Libertarians Beware

It's not too hard to understand why a political philosophy that contains the word "liberty" has become so popular. Who doesn't want to be free? The problem is that most people don't understand that freedom, or indeed liberty, is not something that can be gained individually, at least not if the goal is for everyone to be free.

Personally I hold the rather extreme position that freedom doesn't really exist, and therefore find it rather useless to even talk about it. I always say that if you want to be free, you need to find an island for yourself to live on, and even then you'll have to adjust to the other creatures on that island; freedom is found in the world around you, not within you, and if the world around you is full of other humans, than that's where you'll find it. Or not. Mostly not. Not in the capitalist, free market world that is our current reality. Most libertarians nowadays believe in laissez-faire capitalism without a state, without understanding the inherent contradiction in that belief. You see, "the state" with its monopoly on the use of violence is invented by and for capitalists, and is the result of a system based on the accumulation of private property; having lots of private property is equal to having lots of power, because all that private property needs lots of protection by an institution that has a monopoly on the use of violence. If you can follow the circular reasoning in that sentence, you're one step closer to understanding why this modern notion of libertarianism is a bunch of nonsense, and why anarcho-capitalism suffers from the same internal contradiction.

Originally, libertarianism was a leftist political philosophy associated with libertarian communists and libertarian socialists who seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production; all who understand that large amounts of accumulated private property goes hand in hand with immense power, understand that private property is the main barrier to liberty and freedom. The fact that those individuals who have lots of private property are the ones who are the most free among us explains why they are the ones who benefit most from keeping the delusional right-wing version of libertarianism alive. There's no such thing as a free market in a civilized world; the mere restriction on what can and can not be traded, humans for example, makes the market not free. An-caps believe in something that's simply not realistic, which is why I'll close today's short post with an invitation to watch the below linked video. It's a fun, in my opinion at least, dunking on those modern libertarians who take some legitimate political, social and economical concerns, and subsequently attach a bunch of completely wrong solutions to them, often descending in white nationalism, xenophobia and calling for more of the very politics that caused the legitimate concerns in the first place. So while it's a fun watch, it's important to keep in mind that these right-wing ideologies based on extreme individualism and individual freedom are in fact dangerous...

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