Comment on Using conservative logic
davidagain@lemmy.world 1 day agoLibertarianism is really really really stupid because in the real world no one pays for high quality roads, light rail network etc, safety nets for folks too ill to work or recently sacked through “reorganisation” etc etc etc unless they’re forced to. Privatised healthcare sucks for most people except the very wealthy, same for education. Libertarianism puts no governmental checks whatsoever on the power of corporations, it’s basically the rule of the jungle where the wealthy get freedom and the poor get slavery back. What stops corporations poisoning you for profits? I’ll give you a clue, it’s not competition. If you don’t regulate, people die. Just because American governments are crap, doesn’t mean governments are unnecessary. Individual liberty is a great concept, yes, but if nobody forces children to share and be considerate, they never learn it. For example, Elon Musk, Donald Trump.
Rustmilian@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Your points about weak safety nets, underfunded infrastructure, healthcare and education that often leave most people worse off, and corporate harm when oversight is weak are not wrong. The leap is blaming libertarianism as such for harm capitalism can create through its incentives.
Libertarianism is not automatically “no regulation” or “no government checks.” A lot of the harm you describe comes from limitations or additions to the idea as it is practiced, plus how parties structure markets, enforcement, and accountability. If the real target is that those arrangements let corporate power outrun protections, then arguing for better safeguards fits without concluding that the underlying commitment to liberty is stupid.
And you can treat limitationism as a mutually beneficial modification to libertarianism. The idea is to keep individual liberty and market freedom while explicitly adding credible constraints for externalities, power imbalances, and baseline protections so people are not left exposed.
Also, “libertarianism plus minimal governance” is not a uniform package worldwide. Some countries and real parties implement more constraints, different enforcement, and different welfare baselines, so you can’t read one especially dysfunctional American pattern as proof that libertarianism in general is destined to produce these outcomes.
davidagain@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No true Scotsman allows public infrastructure to decay, corporations to trample people’s lives, capitalism to run unchecked, “states rights” to overturn Roe v Wade.
Airway, back to the original point: conservatives are stupid because they think that seeing gay men kissing turns children and teenagers gay.
Rustmilian@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And that’s why I’m best described as Limitarian Constitutional Liberalism (LCL) : a rights-first, small-state constitutional approach that strongly enforces individual liberties and rule of law while limiting extreme wealth and power concentration through limitarian constraints. As overturning Roe v Wade is strictly against the core values.
Yes. That wasn’t something I ever refuted…
davidagain@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Thanks chatgpt.