word liberal.
Liberal means liberty, it means economic freedom.

This definition is precisely four words too long. It might have been a useful definition of liberalism in the 17th and 18th centuries, but we don't live in a world of mercantilism empires anymore (speaking of out of touch...). Contemporary liberalism was reforged by the industrial revolution and the excesses of private monopolies and cartels.

Conservative has no clear meaning, does it mean we should stick to the medieval rules of business? Which are completely at odds with economic freedom.

Conservatism (a) defends inequality (b) through appeals to traditionalism. (a) makes it right-wing, (b) defines its methodology.

[Glorious Leader]

I should be noted that libertarian-ism has a different meaning in continental philosophy and historically as well.. Right wing libertarians, more rightfully called "propertarians" are in many cases antithetical to libertarian as well as anarchist values.

[Shadowferal]

Well, to be fair, we could have ten libertarians in a room and each one could easily have a different definition.

[Noradin]

They are fundamentally one and the same. If the government tells you where you can and cannot go can you truley say you are free? The enforcement of private property is by far the most intrusive and gross form of state intervention that exists today.

It is also the one that results in the most freedom.
Without government guaranteeing private property we would have to spend all our time guarding what we need to live with no freedom to do anything else.

[Glorious Leader]

It is also the one that results in the most freedom.
Without government guaranteeing private property we would have to spend all our time guarding what we need to live with no freedom to do anything else.

Again thats an okay argument to make but its not a "libertarian" one as it suggests that freedoms can and should be limited in order to promote more freedom. While this might be true one could easily apply it to every right including property. When the "libertarian" rails against taxation he doesnt accept the idea that taxation increases his freedom because it provides for defence of his property even if it comes at a slight cost to his freedom with that property.

[Slybak]

I think the majority of voters vote on the basis of social issues, not economic issues. Gay marriage. Racial politics. Gun control. Abortions. Bathrooms. Wage gap.

Some of these are actually economic issues, however I find these polls rarely reflect it as such.

Most voters vote on the basis of partisan identification, even those unaffiliated with any party as most "independents" consistently vote for candidates of the same party even though they themselves are not registered members.

Issues often come second. Take marriage equality and the bump in approval it received among reliably Democratic voters after Biden and Obama announced they were for it. Or when, during the Bush administration, the majority of Republican voters were against privatizing Social Security until Bush announced his plan to privatize Social Security. Or all the banker hate expressed by Trump voters, who just recently cheered Trump at an Iowa rally after claiming that Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn (Goldman Sachs alums), and famed business liquidator Wilbur Ross (who made his bones working for Rothschild, of all places) were the right people to "run the economy."

Partisan loyalty is itself a form of identity, and identities are more than just composites of political interests; they reinforce each other in all kinds if ways, sure, but there's not a one-way causal relationship between them.

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Again thats an okay argument to make but its not a "libertarian" one as it suggests that freedoms can and should be limited in order to promote more freedom.

It also means that freedom is entirely dependent on state power as a monopolistic purveyor of coercive violence, i.e. "don't do this or people with guns will do their utmost to stop you." And yet this very basic fact about "Propety Rights Uber Alles" is not afforded much currency in libertarian circles. They'd probably call you a filthy "statist" for even suggesting it.

It is however entirely consistent with the precepts of liberal democracy, i.e. "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

[Dmitro]

I am a libertarian.
ask me anything

[Ahovv]

There are clearly several different definitions of libertarian at play here.

From the modern political compass, it's a very weird spot (middle of the road economically, civil libertarian).

However, that's not the political position of the US Libertarian Party. That would be extremely conservative on economics, and civilly libertarian. So, in the direction of, but not quite ancap.

Most economic conservatives are simply authoritarian, so yes, it's rare to see people like Rand Paul.

[Shadowferal]

I remember when Gary Johnson was booed at the libertarian convention for suggesting that drivers licenses were okay.
It's a trap to think that Libertarian means socially liberal and fiscally conservative.

[PosPosPos]

Every self-identified libertarian I have seen here and off MMOC somehow manage to fit a few things to a T:

1) They profess undying support for Trump and everything he does.

2) They deny they are Republican, but somehow never fail to take stances favoring Republicans while bashing Democrats

3) They always claim they vote independent and don't vote for either Republican or Democratic candidates.

Naturally if you look at all 3 points together you would find that Libertarians are simply Republicans who call themselves by a different name thinking that the repackaging somehow disconnects them from the perceived embarrassment they would apparently otherwise have.

It's like a wolf in sheep's clothing - it's still a wolf in the end.

[Bullettime]

Every self-identified libertarian I have seen here and off MMOC somehow manage to fit a few things to a T:

1) They profess undying support for Trump and everything he does.

2) They deny they are Republican, but somehow never fail to take stances favoring Republicans while bashing Democrats

3) They always claim they vote independent and don't vote for either Republican or Democratic candidates.

Naturally if you look at all 3 points together you would find that Libertarians are simply Republicans who call themselves by a different name thinking that the repackaging somehow disconnects them from the perceived embarrassment they would apparently otherwise have.

It's like a wolf in sheep's clothing - it's still a wolf in the end.

Many also call themselves libertarians just to avoid being packaged in with the religious element of the modern Republican party. They still support the same things but not in the name of religion so they just fly the libertarian banner. Then they get to jump off the ship when/if the GOP does something retarded and they don't get lumped in with the religious nuts.

[PosPosPos]

Many also call themselves libertarians just to avoid being packaged in with the religious element of the modern Republican party. They still support the same things but not in the name of religion so they just fly the libertarian banner. Then they get to jump off the ship when/if the GOP does something retarded and they don't get lumped in with the religious nuts.

Correction: they pretend it's not for religious reasons for the sake of adding credence to their stances(of course, nobody in the right mind buys that crap). Most of them still go to conservative church on weekends gobbling up the partisan propaganda thinly veiled as religious sermons.

Pretending it's not for religious reasons is just an extension of pretending they are not republican leaning.

[PC2]

The main misunderstanding comes from conflating libertarians with anarchists. Anarchists reject the mixed system. Libertarians work with the mixed system to find a balance that preserves liberty.