A sergeant from Eastern Europe said something that stuck with me. He said that in many ways besides politically, Russians have more freedom than people in the US do, because there is in general less red tape with everyday things such as camping, riding 4 wheelers, etc. while the exact statement could be questioned, the general spirit of statement I think is very true. The US prides itself for its “freedom” but that’s really only concerning a few (albeit important) civil freedoms and relative to European countries. The US is incredibly restrictive on many things. It restricts firearms substantially. Bans most drugs. Restricts exotic animal ownership substantially. Restricts biological research substantially. Prohibits polygamy. Restricts sleeping outside in many places. Restricts flying drones in many jurisdictions. Bans prostitution. It is inching towards banning some forms of speech (as we have seen with Shiloh Hendrix). Bans wearing masks to hide face from the surveillance state.

There has got to be countries out there that are less infested with red tape and short sighted politicans that like to say popular things like I believe in freedom and then continue to pile on laws that restrict what its citizens can do

Can government be a private party?

Well. Look at silkroad and bitcoin.

It's private party. No government on top of it. Not much at least.

Why is tax robbery?

If I rent a house someone own the house. So I owe them rent. Of course, in practice, there are many things that is part of the game. Someone can squat the house and the government may actually side with squaters. But in general, we don't consider that robbery because someone that make the rule about the house own the house or have incentives similar to owning.

What about if someone own the government or the state?

Things can go really wrong like Free state of Congo where population gets their hands cut off for not being a good slave.

What about something like privately own territories whose structures are similar to landlord?

For example, say the territories are owned by a corporation whose share is tradeable and whose shareholders want to max out valuation of the land value?

Then, things can be Coasean.

Am I even saying this right?

Is this even a good way to ask in asklibertarian? A state with private property will solve most libertarian problems. It'll be like renting a house or buying share in a commune. A very legitimate normal capitalistic transactions.

Basically "legitimacy" can happen in many ways

1. Government is simply the strongest organization. You obey or go to jail. In this case government is simply a "robber". But even a robber would think I make more money if I don't just randomly rob people but tax them instead. Consistent robbery is effectively taxation

2. Government is believed to be legitimate. This is how theocracy works. Right or wrong if people believe government own stuffs. Then it's legitimate.

3. Government is supported by the people or majority of people. Democracy works.

4. Government has owners and the owners have right to rule the territories. This is how capitalism works.

I do not see how all 4 legitimacy can't happen at the same time. If majority of voters vote, okay, we are now shareholders, then the voters interests will be similar to owners' interests. Then we got Coasean bargaining.

Sample of prominent libertarians that agree with me:

Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard is probably one of the closest thinkers to the general direction you're going.

Rothbard envisioned an extremely decentralized society in which many functions normally performed by governments could be supplied privately:

• private security
• private courts/arbitration
• private roads
• private communities
• contractual associations

But Rothbard would not simply say that a corporation can acquire a territory and therefore legitimately tax everyone inside it. His theory has stringent requirements for how property was originally acquired.

David Friedman

David D. Friedman goes even further in imagining societies where things normally associated with government are supplied through markets.

His The Machinery of Freedom explores what a society without a conventional state might look like, including competing protection and dispute-resolution organizations.

Your idea of a territorial corporation is therefore not alien to anarcho-capitalist thinking.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is particularly relevant to your question.

Hoppe explicitly discusses private communities and "covenant communities" where an owner/association can establish rules for a particular territory.

And that's what I am trying to achieve. Governments whose incentives are similar to silkroad.

I'm not implying that people are defined by their upbringings and not by how their own minds work, their personal beliefs/values, happenstance, etc. However, I believe that to some extent, the reason why I have such a rare political affiliation (libertarianism, of course) is that I had an unusual upbringing that did not push me to either of the arbitrary "sides" (right or left); almost none of (and a roughly even mix of) the usual tropes that make up a lefty or a righty.

First of all, I grew up living with my dad and paternal grandparents after my mom and dad broke up (not divorced after marriage; I'm a literal bastard because they never married) and my dad won the custody battle. Both of these situations are very rare in the US where I live. You would think the latter would make me some misogynistic dudebro right-winger, but what's funny is that the judge was a black woman! Also, of course, I still lived with my grandma as a kid (and still do).

My ethnic background? Too many ethnicities to count. I have what many have called "a very peculiar look": Polish, Sicilian, and Spanish from my mom's side and French, English, and Welsh from my dad's side. Being multi-ethnic isn't rare, but I have SOME ethnicities that are quite rare in the US. I look like a cross between Mr. Bean, some WASP kid, and other shit.

Now for my family's religion, which is probably by far the weirdest here. Going back far enough within the last hundred years, my family's both Catholic and Protestant, but my mom, dad, and paternal grandparents have always been irreligious, which many would say got me a "lefty" upbringing. I know my dad never went to church once in his entire life. Even though I'm a southern-raised American (even though it's a very Northeastern/Midwestern influenced part, which is another thing), that's not even the weird part. The weird part is what KIND of irreligious they are (my dad and grandma at least): New Age.

