Is this why when Pike mentioned that the world is governed by lizards was not a word of insult muttered?

“Libertarian Party UK showed some early promise”

Surely the name was a dead give-away?

“showed some early promise”

Did they fuck. They were only ever supported by a handful of angry, frustrated men enraged that the world fails to conform to what they think it should be.

Any resident of the reality-based community acknowledges two things:

1. Libertarianism is a load of bollocks.
2. Even if it wasn’t, most LURPAK members are too lacking in social skills to persuade anyone, and content themselves with wanking over each other’s blogs.

For fuck’s sake, attacking Brown is like shooting fish in a barrel given how angry mainstream Tories are. But once their venom has been drawn by Cameron’s election, we’ll soon see libertarians fuck off back to oblivion.

“Libertarian Party UK showed some early promise”

Which is why I stick to my view that there is no such thing as libertarian’s . They are all fake, no matter how much the trolls like to tell me otherwise.

I agree with 4…

There are plenty of liberterians Sally, they just don’t give a sh*t about people.

“There are plenty of liberterians Sally, they just don’t give a sh*t about people”

Oh I don’t disagree with you on that one. The pretend libertarians are the most selfish, heartless bastards out there. But I still say they are fake.

My experience of them is that they are the first in the queue for govt help when it suits them. A lot of ex military people claim to be libertarians , which is odd , seeing as the state has paid their wages and their pensions, and provided health care for them.

Then you have the libertarian farmers. These are classic in their hypocrisy. They hate welfare but love farmers getting govt compensation for their own fuck ups. Then you have the business libertarians who hate paying a penny in tax, yet want govt bail outs every time they screw up.

Then you have the intellectual libertarians. These are the stupidest of the lot. They live in fantasy land.

Sally presumably believes this is an optical illusion – http://all-left.net/

My theory is that back in the 1950s, there was a secret plot by interdimensional reptiles to take over the political system of key Earth nations.

However, due to a failure to understand human psychology, the reptiles ended up in control of only a few tiny fringe parties…

Heh, although a few do frequent here harping on about the individual.

7, not to mention the GOP thugs and scum in America who use state power to crush dissidents whenever they’re in office, but then call themselves libertarians and magically discover an opposition to state power the minute they’re out. Obama isn’t even left-wing, but they hate him because he’s a vaguely sane Tory rather than a completely insane one.

Fucking hypocrites- once you weed them out, you’ve got a handful of people who’re stupid enough to believe in it, because they’ve never actually had a job and been pushed around and told what to do by some dickhead boss for 40 hours a week like most real humans do.

What did they do when Thatcher and her henchmen were using the state to repress the working class? They fucking cheered, that’s what.

They fall into two categories, the liars and the lunatics.

To many of those who consider themselves on the “Left” “Left Libertarianism” would seem an oxymoron. This is because the right has hijacked the libertarian rhetoric of self-reliance, individualism, and free markets(and was enabled to do so by the statist turn the left took at the turn of the century).
In the mind of of your average unthinking Leftist,these principles are four letter words, synonymous with selfishness, indifference, privelage, and capitalism, for which the only remedy is the aggresive expansion of a Robin Hood government. These misinformed individuals do not understand that the evils of capitalism are not the result of an unregulated free market but of the absence of one. The massive power of big business would be non-existant without big government as its protector, if not its outright creator. The practice of state intervention on the behalf of capital is as old as capitalism itself.
But perhaps what makes a “Left Libertarian” is a strong sense of voluntary vs. coercive. While most Right Libertarians, even those intellectually honest ones who are vocally critical of state-capitalism as an affront to the free market, will defend, say, the wage system since on the surface it is simply a free market interaction. The Left Libertarian knows better, and will point out that the wage system as we know it can only exist when capital has secured privelages from the state to protect itself from competition. The Left Libertarian looks beyond the surface of the “free market” masquerade and exposes the apparatus of state coercion that lies beneath it. In this refined understanding of voluntary vs. coercive the Left Libertarian also realizes that in a truly free market a plurality of economic institutions could thrive, provided they did so peacefully, be they mutual banks, worker co-ops, syndicates, or collectives.
Incidentally, though, a fact that both left and right should be aware of: the term “libertarian” was originally just a euphamism for anarchist and therefore implied socialism of one kind or another. This is still largely the connotation it has in Europe. It always bothers me when right libertarians and “anarcho-capitalists” claim that individualist anarchists like Tucker are their forbearers. Tucker considered himself a socialist and he makes that abundantly clear.
Left Libertarians should do everything possible to educate the statist left. In addition to illustrating the horrors of Marxism and Communism, they should show them how the “social democratic” welfare liberalism of the Fabians, “Progressives,” New Dealers and others has been for the most part a legacy of managerialism, paternalism, and social control, that has preserved capitalism if not strengthened it.

