Comment on Is it just me or do Lemmy communities tend to skew left wing? Why might this be?
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 3 weeks agoLibertarian here. According to you I don’t want to help the poor so can you please explain to me why I’m spending hours every month doing volunteer work that has positive impacts for the disadvantaged?
It’s long been said Libertarians are just Republicans that want to smoke weed and distance themselves from the outwardly racist rhetoric.
Some are but not all. The people who repeat that line really don’t like to be confronted with the reality that there’s a lot more to a libertarian than weed. As an example the party platform started pushing LGBTQ rights clear back in the late '70s, long before anyone else was.
There certainly are selfish bastard libertarians but undesirables exist in every party and I maintain that we shouldn’t define a group by its worst members.
According to you I don’t want to help the poor so can you please explain to me why I’m…
Lemme stop you right there. It’s a decidedly libertarian trait to read a broad generalization and conclude someone was referring to them personally. Take a step back and peruse the most widely available libertarian positions.
Because you vote that the government shouldn’t help the poor. Whatever you do on your own personal scale is meaningless compared to the impact that could be caused if you voted to have the government do the helping.
As to why you hold such contradictions in your mind, I don’t know, maybe you feel guilty about depriving the poor of healthcare and education that you try to make out for it? Maybe you are a good person with good intentions who never really thought that whatever help a single person can give is meaningless on the large scheme of what the government could give so you think you are helping by serving soup to the people you deny healthcare, or maybe you’re just an egoistic bastard who likes to see people in misery to feel better so you vote for them to be miserable and you do volunteer work to be near them. I don’t know, I’m not in your head, but your political views directly contradict your thoughts, if you think people deserve help when they’re vulnerable you’re left leaning.
Eldritch@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Just because you in isolation are doing it. Does not mean it is a characteristic of all economic liberals. More importantly. We know that Aid and Outreach is more effective when it is handled by larger organizations. Larger than private individuals. And of course larger than Church congregations. Something rothbard liberals heavily oppose. Mutual Aid absolutely should be one of the primary things our government is involved in. Especially a Dejacque libertarian government.
Libertarians and other groups even in the United States supported lgbtq far earlier than 1970. Don’t get me wrong I’m glad that for all the damage Rothbard, the Koch brothers, and others have done masquerading as Libertarians that is one of the things they’ve kept lip service to at least. They won’t actually do anything to actually improve the lives of lgbtq. But at least they support not overtly invisibly discriminating against them.
There certainly are some selfish bastards in every ideology. But economic liberal rothbard Libertarians have a higher concentration than natural. It’s possible that you might be an actual libertarian. But you would be more the exception in the party than the rule.