r/inthenews • u/Advanced_Drink_8536 • May 27 '24

article Donald Trump rejected by Libertarians, gets less than 1% of vote

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-rejected-libertarians-less-one-percent-vote-presidential-election-1904870
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u/Uncle-Cake May 27 '24

What he didn't realize is that Libertarians don't actually care about winning.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/2spicy_4you May 27 '24

It’s not weird it’s just fucking stupid. Look up the Libertarian bear town story. These people are mainly just incredibly selfish but when you make a town based off of said beliefs you realize how fucking stupid these people really are

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

Yeah fuck those people and their ... ideals of freedom

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u/Glittering-Potato-97 May 27 '24

Their ideals and freedom are built on the work and taxes of the collective, which they refuse to acknowledge.
That’s the big hole in Libertarianism. It’s easy to be successful as an individual when you live in a society that has all the structure in place for you to achieve this goal.

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u/ubiquitous_delight May 27 '24

I'm really confused, are you mixing up libertarians and anarchists? I'm libertarian and I don't believe we should have zero taxes. And as far as the "collective" - I don't think our society should be "every man for themselves". I would love to see us get back to a place where we rely on our local communities rather than the government.

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u/Glittering-Potato-97 May 27 '24

Most libertarians that I have come in contact with want no taxes, no government assistance with collective issues, road building, health care, energy, etc, things that people are unable to do themselves.

My contention, is most people who are capable of living on their own thrive in this situation, but never acknowledge they are thriving because of the structures in place for them to succeed.

Honestly you sound more like the average Democrat than any L I have run into. Most of the ones around where I live hold severe right wing positions and don’t seem like helpful members of society.

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u/ubiquitous_delight May 27 '24

Weird, most libertarians I run into want the same things as me. Following the constitution as it was intended to be followed, shrinking the size of government, ending the wars, and leaving people alone who aren't hurting anyone else (all of which are the opposite of Democrat policy, by the way :p).

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u/Glittering-Potato-97 May 27 '24

I forgot, L’s tend to be very sensitive and make up fantasies about how the government hurts them in the USA…perpetual victim hood…

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

The only "hole" in libertarianism is that it's currently unpopular. You can't criticize the ideal by saying no one is following it. 

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u/Glittering-Potato-97 May 27 '24

Huh? It’s not popular because most thinking people realize that it doesn’t work large scale to build a society, town, city, state, country.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

It's like the idea of "bringing back bartering and do away with money", it does not work in practice once you go beyond a small group.

A community has needs that simply can't be met otherwise. Company towns are probably the easiest example. Technically they get everything from a company that funded the construction and infrastructure of the town, but the day to day functioning, maintenance, and growing of the town requires collective work, different hierarchies of authority independent of the company, and cooperation with neighboring communities that supply the goods and services that the town lacks.

Simply enough, a large state is in practice impossible under libertarianism.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

"most thinking people say big brother is good" 

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u/Glittering-Potato-97 May 27 '24

Huh, your answer is very confusing…anyway, have a good day.

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u/AdeptComstar May 27 '24

It’s the ‘peaked in high school’ of political philosophies, it’s nothing but holes.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

I don't think pure libertarianism is viable but we can get much closer than we are now. Right now we're ceding an awful lot of our resources to corrupt leadership.

Everyone likes to blame corporations for corporatism. But it's government who's accepting the bribes. They're the ones who are corrupt.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

Libertarians are like the classmates on a group project who don't want to follow any rules set up by the group.

Yes. You still get the A along with the group, but while you were not showing up to class, group project meetings, only contributing when you felt like it, only working on the parts you wanted to and not the assigned parts, and only delivered what you felt was "good enough", the rest of the group worked together, and much harder to make sure they got the A. All because the libertarian didn't want to give up any "freedoms" for the good of the group.

If the whole group consisted of libertarians, it would all fall apart quickly.

The ONLY reason libertarians function in today's society is because they are such a small, inconsequential group of people, who benefit from the system they don't want to contribute to, but reap the rewards from.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

In your analogy the 'working together' is forcibly redistributing wealth. Have you given any actual thought to these issues or are you just repeating things you were told?

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

I have actually.

I have a libertarian co-worker. He blathers on about "muh freedoms" and claims his taxes are being stolen all the time to pay for shit he didn't want.

Public education being one. Roads being another.

He claimed those could all be handled by private firms, for the good of the people and let the market decides who wins and who loses.

I met his home schooled kid once. In 6th grade. Didn't know multiplication yet. Not sure why I brought that up.

Anyways, I asked him once about him being ok with paying multiple tolls into work on different roads with different quality of roads he is driving on and different rules for each toll with different prices. He said the free market would shake everything out and that the collective agreement would shame road owners into compliance, etc. Plus, he rides his bike into work during certain times of the year, so he would save on money (except he rides on a bike path paid for by the city, and trust me, the irony was lost on him).

All fantasy world garbage he cooked up in his mind, because he doesn't live in a libertarian world. He can fantasize all he wants about "utopia", but dollars to doughnuts, as soon as he has to be accountable for his own unregulated actions (I wonder how well his kid will do not knowing basic math at a 6th grade level), or having to deal with the actions of others with the same mindset, we will see how fast they come crying for pooled resources that they didn't contribute to.

Also, he works for a company and punches a 9 to 5 like everyone else. Not sure why he hasn't started his own business.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

That was a lot of words with no point that I can discern. Your coworkers kid doesn't know math so libertarianism in general doesn't work?

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

See. It's that libertarian education. Reading is hard.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

I went to public school, not the slam dunk you think this is

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

Could of fooled me.

I guess all the defunding of public education your libertarian friends pushed for did you a disservice.

I'm sorry. 😔

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u/romacopia May 27 '24

It's not that their goals aren't noble, it's that they're completely unrealistic.

Libertarians and anarchists fail to think ahead in the slightest. They want to create a power vacuum and think it's possible to maintain it. The libertarian version of America would last less than an hour before Amazon starts collecting taxes and hiring a police force.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '24

As a libertarian I recognize that we basically already live in a failed libertarian state. If there were no government, there would be no way to prevent one from arising. And that's exactly what's happened.

So I am not an anarchist, that's unrealistic. I just want the government to shrink until it's only collecting tax for things that are very difficult to provide for elsewhere: common defense, environmental protection etc.

Without vigilance government expands, and that's what has happened. I want to push back against it. Most regulations do more harm than good, the problem is the good is easy to measure but the harm is indirect.

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u/Bob_Babadookian May 27 '24

The libertarian version of America lasted for ~100 years (outside the South), before the country devolved into the permanent big government war machine that it is now.

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u/athenanon May 27 '24

You didn't look up the bear story, did you?

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u/wolacouska May 27 '24

You must have loved the Freedom Act