May Left-Libertarianism have a prosperous future!

Nathan said it better than I could.

I am critical of the excesses of the state, for example its repression of me personally and my fellow miners under Thatcher, and its repression of our political descendants at G20. I further support action such as that taken by the Vestas workers, and I attribute the stagnation of the 70s (which were nevertheless a far superior period socially and economically to the Thatcher years or anything subsequent taken by Thatcher’s loyal heirs and successors) to the fact that industries were controlled by state bureaucracts rather than employees, making it barely better than rule by shareholders.

Furthermore, the working class can organise for themselves, were it not for Thatcher’s “laws” and their predecessors going all the way back to the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Taff Vale fiasco, and other devices used by the ruling class to use force to hold us down.

But why is it that the most prominent LPUK members are all obviously and undeniably on the right and supporters of Thatcherism, and as much as they may claim not to be, from my perspective they are only differing from her on trifling details? What would the likes of Devil’s Kitchen, Obnoxio The Clown, Old Holborn, Very British Dude, Neue Arbeit Macht Frei (he of photoshopping the gates of Auschwitz fame) etc. make of any claim that they had to do with the left or its ends? What is it about libertarianism that makes Tories identify with it? Why do they think that removal of the state from almost all areas of life would benefit their agenda, which I do not share?

This is one of the main reasons why I view “left-libertarians” as simply deluded. There will need to be a role for the state in the economy, more extensive than it is now. No, not Marxist-Leninism, but something that you’d call socialism. I remember that some unions were against a national minimum wage and I thought they were talking shite. Independent organisation won’t always be enough, just like the original working men’s clubs, excellent though they were, didn’t plug the gap that naturally existed, which required the state to involve itself.

I’m 49, and I can well remember that communities such as the mining village I live in once had a much higher standard of living. No unemployment, no single parents, no one living on disability unless they really were disabled. Yet benefits existed in those days, but the presence of decent honest work meant that people could make a good living without them. And they could support their wives and children too, as my dad provided for us, on a wage that no one at the time would have seen as high.

I have no objection to women in top positions, obviously provided they have the right opinions, but I don’t think going to some shit job in a clothes shop, a pub, or something is a kind of “liberation”. The choice of having a career or staying at home should be a choice, not one of de facto being made to go out and make ends meet because your husband has a shit job and can’t earn enough. Again, social conservatives fail to acknowledge that their fealty to Thatcherism has fucked over their own aspirations.

You have said before that my scepticism about state power and awareness of its uses for right-wing purposes makes me a libertarian in the making. But I deny this because I have not seen any plausible evidence that the sort of order I support, based on decent employment which pays well enough and fair treatment for workers, will spontaneously emerge if the state withdrew altogether.

Look, David, we are where we are.

You clearly understand the realities and can see that they we are not going to change them by exchanging increasingly repressive Tory governments with increasingly repressive Labour governments backed by an increasingly national and aggressive police force.

You look back to the 70s with nostalgia but you must understand that the working class are no more. They were not only defeated by Thatcher but they have been effectively exterminated by managed social change. There is still the occasional flicker of rebellion but the remnants of the working class have no power and, with the collapse of communism, no agenda.

But why is it that the most prominent LPUK members are all obviously and undeniably on the right and supporters of Thatcherism, and as much as they may claim not to be, from my perspective they are only differing from her on trifling details?

I think Devils Kitchen would claim to be of the left but the mistake here is thinking of libertarians in terms of left and right at all. They hate Nu Labour not because it is of the left but because of its authoritarian statist policies. They hate the Tories and the BNP because they advocate more of the same authoritarian statist policies. They hate the EU not because they are nationalists like UKIP but because they detest government even more the further and more remote it is from the citizen.

Undoubtedly some of the laissez faire policies do not sit well with traditional collectivist ideas, but libertarianism is built on an optimistic view of the human condition. The principles that underpin it – fairness, personal responsibility and freedom from oppression are closer to the principles of the left than the right.

I have not seen any plausible evidence that the sort of order I support, based on decent employment which pays well enough and fair treatment for workers, will spontaneously emerge if the state withdrew altogether.

