Replying to various posts at once. Oh, I just realized, the way I did this probably messes up quoting-within-quoting. Oh well:
Leonard D Neubache: "But worse, there seems to be among them an extreme focus on decrying all obligations to society while claiming an infinite number of rights to be protected apparently by some sort of imaginary divine good will between all men." Interesting you say that, given that libertarians are often described as paranoid gun nuts who think the government is out to get them. Libertarians believe in the use of force to defend rights; they just don't trust in the goodwill of an autocrat or a democratic majority if it is allowed to monopolize the use of force.
"Civilisation is only possible through state." Maybe, but the state can be run as a for-profit rather than as a non-profit entity. Monarchy is a step in that direction, by allowing the ruling family to derive profit from the state, and treat the country as a long-term investment rather than plundering it as much as they can before vacating their leadership position when their four years is up. But that need not be the final step toward a more capitalistic system.
"If the state (minimal as it is under such a libertarian arrangement) can use it's minimal powers to strip you for example of your fatherly right to control your daughter's behaviour before she demonstrates adult capacity then she will exercise her libertarian right at age 16/18 to do as she pleases and you will set your society down the path that has led us to where we are today." In a libertarian world, a father who wanted his daughter to live a healthy, moral, and happy life under male leadership would probably marry her off in her early teens. A marriage that occurs when she's still a young virgin whose SMV is at or near its peak creates a win-win-win situation for husband, wife, and father.
Libertarianism would in some ways make it easier for fathers to control their unmarried daughters, and husbands to control their wives. Slutty women wouldn't have state-imposed child support or state-provided welfare payments to fall back on, in the absence of a husband or father paying their bills. This would give women an economic incentive to behave themselves. (Radical libertarianism holds that men have no obligation to provide for their kids; Rothbard, for instance,
writes, "the parent should have the legal right
not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die." However, a private marriage contract could create such an obligation, enforceable through arbitration, for as long as the wife remains faithful and loyal.)
In a libertarian world, there also would be no state-funded education, so perhaps we'd see fewer girls becoming college sluts.
MOVSM: "Take for example, subsidies. An abomination for libertarians. But when American airlines that receive no subsidies have to compete against Arab airlines that do, in national interest conservatism must step in to solve the problem." In doing this, Arabs are giving consumers free money, so they're either being charitable by giving up some of their profits, or they're robbing Peter to pay Paul, by make some other sector of their economy less competitive in order to pay for that airline subsidy. Maybe they have to raise the price of the oil they sell, which prompts Americans to buy more Priuses or do more fracking to obtain cheaper energy from domestic sources. In the end, they're not getting a free lunch.
If the Arabs are thinking they can lower airline prices longer enough to drive the U.S. airlines out of business, and then jack the prices way up, that won't work too well, because new competitors can always form and enter the market, putting them right back where they started.
Kid Twist: "I jumped ship a while back because I saw Libertarianism as being a clear precursor to a one world economic system, which necessarily contradicted nation states." A global economic system does have the advantage of making war less likely, though, as nations become interdependent. For example, Japan backs down from provoking China because it doesn't want China to cut off the supply of rare earths for its electronics industry. I'm not sure it would've been possible for the great powers to have broken up their empires after World War II (producing an explosion in the number of sovereign states in the world, which nationalists should be in favor of), if they hadn't been able to continue getting resources from those countries through international free trade.
"Freedom and order must be considered at all times, realizing that most are irresponsible or not disciplined enough for extremes of 'freedom' and thus order must be instituted as a way to form society and its direction." Yeah, but who will guard the guardians? What will assure that the state's leadership, whether democratic or autocratic, doesn't suffer the same cultural decay as the rest of society? Sometimes decadence spreads even more quickly among the ruling class than among the rest of the populace.
goodburger: "Libertarianism and limited gov. are a gentleman's agreement between like minded people and when that agreement exists it's probably the most robust system out there. But when the cultural cohesion breaks down so does the system, especially when the core principles are weaponized against them." Liberty works best when the culture is good, but when the culture is bad, liberty still gives the minority an opportunity to break away from the culture and do things their own way. E.g., they can home-school their kids, or even retreat behind the walls of a traditional religious community.
John Michael Kane: "What they fail to realize is that with universal suffrage, women will ALWAYS vote en masse for massive, Big Daddy government. That automatically means that Libertarians will never be in power." A large minority of women voted for Donald Trump, even though he supported repealing Obamacare, overturning
Roe v. Wade, etc.
Leonard D Neubache: "a gay couple walk down the street in matching bikini thongs": A libertarian society might be less tolerant of that than our current society, since streets would be privately owned. We usually don't see gays wearing bikini thongs at malls and other privately owned venues, because the owners would kick them out, out of deference to their other customers' wishes.
Kurgan: "Most of the libertarians I know are weirdos." Yes, weirdos have more reason to be libertarian because liberty will give them more freedom to find a niche somewhere in society where they fit in.
Rob Banks: "Now, libertarianism means gay sex orgies and "weeeeeeeed, man."" The weed issue is important because of the sheer number of otherwise law-abiding people affected by criminalization. Because of this, Republicans or Democrats could probably bring a lot of Libertarians into their fold by accommodating them on that one issue, but I guess it's too much to ask. So who's really being unreasonable in their refusal to yield to political reality?
Different T: "The argument can easily be made that it is actually a preferable globalist strategy to follow this “2 steps forward and one step back” approach (even if a “3 steps forward” would likely be immediately successful) for reasons such as plausible deniability, scape-goating, and anchoring." What if the elites want us to think that by knocking them back a step, we've played into their hands?
nomadbrah: "Libertarianism would cease to exist the day it became reality and that is the irony. Day 1 after the anarchist revolution, gangs begin to form along ethnic lines and instead of bargaining as nice libertarian free traders they just take your shit." There seems to be an assumption that without the state, gangsters would be the largest organized group of armed men. There are a lot of armed security guards out there, though, which demonstrates that firms and individuals are willing and able to invest a lot in protecting their persons and property, to make up for the inability of police to be everywhere at all times. Companies like
Executive Outcomes have also had impressive outcomes in combat against warlords.
