Political Memes

You need to find yourself some Left-Libertarians.

You're usually looking for some type of Georgists or some flavor of small-scale Social/Communist Anarchy. Most of them are way more able to grok the concepts of things like "natural monopolies" or "Tragedy of the Commons" and other fun market failure states. They tend to focus more on the existence of the market itself as a tool for creating competition that drives innovation and efficiency while giving less lip service to the idea that just because you accumulated a bunch of capital from an idea that's its a good idea.

If I scam a bunch of people, I've gathered a bunch of capital, but that doesn't mean I've actually produced anything of value for anyone. If I refined chemicals in my house and dumped all the waste in my neighbor's pool, I'm not actually competing in an even market, because I've burdened my neighbor with the cost of waste remediation while I get to keep all the profit.

When I considered myself libertarian, I was not a fan of police brutality, pro LGBTQ rights, more open border, and legalized drugs. I still hold all of those views but have gotten a lot more to the left from am economics standpoint. A lot of that is die to my econ degree.

That said, post 2016 I definitely noticed a ton of faux libertarians who were very defensive of Trump. If you voted for Trump, I don't think you can consider yourself libertarian. I think I recall hearing that the whacko New Hampshire libertarians basically took over the party. Those guys are a bunch of racist fascists.

Generally I lean libertarian in terms of pure individual choice. Worship no gods or a million, be single or marry 20 people at once, put whatever substance you want in your own body, kneel for the flag or shed a tear, yes I will use your pronouns.

Every man a king, that's my philosophy.

The rest of the stuff yeah. I want food stamp programs, I want a secular neutral state, I want antidiscrimination laws, I dont support a company dumping pollution on us.

This means you have never interacted with a libertarian then, just a ashamed conservative/republican wanting to be labeled something else.

Not a cute girl, but a rather plain woman so I get the memos, and generally we're not a big fan of libertarians either. There are some outliers but yeah, the ruse was not super effective.

As a self diagnosed math major: Republican is already a product of coward so shouldn't it be more like Republican + Shame = Libertarian?

That would work, because Republicans lack shame and Libertarians are Republicans that know that their beliefs are shameful.

That's one of my favorite stories ever. I think I laughed the entire time when I first read that article. Fucking morons.

not hairy gay men, although that would be fun too.)

I have had much worse neighbors.

There seems to be a basic misunderstanding among both the targeted parties and the entertained parties in many posts like these.

Even when this particular post specifies "fake libertarian" in their simplistic collage of observations, many readers end up understanding it as "this is what OP and the upvoters think libertarians are like", and then it's that premise they either agree or disagree with.

It should be said thst if you're a libertarian that is genuinely liberal without the "protect sensitive people through authoritarian means"-mindset, then you're a much different type than the cop-loving "liberty is for white christian land owners"-type this meme is about.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department

here is a teaser

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

Real libertarianism looks more like anarchism. There's no strong central body (neither government or corporation), community helps each other, total personal liberty, etc. Political anarchism is generally "lib-left" on a political compass while classical libertarianism is "lib-right".

As a tangent, I very much dislike the ambiguous words we chose for the political compass, they have usage that could indicate so many different things on their own. For example, if I saw someone referring to republicans as "lib-right", I'd say no shit because both parties in the US are liberal political parties.

It depends on who you ask. 10 years ago, it was mostly classical liberals that defected from the Republicans after the GOP started focusing their messaging on rallying evangelicals. Within the last couple election cycles, which IIRC is right around when they got close to having good enough poll numbers to get in a debate, the loudest group in it became ANCAPs who fight with each other about who's actually extreme enough to earn the libertarian title.

TL;DR: hippies. (At least for left-libertarians.)