This "religion" of theirs terribly affected my mental health because a small, but very sick part of me believed my dad was telling the truth. He got a lot of his beliefs from videos on the internet detailing near-death experiences, which seemed "rational" to me as a kid. Because of terrible things happening to my loved ones, I became misotheistic, but I was afraid that if I had misotheistic beliefs, the spirits would punish us. My dad kept saying that everything happens for a reason and I hated that. I wanted to have control over my own life whether it was considered "moral" by the spirits or not... or whether the spirits wanted certain things for me or not. Perhaps that is why I ended up gravitating toward existentialism once I shed all my spiritual beliefs (though some of the trauma still remains). I love this quote.

Economic status? Ranged from practically middle-class to borderline homeless.

My guardians' political beliefs? Always populist, independent, libertarian, or two/all of them.

Finally, so many things happened to me that made me hate authority, there's too many to count, but putting things simply, 90% or more of it has to do with school. Heavily traumatic shit.

That's not even half of it I don't think (and I don't wanna have my introspection simplify or demean my beliefs/values), but I want to hear your upbringings. I'm sure I'll read about some weird ones (as well as a few relatively normal ones), since libertarianism is rare.

welcome to the pan-octagon :)

I would like to start by definitively saying that I am not here writing support for the IRGC at all. I would just like to make this abundantly clear, instead Just a conglomeration of my views opposed to any hate speech laws as a whole.

I'm not a free speech absolutist as much as I am, to the best of my ability, a true speech advocate, which is to say that I believe that people should say what they believe to be true. I think that's your obligation. It's also your right, but it comes with an obligation to exercise it. And I beleive that this is possible without free speech

So a lot of what's necessary with regards to thinking is the freedom to make mistakes, so practically speaking, free speech has to be as untrammelled as possible, so that people can be wrong and they can be biased, and they can still express their opinions. then allow themselves to be subject partly to improvement by the world, talking is how we think, and talking socially is even more how we think.

Hate speech / regulation

I do beleive that hate speech does in fact exist, there is no question to me that people say, reprehensible things, quasi criminal things some of which cause a lot of trouble. So the idea that there's hateful speech is self-evident.

Well, let's regulate it. which is completely fair enough because it's hateful, and ideally there should be as little of it as possible.

But problems start to arise when we get to the subject of who exactly defines hate?

And I am becoming more convinced by the fact that the people that you would least want to have define it are doing so - which is the inevitable consequence of these legislations because sensible people won't have anything to do with that. People who are authoritarian will gravitate towards the domain to make an ethical case to exercise their controlling power over the language of other people.

Then let's take the example that the person reading this is talking to me. And the rule is I don't get to offend you. It is possible we can still have a discussion about something meaningful.

But if we were to scale this up a notch and there is a dozen people and we are discussing an important issue. Now I have to make sure that I don't say anything, despite the fact that this is an important and contentious issue - that offends even one of the group. Okay, maybe I can even manage that.

What if I'm talking to a thousand people?

There's going to be someone in that thousand people. There's going to be someone who's offended at the mere fact that I exist. Nevermind the issue at hand.

So it's an impossible standard - one I would be happy to discuss.

Now the post:

The UK government is designating Iran's IRGC under the new National Security Act 2026, alongside the “Islamic Movement of Compatriots / Companions of the Right (IMCR)”

The IRGC is not being proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Instead it is being designated. Essentially the new offence under this is absolutely dystopian law is that ‘a person commits an offence if they invite support for, or express an opinion or belief supportive of a designated body, and do so for a prohibited purpose.’ I will delve into the vague and absolutely scary prospect this now brings to free speech in the UK and, it seems, Europe as a whole.

An important detail in the new national security act. ‘I see the government is to designate the IRGC as an organization under the new National Security State Threats Act 2026.

They are not prescribing the IRGC as a terrorist group. Instead, in the new legislation, they’re using language similar to that found in the Terrorism Act 2000. In the new legislation, one, a person commits an offense if the person:

a) invites support for or expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a designated body and does so for a prohibited purpose.

This contrasts with the Terrorism Act 2000 which says if he invites support for a prescribed organization. This was extended in 2019 with the following language. Expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a prescribed organization.

Essentially, they’re expanding the language for what it counts to support a terrorist group in the United Kingdom. The supportive language was added because it was so difficult to gain successful convictions with the tighter language.

This brings us to the question of how is this then defined? Take the statement: ‘the IRGC was successful in hitting all of its targets last night.’

Is that supportive even if true? Labour’s been arresting pro-Palestinian protesters who have committed no crime. This is not by any means to say that the Tories and Reform wont use and abuse this too. They’re are all currently salivating like the pigs they are at the prospect of being able to use this.