There may be none, but let’s give it a try. It can hardly be worse than where we are or where we’re heading.

To be fair, in America, the equivalent of LPUK are the survivalist nut jobs that hide in the hills in little shacks surrounded by assault and anti tank weapons praying for the day either the Government come looking for them or the plot of ‘Red Dawn’ comes true.

Although just as paranoid, our mentalists rail against the TV licence fee, CCTVs, warning signs at train stations and the Government’s Recommended daily allowance of processed meat.

The latter are sad cases who are full of their own importance, but the worse most of them will do when the fuse bursts in their mind will be that they rip up the census forms or force feed their kid ‘too much’ meat in deliberate defiance of the State.

When the former’s paranoia gets too much, he is likely to go about with loaded weapons.

Essays on Libertarianism are long but have little content, much like the political belief system itself.

Posts by DHG are short and have no content.

If you are going to post then make some attempt to engage with the arguments.

Barking doesn’t mean much.

Too much air Pagar, too much hot air.

That’s constructive.

Indeed it is but you confuse your volumous responses with constructive ideas, I mean the Libertarian ideology is not one to turn to either now or in the future and this is reflected by it’s consistantly bad showings at elections.

Few would deny that LPUK don’t have a few teething problems. But it is quite laughable to claim that libertarianism doesn’t have a proud intellectual history (from Locke, Bastiat, Cobden to Hayek and Friedman) and an intellectual present: Nozick, and more recently Narveson, put libertarian ideas at the forefront of contemporary political philosophy.

“But it is quite laughable to claim that libertarianism doesn’t have a proud intellectual history”

Never said that Nick old bean, you’re putting words in me mouth duck, what I said was it makes for shit politics and no one wants it, which is true.

Lovely.

Well I am not sure what your comment at 16 could mean apart from an attempt to argue for the shallowness of libertarian intellectual belief, but I understand that you aren’t one for making excessive inferences about anything, old goose.

I get this in various academic discussion forums. Left liberals, when they think they are alone, unload various calumnies about what libertarians believe, that get plenty of nods of agreement. Then when I question them and explain what contemporary libertarians actually believe, they just say “Oh, I didn’t mean those libertarians, just the ones that work at the Adam Smith Institute/spend all their time defending Republicans/Conservatives” which they take to be more the important ones. Yet it seems a little rich of the left to judge others almost exclusively on the basis of the temporary alliances they have been forced to make (how many calls to support New Labour on here when faced with the stark choice of them or the Tories?). In political action, everything is always a little more ambiguous than ideals would ever allow.

Nick, just so we’re clear, I don’t like what contemporary libertarians believe and neither do vast rafts of the electorate, thankfully.

And your point is? We’re not in this to be popular.

But who knows, perhaps people might come round when they realise what it is like for a government to hold increasingly arbitrary powers over them.

My point was in ref to Pagar’s long winded efforts.

And in ref to your second point: I very much doubt it.

My point was in ref to Pagar’s long winded efforts.

My “long winded” efforts were in response to a detailed post from David Brough- a contributor prepared to use this site to honestly illuminate issues by way of argument and discussion.

If, as I suspect from your comments on other threads, the single track in your brain renders you incapable of coping with complicated ideas I sympathise but would urge silence.

If you can comprehend but just can’t be bothered to engage in constructive debate I’d suggest you go off and troll another site that might value your pithy one liners more.

If you can find one.

pagar:

Handbags you little divot?

I’m all for argument and discussion but not for dressing up Libertarianism as anything other than the unworkable and anti-human pile of tosh that it is.

I’m more than capable of dealing with a whole raft of ideas but you present none, so rather than crafting long-winded and tedious put downs on your mum’s PC, have a slice of Battenburg and a lay down.

All the breast!

DHG

Sorry don’t have a handbag- I have a kalashnikov (and I’m not little).

But since we can’t indulge in a bit of rough play over the internet, let’s try out your intellectual capacity.

From my post above

The massive power of big business would be non-existent without big government as its protector, if not its outright creator. The practice of state intervention on behalf of capital is as old as capitalism itself.

Today Mandelson intervened on behalf of the entertainment industry and threatened to force ISPs to disconnect file-sharers from the internet. It is the left that is supporting capitalism.

Discuss in more than two words.

Boy got a gun? BWAH HA HA!

I’m not here to answer your questions pretty pagar, I came here because the verbose libertarian odes made me laugh.