President Vito

[nyuanshin]

Libertarians like to compare the state to the mafia, but this is unfortunately not accurate: if it were, we'd be a lot better off. Everything the state does wrong stems from its trying to be benevolent. The mafia isn't benevolent -- helpful if you have certain kinds of problems, but not benevolent. The state is very good at breaking things, or

Comments

[nyuanshin]

It's true, it's true -- I sometimes use the hypothetical "Libertarian" as my whipping boy for rhetorical purposes, in somewhat the same spirit that hardcore Marxists would rag on democratic socialists. I spent enough time in the trenches of the LJ libertarian community and various libertosphere blogs years ago to know that I could find and justify any stereotype by cherry picking, but it's still admittedly dirty. My only defense is that I do it to confuse the hell out of people who think they disagree with libertarians.

I also have a self-interested preference for defining non-deontological thinkers out of "libertarianism", so I don't really think of the Friedmans or Hayek that way. The rationalization is that it's not analytically helpful to lump them into the same category as Rothbard or Rand except from the perspective of someone whose worldview is radically different from all of them in any case, and because I find simply describing them as "liberal" is both more historically accurate and more likely to confuse people who don't actually understand what that word means.