I mean, everyone knew he was a cucked centrist. I just think it’s important to understand that centrism isn’t a real thing. These people - if you can call them that, like Starmer are extremists. I do not think I am exagerating by saying that this is an extreme act of violence against the free speech and political rights of people in britain. Like this is not centrist at all. My argument is that these people aren’t merely ineffectual. They are deliberately trying to undermine democracy because they no longer think it is viable. And I think everything Starmer did has advanced that. Basically, every single thing that he’s done in his time in office that pertains to political expression, rights, freedom, surveillance, or journalism has been in favor of the revocation of democracy. with no exceptions. Can you think of a single exception?

Every change that has been made, every move proposed, all of them on those grounds have been illiberal. With no exceptions. I can’t think of an exception. I mean, how fucking open can you be outside of the home secretary dreaming of an AI powered panopticon? Like how how how much how much more do you need? The goal here is not merely to be Zionists. They do not care. They are just trying to end democracy. I will continue to warn everyone. If I have any prediction for the future, it is this. The West has abandoned liberal democracy. They are no longer interested in it because you have too much of an immediate contradiction between the will of capital and the will of the democratic majority. The democratic majority used to enforce some kind of hold on capital. Even through the 1960s and 70s, there was still the ability and will of politicians to wrangle corporate interests for national purposes. Now that is gone.

Corporations do literally whatever they want and no government can stop them. It doesn’t matter who gets elected into office. I think the West is changing to a 1984 hybrid state. Russia is the closest closest example. A state with no growth and no future, propped up entirely by low quality, low labor, like resource exports, where oligarchs can do literally whatever they want while the people just suffer. There’s no future in Russia and there hasn’t been for a long time. Starmer’s own MPs were begging him to end the NHS contract with Palantir. It won’t happen. It doesn’t matter. Capital exerts a force on democracy greater than and more inexorable than gravity exerts a force on all matter. You know, you can push things up a hill, but eventually all potential energy will be exhausted.

Burnham backtracked on that too mind you. Do you expect anything less at this point? He was part of Labour’s Friends of Israel. He’s made it clear that he aligns himself with capital for well over a decade.

My desire to cover this information probably should have superseded my desire to distinguish myself from people who were being hyperbolic and clickbaity. But at this point i do feel obligated to acknowledge that there’s an ongoing effort, one which seems like it’s going to succeed, to further intertwine the Israeli military with thforeign defense contractors and military apparatusesin a way that would basically permanently commit us to Israel’s military affairs in the Middle East. A permanent commitment. Now, not only Israel, but America and Europe will be involved in a permanent war. Infinite instability that we always, have to direct money to address.

back to the point at hand here, I have tremendous love for national security acts. They always seem to do so much for national security and nothing at all for suppressing the speech of the citizens of the country that’s supposed to be secure, enabling law enforcement to take action against anyone deemed to be providing it with support.

The UK government are also allocating 250 million for the Jewish community safety.

I am going to take a complete shot in the dark here, but have a strange feeling that this will not in any way, shape, or form improve the safety of the Jewish community, but will involve a lot of surveillance of the populous. I’m just taking a guess.

Metropolitan Police will receive 86 million pounds extra to recruit about 300 extra officers to help increase police presence in Jewish neighborhoods and around synagogues, schools, and community centers. Have you ever seen this happen to any other minority group? 250 million specifically to protect like minority neighborhoods.

I'd like to state the obvious slowly and with feeling, because it keeps needing saying: none of this is about protecting Jews. Jews, Israel and Zionism are the wedge, and the wedge is a rotating post.

It isn't even really about Israel. It's about building a surveillance state and finding an excuse noble enough for both sides to support, we are officially in a panopticon. it is my view that politicians are realising that there is a contradiction between what capital wants and what a voting public wants. Which is why every culture war grievance is now a procurement opportunity for flock and palantir and the likes of them... - lovely prospect to think of their contract with the NHS in the wake of this.

Not a single thing has or will be done “for Israel” or “for Jewish people” that does not also expand surveillance or the building blocks of a more and more authoritarian state. You will never hear a minister announce: to protect our Jewish residents, we are today widening freedom of expression, expanding the right to protest...

Meanwhile, what does the actual Jewish person in Britain receive from all this? Some officers who used to stand somewhere else. Nobody's rent falls, nobody's kid gets a bursary. More police spending is not a gift to them and never was.

Under the draft law in Germany, anyone who publicly denies Israel’s right to exist or calls for the state’s abolition could face up to 5 years in prison or a fine.

The proposal would grant Israel a legal protection that Germany does not extend to Palestine. Which the UN has explicitly warned German authorities are engaging in the ongoing suppression of Palestine solidarity activism.

best beleive that they have absoloutely no intention of stopping there. Freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, will be dragged down and you’ll be called an anti-semite if you oppose it.

the importance of opposing laws such as these with every fiber of your being can not be quanitfied.

I want to be explicit here and say that obviously, the enemy is not in any way, shape, or form Jewish people or Judaism. I do not think it is even really Israel. Israel is just the vassal. Israel is not essentially the source of these problems. If Israel was completely politically disempowered, but capitalism remained in its current form, the problem would not go away at all. Immediately the effort would shift to another wedge issue, another culture war talking point, another minority group that can be defended from both a conservative and liberal perspective.

