How much do I really have in common with (right) libertarians?

So, libertarianism is a weird subject for someone like me. I would say at one point, around 2008ish or so, I was really into Ron Paul and libertarianism, but then I would say I've grown up. As I became more liberal, hating on libertarians became a common thing for me, much like I hate on moderate liberals now. But at the same time, as I try to distinguish myself from liberalism and forge my own ideological path, I realize that I have more in common with what I call left libertarianism, particularly the more moderate varieties in the Steiner-Valentyne school. More specifically, I resonate strongly with UBI oriented left libertarian ideologies like Phillipe Van Parijs' "real libertarianism" or Karl Widerquist's "indepentarianism." I mean, I essentially am a bit of a libertarian, but I'm just a different kind of libertarian than most right libertarians. 

Analyzing right libertarianism

Right libertarianism, in its most simplest form, is an anti government ideology. It has a strong emphasis on negative freedoms, and from the government telling people what to do. The core of it is based on the conservative ideal of shrinking government as much as possible and having the minimum government intervention in peoples' lives. On social issues, their views are whatever you want to do. As many so often say, they don't care if you wanna harvest marijuana in your back yard while carrying an AK47, after banging your gay spouse. Like, it's up to you. However, this extreme freedom has a dark side. In the COVID crisis, right libertarians were some of the first ones on the right wing wingnut side to be anti mask, and anti vaccine. They did not want the government telling them what to do, and saw wearing masks and lockdowns as killing their freedom. Right libertarian ideology is actually at the heart of the right wing movement against masking up and shutting stuff down and treating the COVID pandemic as an actual emergency. Their version of freedom, while being against aggression (their framework based on the so called "nonaggression principle"), often fails at addressing passive harm like...spreading a deadly virus. That said, they see actions taken that reduce freedom to tackle the virus as against their ideology. Right libertarians also have concerning views in my experience involving children. Austen Petersen, a libertarian candidate in 2016, was once booed off the stage at a libertarian convention for being for mild legislation to stop people from selling heroin....to 5 year olds. Libertarians also seem obsessed with the age of consent and many support lowering it or doing away with it, believing that people should be free to have sex at any age. I've even seen some rather famous libertarians believing the best way to deal with unwanted children is to sell them in the marketplace.

On economic issues, they are not much better. Libertarians seem to be against all regulations, minimum wages, and safety nets, often believing the free market will always achieve the best outcome. Many of them have revisionist histories of the gilded age in which they believe it was the best period America had ever went through, until big government (read: FDR) came along and ruined it. They stop adopt the Austrian economics of like the 1920s as their mainstream economic theory, which is wrought with a lot of ideological statements that may or may not hold up to scrutiny. They are free market fundamentalists and believe the magic of the marketplace will solve all social ills one way or another. The more extreme among them even believe in abolishing the government altogether and having privatized police forces, courts, and roads. Right libertarians are the people who would fight vociferously against anything that is a tax by government ("taxation is theft") but they will be willing to pay for anything in the marketplace and believe a "true free market" does no wrong.

So, how much do I really have in common with these whackjobs?

Well, first of all, what I described above is the extreme. The purist theory. Obviously, as I explained yesterday about liberalism, sometimes people have more in common with moderates in adjacent ideologies, than with the people on the other end of the spectrum in their own. After all, all political ideologies exist on a spectrum, with grey areas and overlap between them. Obviously I have nothing in common with an anti masker who believes we should sell drugs and have sex with kids and believes in a free market dystopia with no taxes, safety nets, or regulations ever. At the same time, maybe I have something in common with moderate right libertarians who don't believe those things and border more sane ideologies like liberalism or left libertarianism. And that's where we start seeing some agreement.

On economic issues, some moderate libertarians are actually quite supportive, for example, of UBI. Heck, in America, some of the fathers of the movement come not from the left, but the right. We had Richard Nixon, we always come back to him, but also people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. The logic behind UBI for a lot of right libertarians is basically the idea that okay, say we need SOME safety net and we need to come with a grand bargain with the left. They'll say let's abolish the entire bureaucratic safety net as it exists, which is an overegulated nightmare, and just have a UBI, which would improve economic incentives to work and keep government out of peoples' lives. And here I am being half horrified at the idea of removing EVERYTHING from the existing safety net, and half amazed at how close they are to getting it. I don't believe we should get rid of everything in the current safety net. There are a few industries subject to market failures like healthcare and education that need to be addressed. And there are a few groups like seniors who should probably get a higher income via social security. But all in all, I can ALMOST work with such moderates.