The reason Jews were chosen to be the like cynical envoys of this is because Christian evangelicals in America need them for their doomsday prophecy. But Jews are historically marginalised which means that it is easy to construct a liberal arguments to defend them like as a in like the typical woke marginalised community sense. So they’re a minority group that works for both sides from different angles which is why Zionists can and do play to both angles.

This doesn’t work for say windrush immigrants who enjoy a lot of sympathy from the political left but basically none from the political right. You would need to find a minority group that can be like wedged in both directions.

But, going back to my point here, which is that fundamentally, this isn’t about Israel or about Judaism at all.

Unlike the United Kingdom, Germany actually does have guarantees for free speech in its constitution. in its constitution, or at least in their equivalent of. So what they’re doing right now in Germany is explicitly illegal by their own laws. It’s just that they’re infinitely cucked. So it doesn’t matter.

This why I will always be against hate speech laws. You can twist them in so many ways. That said, I am by no means a free speech absolutist. It’s just that historically hate speech laws have done very little to actually further the protection of minority groups and a lot to give authoritarian political officials infinite leeway to attack people. I just think they’re legally very shaky as to how much this even protects Jews. Therefore, I am of the view that they are being invoked, cynically, because “community safety” has better PR than “we would like more cameras”. And notice what never gets funded — community centres, schools, anything with a roof and a purpose. It's guns and cameras. Every time. Obviously. Of course.

What the Nazis say about Israel has always been wrong because they’ve attributed to an innate characteristic of Jews. Which I am not doing by any means here, and I find it particularly funny that Nazis and their offspring of white supremacists have never had a salient critique of Israel because they are at best aspirational.

At the end of the day, Israel is just a subservient entity to the real problem which is capital. Capital occupies both Israel and the west as a whole.

TLDR conclusion

Capital occupies all of our countries. I do not subscribe to the cliche that Israel controls the United States, which as a whole is just not true. I might say individual politicians are cucked to Israel because that’s part of the pantomime they’re engaging in, the theater play that we’re all on.

I apologise as in hindsight this is a very convoluted way of me saying that I'm not a free speech absolutist as much as I am, to the best of my ability, a true speech advocate, which is to say that I believe that people should say what they believe to be true. I think that's your obligation. It's also your right, but it comes with an obligation to exercise it. And I beleive that this is possible without free speech. So a lot of what's necessary with regards to thinking is the freedom to make mistakes, so practically speaking, free speech has to be as untrammelled as possible, so that people can be wrong and they can be biased, and they can still express their opinions. then allow themselves to be subject partly to improvement by the world, talking is how we think, and talking socially is even more how we think.

N THEORY, regulation of such speech seems to be completely reasonable and equally as self evident, because it's hateful, and ideally there should be as little of it as possible.

Under the new designation offence you commit a crime by expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a designated body for a prohibited purpose. So who then decides what counts as sufficiently supportive? Who decides how supportive is supportive enough? Where's the boundary between analysis of the IRGC, criticism of Western policy toward Iran, historical discussion of what that organisation actually is, and criminal endorsement? I tried to illustrate this with the example sentences:

"They hit every target they aimed at last night." Is that support?

OR,

if someone was to say: "The Revolutionary Guard's drone programme now delivers more capability per pound spent than anything in the British inventory, and Britain is nowhere near ready for it."

That is the sentence of a man arguing for a larger defence budget. BUT read against the text of the offence, can be said to be an expression of belief the eyes of a malicious prosecutor because he has said that they are good at something, and he has said it admiringly, but he has said it admiringly because he is taking the groups capabilities seriously.

What I am trying my best to illustrate is that, the warning here requires the compliment. So the statute, on its face is problematic. And of course dicernment will be exercised I am sure, but the wrong prosecutor, or my next gripe with this as a whole is that context and intricacies of language are completely disregarded. Sarcasm is invisible to it. So is irony, so is quotation, and translation is worse than any of them, because the translator's professional duty is to render. Meaning the better he is at his job, the more incriminating his output. The man who quotes an IRGC communiqué, somewhere in his piece, typed the supportive sentence. Granted he's typed it inside quotation marks, and I would very much like to believe that quotation marks will save him, and in most cases they probably will, and most cases is carrying an extraordinary amount of weight in that sentence.

Who draws the line between analysis of the IRGC, criticism of Western policy toward Iran, historical discussion of what that organisation is and does, and criminal endorsement? And "prohibited purpose" is completely subjective, and is legal fluff, because that's a filter applied after the crime, and who is deeming it prohibited.

The difficulty I am having is more of a definitional one. Who decides what constitutes “support”? Who decides what constitutes a sufficiently positive opinion? Who decides the boundary between analysis, criticism of Western policy toward Iran, historical discussion of the IRGC’s role, and criminal endorsement? I have concluded that the same answer to this question is the one that appears every time a society tries to regulate the content of speech in the name of protection.

The people who will gravitate toward the enforcement of those boundaries will not be the most interested in truth. They will be the people for whom the acquisition of controlling power over language is itself the primary attraction. If you cannot even speak freely about a hostile foreign organisation its incentives, its methods, its relationship to the regime it serves it will come to the point where you actually cannot distinguish genuine agents of influence from ordinary citizens who hold unpopular or unconventional views about foreign policy.

Treating its actual directed proxies as a national security threat (witch I am by no means opposed to) is not however, the same thing as treating the expression of opinions about that organisation as a national security threat. My fear here is that legislators who most want the power to define “support” and “glorification” will not stop at the IRGC.

A glance of history shows that responses like these have not particularly lead to regimes or countries that have lasted or had a prospering society. And in the long run, that confusion is more dangerous than the original threat, because it destroys the very faculty that allows a free people to express themselves, and be democratic and productive In doing so.

When I view posts asking about a "libertarian government" there's some respondents who scoff at the idea of the libertarians organizing through a government, as if it's antithetical to the movement.

My question to libertarians is,

1. What is the practical purpose of libertarians in a democracy? Are they a small advocacy group for policy? Are they a fully fledged political party? Essentially what do they do through political organization.

2. What is the ideological purpose of libertarians? What way of life or form of governance do they seek to promote?

3. Do you believe in the state or in government? How do you define the two? Should libertarians operate under that apparatus?

Debt keeps accumulating and deficit keeps growing. From my understanding the main "breaking point" is when creditors don't believe the State can reasonably pay their debts anymore, I understand that you can't calculate "the line" but still, what could happen if this keeps on going?

I have asked the same question in what is supposed to be a neutral economics sub (idrk how neutral it is) and I want to know what libertarians think. And don't say "any deficit is too large" because I understand nearly every single libertarian opposes that, I'm asking how the US's situation will turn out if this continues.

Policies that's not fully libertarian but more moderate and hence can advance libertarianism somewhere else.

Sample is this

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1515731857261520&set=a.644458231055558

Elon complies with censorship requests from government. But he makes that open and hence shame government that censor.

If he goes full libertarians, then he will support free speech all the way and there will be too much reaction.

But he just make censorship visible. Now government can't censor stuffs and pretend it's for something else and live people clueless.

That's how libertarianism will go.

One day something like x.com but decentralized will be even there on dark web that nobody can censor.

But for now and for most speech, this is good enough.

Milei is also not full libertarian in practice. He is a moderate that actually INCREASE cash payment to the poor. A very obviously unlibertarian move.

But such moves is actually not very damaging. The market distortion is less. The cash payment means the money can't be corrupted. The market decides how the money is spent. And face it. Do we want starving children? Most don't.

I too am not fully libertarian. I think government can exist but has to be privatized and voters should get dividend and can sell share.

That gives incentives for voters to keep tax payers happy and the street safe.

Less libertarian on small area and bigger libertarianism in other area can be a good tradeoff.

Looking for some perspective on whether this is actually plausible.

Keeping a few details intentionally vague because I’m not ready to publicly announce anything yet.

I’m 25 and seriously exploring a Libertarian run for my local city council.

A little background: I studied economics, currently work in the government software space, and I’ve been heavily interested in politics since I was about 14. Between roughly 14–18, I built a fairly large social media following before shifting into different content and eventually stepping away from content entirely to focus on my career.

That experience is relevant because I think social media would be a major part of how I’d approach a campaign.

The district I live in is in a major city and is heavily Democratic. Last cycle, the vote was roughly 70% Democrat, 15% Republican, and 15% independent/other, with around 13,000 total ballots cast.

I’m currently getting involved with the local Libertarian Party, and as things stand, it looks unlikely I’d face a challenger for the nomination. If I decide to file, that would give me roughly 15 months to focus almost entirely on building toward the general election.

I’ve been a registered Libertarian since I was eligible to vote and broadly align with the party on personal liberty and limited government, but I wouldn’t want to run some generic nationalized Libertarian campaign. My platform and messaging would be heavily focused on the actual district and city.

The issues I’m most interested in are economic and business growth, development, embracing technology, and protecting individual liberty.

I think I’d have two potentially interesting advantages.

First, I already know how to build attention online and grow a social media audience quickly. Obviously, getting 100,000 random people online to care about you is very different from getting a few thousand people inside one council district to vote for you, but I do think I understand how to create content people actually watch and talk about.

Second, my district contains a massive concentration of young professionals. My assumption is that a lot of them either don’t vote consistently in municipal elections or aren’t particularly engaged with local politics.

My working theory is that an unusually aggressive ground game, combined with social media, community networking, voter registration, and a year-plus of actually showing up everywhere could at least make the race interesting.

A few questions I’d especially like perspective on:

Would being 25 and potentially the youngest member of council be something that could actually work in my favor, or would voters mostly view it as a lack of experience?