The big difference between me and right libertarians on an ideological level is the fact that they tend to be anti government and view taxation as theft. I tend to be anti authoritarian, and view work in modern society as wage slavery we are coerced to do through the property system. Right libertarians seem to be focused purely on state action as bad, whereas I tend to view the state more neutrally, believing it does some good things, and some bad things, while also recognizing how coercive private power backed by the state (or whatever corporate agencies they wanna replace the state with, let's face it, it's a state by another name) can be as well. They have a negative view of freedom of wanting authority to leave them alone, but if people "voluntarily" adopt authoritarian social structures out of need like in capitalism, well, it's voluntary, you can choose to starve instead. I tend to have a more positive view of freedom, and more naunced views on how coercive social structures can be, so I seek to make people independent of these coercive forces. I dont want to coerce people to work, but if they do, they should pay taxes to pay for a system in which no one is coerced to work and poverty doesnt exist.

This begs the question, if people choose to work, and I am able to get my ideal system where UBI is high enough to live on and people have healthcare, how right wing can I get? Should people be free to work whatever jobs they want at whatever wages they want? As long as we eliminated coercion, yes. Should they be free to pollute? No. I still would accept environmental regulation. Would we need socialism? not necessarily, although it would be nice. Should billionaires be allowed to exist? Eh, part of me says yes, but part of me says that a system with billionaires existing tells me there's some inherent inequality in the economy that is potentially unjust somewhere and wealth and income should be more evenly distributed. I'm mixed on that.

As you can kind of see, I mean, I guess I have some libertarian influences in that I want people to be able to do what they want, but at the same time, I am also deeply paranoid about the potential for my own ideals not living up to themselves in reality (as happens with all ideologies), so I tend to be far more pragmatic and still support additional regulation and safety nets to make more equitable outcomes. While my default mode IS freedom, I also recognize that there are places where rules need to exist and rules aren't always bad. I am against a quite frankly inefficient and overbearing government that does try to intervene in peoples' lives too much and micromanage them. However, if a rule needs to exist for the common good it needs to exist. Same with lockdowns and masks. I'm not inherently against nonessential businesses existing, but if their existence spreads a deadly virus that kills hundreds of thousands of people, well, maybe they can take a year or two off while we resolve that. And maybe people should wear cloth over their faces to prevent disease. 

On social issues it's the same thing. Obviously I have nothing in common with the whackos there. No, baby markets shouldnt exist, neither should drugs or sex involving kids. At the same time, there is something appealing about the idea of people being able to live as they want. But ultimately, my ideas about harm are different than a right wing libertarian, and are far more nuanced and sophisticated. I understand we're not all islands. if you play loud music on your property, you disrupt life on mine. If you strip the grass off of your own and live on a slope, a wet rain can cause a landslide to impact mine. If you have covid and go out without a mask patronizing businesses, your actions are potentially killing people. While prostitution, drugs, etc. are all fine activities for consenting adults who are not coerced either via overt or covert means, they do tend to be not good when applied to other groups like minors. We need rules sometimes. It's not that I have some desire to control everyone. I don't. I want people to live as they want. My ideology actually is about reducing control people have over other peoples' lives, often picking up obvious blind spots in right libertarian ideology. But, not all rules are bad and evil. Rules need to be justified to exist. You need to be reducing a harm, and demonstrating that the reduced freedom is justified to reduce that harm. Likewise, taxation is used to promote good things that wouldnt otherwise exist. Like safety nets that give people positive freedom to live their lives. Ironically, by paying taxes in my ideal system, I see people as GAINING freedom, because theres more to freedom than government telling you what to do. Like private business telling you what to do and limiting your options. Amazing how right libertarians miss that.

 Conclusion

I guess that's the big issue I have with right libertarians. I mean, while I can cross over and find some vague agreements with them on some issues at times, I still believe my disagreements with them outweigh the agreements. I might agree with moderate libertarians on UBI, but not on their overall ideologies on how markets and taxes and regulations and safety nets should work for the most part. I might agree with the idea people should do what they want in their private lives, but while libertarians only recognize overt harm, I also recognize how systems work in tandem with themselves to screw people over. Right libertarians seem blind to that. Right libertarians just seem blind in general to the harm they cause. They tend to define harm and tyranny and the like extremely narrowly and dont understand how complex reality is. So they end up having an ideology that causes a lot of harm to people unnecessarily. 

It's like dealing with conservatives on critical theory. I might have vague lapses in which I'll agree with conservatives that SJWs are annoying, but at the end of the day I'll at least admit SJWs have a point, they just overdo it, while they'll think critical theory is just crazy marxist propaganda with no validity. Right libertarians do that too. They just lack that nuanced systemic understanding and act in broad strokes, ignoring how the simplistic models that exist in their head don't match reality, and that reality is complicated, and that their ideas can cause great harm. 

I mean, the idea of libertarianism isn't bad. I even have a version of that in my views. But again, a more nuanced, broad understanding of what freedom and coercion is, is necessary to proceed. Sometimes the simplistic answers right libertarians go for aren't the answer and more implicit forms of coercion like power relationships need to be taken into consideration. Right libertarianism is very immature in my opinion. It's like the ideology of a kid who doesn't know how the world works.