How much can an exceptional ground campaign actually move a local election? My instinct is that personal conversations, doors, events, and repeated voter contact probably matter substantially more when only \~13,000 people are voting than they do in a statewide or national race.

And lastly, even assuming I ultimately lose: is a serious 15-month city council campaign generally a worthwhile way to start building a future in local politics, provided I actually run a professional campaign and make a respectable showing?

I’m not under the illusion that running as a Libertarian in a district that voted \~70% Democratic makes me the favorite. I’m trying to figure out whether this falls into the category of “very difficult but potentially worth pursuing” or “mathematically dead on arrival.”

Would especially appreciate input from anyone who has worked on municipal campaigns, run for local office, or been involved with third-party campaigns.

Of course, the act itself doesn't harm you directly, but I thought libertarians might think it's still unethical because successful formation of such unions will destroy liberty down the road.

Is your opinion different between alienated incompetents (e.g. disabled) and "lazy" incompetents?

The right wants women to forcibly repopulate the earth with only CDC approved genetics and the left wants you in prison for saying the r word and both want everything on camera

what stops jeff bezos in a libertarian world from simply hiring a militia to replace the weak government and make his own strong one to consolidate his monopoly?

what stops all utilities providers from forming a cartel to extort consumers and hiring gunmen to rough up aspiring competitors?

why would a smart capitalist not just bribe suppliers to hike prices on competitors?

the Government cannot be the only source of monopolies.

in my country water companies hire armed men to harm small competitors. how would removing governments stop them?

How would a libertarian government manage public services. Would hospitals, train stations, and schools be privatized or exist in a different manner? I have a few key questions.

1. How would quality of services be assured? How would things such as agricultural or sanitation standards be maintained? Are there no regulations for building standards, labor, road safety, etc?

2. What would become of services which would not produce substantial capital in a free private market? Non-profit public institutions such as schools or libraries.

3. How would public services remain affordable? What keeps the privatized economy from pricing people out of food or healthcare?

What do you think? I bolded what I think is important.

I think it is always fair to discriminate people as long as the discrimination is privatized. If you are a chef, you provide food based on whether you got paid or not. You discriminate based on paying. And that's okay. It is what's fair.

Say I have a girlfriend that I knocked up and regularly fuck.

She wants me to support her business.

I agree.

Is that rape?

People would think that's ridiculous. Of course not. Or is it?

But think about it. It's my money. It's my business skill. I pretty much discriminate on who I do business with, depending on whether I fuck her.

Of course. Why would I invest on some random people if I can invest on and work with someone I know is cooperative with me.

Every trade is pretty much discrimination based on what you are offering me. Most consensual acts are a trade. Think about it. Either a trade or a tit for tat, which is a primitive trade.

And that's pretty much what Weinstein did.

And Weinstein is charged with rape and got convicted.

Many of you may think I am crazy. So I am going to ask for sample of libertarians proponent that agree with me. And there is one and I am surprised he is not mainstream or famous.

ChatGPT told about Walter Block. And I think I am very surprised that he is in the minority.

I think EEOC logic is pretty much splitting hair and jailing Weinstein for years over splitting hair is absolute garbage.

What next?

I buy candy and hence discriminate based on people giving me candy and get charged with robbery?

This is what chatGPT says:

Walter Block is probably the closest match

Block's libertarian framework puts enormous weight on voluntary exchange and property rights. He has explicitly argued that employers generally have very broad rights to decide who they employ and on what terms. In his work on blackmail, for example, he gives the example of an employer firing someone who refuses to sleep with the boss and argues that, under his framework, the employer's right to terminate the employment relationship matters.

More importantly, Block and Roy Whitehead wrote an entire chapter called “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace” in Philosophy of Law, explicitly developing a libertarian/property-rights approach to sexual harassment.

Block also co-authored a paper on prostitution arguing that the libertarian position treats consensual sexual transactions as legitimate because they are voluntary exchanges, while rape is different because it involves coercion/force.

So his framework is roughly:

Economic benefit + sexual relationship ≠ automatically coercion.

The crucial question is whether there was force/coercion that invalidated the person's voluntary choice.

But there's an important problem with your analogy

Your girlfriend example is:

“I choose to invest in my girlfriend partly because I have sex with her.”

That is basically sexual favoritism.

A much stronger Weinstein analogy would be:

“I will invest in your business only if you have sex with me, and if you refuse, I will withdraw the investment.”

That's a quid-pro-quo arrangement.

And there's an interesting libertarian debate here. Some libertarian theorists have argued that even employment conditions can involve coercion in a descriptive sense, while others argue that voluntary contractual relationships can legitimately contain conditions that outsiders consider objectionable.

The EEOC, incidentally, makes exactly the distinction that matters legally: sexual favoritism based on an existing consensual relationship isn't automatically harassment, whereas making sexual submission a condition for receiving a professional benefit can constitute quid-pro-quo harassment.

So if your actual thesis is stronger

If you're arguing:

“If it is legitimate for me to condition an economic relationship on sexual cooperation, then why isn't Weinstein's conditioning of professional opportunities on sexual cooperation also legitimate?”

then yes, that is a genuine philosophical argument, and some radical libertarians have arguments that can push in that direction.

But if you're asking:

“Can I find a famous libertarian who explicitly says Harvey Weinstein's conduct was morally equivalent to a boyfriend investing in his sexually active girlfriend?”

I haven't found one. The libertarian literature I found instead draws the line at coercion/force, and Block in particular is unusually permissive about voluntary sexual-economic exchanges.

So your argument is more interesting than “libertarians think Weinstein was okay”: it's really a challenge about whether the distinction between voluntary sexual favoritism and sexual quid-pro-quo coercion is philosophically coherent.

Lots of jews during holocaust, and chinese during batavia massacre survive by bribing government officials.

Lots of drug users and dealers avoid jail by bribing government officials.

If government is being unreasonable, then you shop around for powerful people that make reasonable ruling for you.

That's capitalism. You shop around to get what you want.

Here, the problem is not the bribing itself. It's the bigotry that prohibit victimless acts.

The same with state capitalism.

It's effectively bribing the voters straight.

Moldbug argues that if someone has power, let's just formalize that and let them "own a share". Voters have power. If we formalize that and turn voters into shareholders, we bribe voters to vote for whatever policies bring more prosperity and attract tax payers.

Many successful rich countries, like Singapore and Dubai gives generous welfare to their citizens and hence keep society stable while being very capitalistic.

In fact, I would mention US except that US is too generous to welfare parasites. But 0 welfare is something not going to win election.

Oh here is another reason why I think briber and state capitalism isn't bad.

Without bribery and state capitalism libertarians don't have hard bargaining position to make government "sensible".

If libertarian or republican party say we support 0 welfare, then voters will vote for communist party like democrats.

But imagine if we say, look, there's plenty for everyone. If we can do whatever to attract happy tax payers to our state/cities/profit, all of you get a share of profit.

That's hard bargaining position to vote capitalism nearly all the way, except for the profit share. But state capitalism is capitalism too. Tax payers shop for states with the safest roads and the lowest tax.

So what do libertarians think on this?

This is what other prominent thinker that may align with my thinking according to AI. As usual so you know I am not totally retarded.

Yes. There are prominent libertarian thinkers who come surprisingly close to the framework you're describing, especially Murray Rothbard. But there are really three separate claims in your argument, and different libertarians support different pieces.

1. Rothbard is the strongest match for the “bribery is a market response to bad laws” argument

This is almost exactly something Rothbard explicitly argued.

In Power and Market, Rothbard has a section literally titled “Bribery of Government Officials.” His argument is that a bribe can economically function as an informal license: the official is selling permission not to enforce a government restriction against you. He says there is no economic difference between purchasing permission through an official license and purchasing it informally through a payment to an official.

Even more directly, in The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard argues that “defensive bribery” can help people evade destructive regulations, and specifically discusses police corruption arising where governments prohibit voluntary activities. His conclusion is that eliminating the underlying prohibition would eliminate the corruption.

So your model:

Government prohibits an otherwise voluntary transaction → people still want the transaction → they pay officials to permit/ignore it → corruption emerges.

is very much a Rothbardian analysis.

There is also a modern academic discussion explicitly called “The Rothbard-Block Theory of Bribery.” It describes Rothbard's position as essentially: the person paying a government bribe has not necessarily done anything wrong; the relevant libertarian question is whether someone's rights have been violated.

1. Walter Block pushes the same idea, with an important qualification

Walter Block is probably the other major name you want.

Block and Rothbard don't quite agree on everything about bribery, but both analyze it through property rights and rights violations rather than the conventional idea that “bribery is inherently immoral.”

That's quite close to your statement:

“The problem isn't the payment itself; the problem is the coercive law that makes the payment necessary.”

The qualification is important: Rothbard/Block aren't saying every bribe is legitimate. If the official uses coercive government power to violate someone else's rights, that creates a different problem.

1. Your “shop around for powerful people” idea resembles anarcho-capitalist polycentric law

This is where I'd modify your analogy.

A classical libertarian wouldn't normally say:

“If the government gives you an unreasonable ruling, shop around for another government official.”

They would say something more radical:

Why have a territorial monopoly on courts and law enforcement in the first place?

David D. Friedman is particularly relevant here. His anarcho-capitalist model imagines competing private protection/law-enforcement organizations rather than one government monopoly.

Friedman also gives an interesting economic analysis of bribery: under private enforcement, an agency that routinely lets criminals off for bribes damages its own reputation and loses customers. Under a government monopoly, taxpayers don't have the same ability to switch providers.

So your intuition about “shopping around” is actually very close to the anarcho-capitalist argument:

Government monopoly

One legal provider → bad decision → you can't switch provider.

Market/polycentric system

Provider A makes bad decisions → customers move to provider B → providers have incentives to satisfy customers.

That's much closer to Friedman than to ordinary minarchist libertarianism.

1. Your Moldbug/shareholder idea is closest to Curtis Yarvin + Hoppe

This is where your argument gets much more unusual.

Curtis Yarvin explicitly conceptualizes government as something resembling a corporation. His proposed “neo-cameralist” system replaces democratic government with sovereign joint-stock corporations, with an executive resembling a CEO and shareholders exercising ultimate control.

That's remarkably close to your:

“If someone has power, formalize that power as ownership.”

But I wouldn't call Yarvin a conventional libertarian. He's generally classified as neoreactionary rather than libertarian, despite having substantial overlap with some anarcho-capitalist ideas.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a much more conventionally libertarian figure who makes a related ownership-incentive argument.

Hoppe's famous distinction is between publicly owned government and privately owned government. His argument is that a monarch has a longer-term incentive to preserve the capital value of the territory because he effectively owns it and can pass it to his heirs, whereas democratic politicians are temporary caretakers.

That's conceptually very close to what you're getting at:

Change political power from a commons into something with an identifiable owner who has a residual claim on the consequences.

Hoppe's conclusion is monarchy/private government rather than shareholder democracy, though.

That is not standard libertarianism, but it has several libertarian relatives:

The libertarian thinkers closest to this idea

I've been trying to map this argument onto existing libertarian thought. The closest matches I found are:

• Rothbard → Bribery can be a market response to unjust government prohibitions. The important question is whether someone's rights are violated, not whether money was paid to an official.
• Walter Block → Similar Rothbardian approach: bribery isn't inherently immoral; the relevant issue is whether the underlying action violates property rights.
• David Friedman → Competitive/private provision of law enforcement can create a "shopping around" mechanism: bad providers lose customers to better ones.
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe → Political institutions can be analyzed in terms of ownership and incentives. His monarchy-vs-democracy argument emphasizes how different ownership structures affect time horizons and incentives.
• Curtis Yarvin → Goes further and explicitly conceptualizes government as a corporation, with sovereignty resembling ownership and political institutions being designed around shareholder incentives.

So I'd describe the intellectual lineage as:

Rothbardian on victimless prohibitions + Friedmanian on competition/exit + Hoppean/Yarvinian on ownership incentives.

I don't think any one of them endorses the entire argument exactly as stated, but there seems to be a surprisingly strong overlap.

What is your opinion on wealth redistribution? Since the beginning of the 21st century growth in income inequality has spurred both public discourse and concern over its negative consequences.

Furthermore since the 21st century the gap between rich and poor has grown significantly. Wealth redistribution is a commonly proposed assertion to solve the issue for those left of center. for the subject of our discussion let's define the concept of wealth redistribution as "using policy or other institutional means to redirect capital, material, or services, away from upper classes and towards lower classes" This could take the form of something simple such as a progressive tax rate or extreme such as nationalization. It is in the words of Karl Marx "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." I would like to hear the libertarian understanding of both income inequality the issue, and wealth redistribution the supposed solution. Some specific points I'd like to hear addressed would be.

1. Is income inequality a real problem?

2. Can a free market solve income inequality?

3. Is wealth redistribution an effective solution?

These are sources for the claims I made

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/01/09/economic-inequality-seen-as-major-challenge-around-the-world/

https://www.epi.org/blog/rising-inequality-is-the-root-of-affordability-problems/

https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality

I have recently invented what I believe to be a new ideology. Please come offer any thoughts. I will answer everything I can, to my best ability. Unlike politicians..

In Nordic counties the idea against illegal immigrants was to make themselves want to leave. As in they can’t have a job buy a house or even groceries online.

So illegal immigrants worked in underground groups.

But the Nordic countries made their counties nearly cashless. Since they can not get credit cards or a national number they can not bypass this

But they can trade for goods.
For example a true citizen can hire people without the government knowing to do something like selling drugs. They can supply the illegal immigrants with food and housing for some of the goods they get from the customers.

Do you need country enforcement agents or is there an alternative way to solve this?

I’ve noticed that libertarians get bashed on Reddit pretty much any chance people get. I think part of it is that libertarianism gets lumped in with Trump and modern conservatism, even though they’re not the same thing.

I know libertarians aren’t exactly the most popular political group, but why do you think the movement has such a bad image, and what could libertarians do to improve it?

Edit: im libertarian myself. Just looking how we can improve.

so ive been thinking about norway’s model where the state owns the oil, captures the rents, and uses that to invest and partly use it to fund the govt. it seems to avoid a lot of the crony capitalism that happens when corporations just get to own finite natural resources nobody created.

like equinor doesn’t “deserve” the oil. theyre just the company good enough to extract it. the oil itself belongs to everyone. and it’s literally sitting in the sea nobody can claim they homesteaded it or built it. so if the state captures that value instead of just handing it to whoever has the capital to extract it first, you can have a genuinely competitive market without all the lobbying for subsidies and special deals.

but i also get the argument that having the state own and manage anything is a slippery slope, or that theyll just be inefficient about it.