Surprise surprise, the biggest supporters of “small government” just want to own everything themselves. Who could’ve seen that coming?
Oh, right, literally anyone with a brain.
A lot of Libertarianism sounds great on paper, so it’s an easy trap to fall into. Once you consider the human element and factors like greed, it stands out as an exceptionally abusable political model; but if you don’t think about it critically (which is a LOT of people), it’s just liberty this and non-aggression-principle-that and it all sounds just oh-so peachy… again, on paper.
Communism is very similar in this way. It’s great on paper, and then people put it into practice…
There is a big difference though. Communism acknowledges collective goals and responsibilities. Libertarianism denies them.
Incidentally I thought both philosophies sounded somewhat reasonable when I was around 13.
Have a look into libertarian socialism aka anarchism (among other ideologies). An internally consistent ideology that accounts for humanitys shitty side while maximizing human freedom. With a decent track record to boot
Unfortunately so many are indoctrinated through language to not understand such an abstract. Anarchism/anarchy is “chaos”. Not to mention the horrible representation of the much more visible oxymorons. Anarcho-capitalists are a contradiction in themselves.
But there is one compelling argument for people to learn and understand it. Understanding it will piss off anarcho-capitalists and Big L Libertarians to no end. And take away any of the mystique or good will others might have towards them. No freedoms but social freedoms. If you have a freedom that is personal to you that others do not get to enjoy or share. That is a privilege and not a freedom. And even pointing this out will cause both groups to sethe and sputter ineffectually
It’s a reasonable philosophy to start out with… when you’re young. Some people mature at different ages than others.
Isaac Asimov called it back in 1980.
I’ve read most of his books and missed this, or it never stuck with me.Thanks for posting it. Dude was smart.I’d like the source, please.
3rd edit:
Asimov, The Sun Shines Bright, Ch. 17 Nice Guys Finish First!, pp 124.
It’s actually a footnote and not part of the text, so here’s some context:
Within these units co-operation has been brought about, despite the natural tendency to destructive competition, by the application of governmental authority, internal police and, most of all, the strictures of custom, social pressure and religion. The general advance in the size of the units within which co-operation is maintained has, at the present day, produced governmental control over a population of 950 million people in China; 22 million square kilometres of area in the Soviet Union; and one third of the real wealth of the world in the United States. The advance has not been smooth and steady. The stresses of internal decay and external pressure have led to the fall of empires and the periodic destruction of central authority and its replacement by smaller units. Such periods of regression usually result in a ‘dark age’. (4)
—
(4) There are people who, disturbed by ‘big government’ today and its tendency to curb the advantages they might gain if their competitiveness were allowed free flow, demand ‘less government’. Alas, there is no such thing as less government, merely changes in government. If the libertarians had their way, the distant bureaucracy would vanish and the local bully would be in charge. Personally, I prefer the distant bureaucracy, which may not find me, over the local bully, who certainly will. And all historical precedent shows a change to localism to be for the worse.
—
Today, the world undergoes centrifugal decomposition politically, as the old European empires break up and as cultural minorities demand nations all their own; but economic units continue to grow larger and the only economic unit that makes sense today is the whole planet. In one way, it’s the political units that count, for it is they who wage war. Though peace is maintained within the units (if we ignore endemic crime and violence, and occasional terrorism, rebellion and civil war) there is war between them. City-states warred against each other interminably in ancient Greece and in Renaissance Italy; feudal estates did so in medieval Europe and early modern Japan; nations did so in early medieval China and modern Europe, and in all cases until modern times there were conflicts with barbarians on the fringes. The intensity and destructiveness of the conflicts shows a general rise with advancing technology, so that despite the growing size of the units within which co- operation can be counted on, competitiveness may still win out. Destruction still threatens to outpace the capacity for recovery. We now live at a time when the outcome clearly hangs in the balance. One more all- out general war and civilization will probably be destroyed - possibly for good. Indeed, even if the realization of this keeps the war from happening, the existence of potential conflict keeps the minds and energy of all the competing nations on each other as the enemy and not on those true enemies which threaten us all - overpopulation, resource depletion and technology inadequacy. Nasty guys will finish last.
Hes not wrong, just didn’t have the zeitgeist to add climate change to the list.
Asimov published four books in 1980: Casebook of the Black Widowers, How Did We Find Out About Oil?, In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978 and How Did We Find Out About Coal?
Of those, Casebook of the Black Widowers was a collection of mystery short stories and the “How Did We Find Out About” books were childrens’ non-fiction, which leaves only In Joy Still Felt as a potential candidate for this quote. I downloaded an EPUB version of this book and did a search for “libertarians” and found nothing.
Either the OP got the year wrong, or they just pulled this quote out of their ass.
Hm. Did a search for a couple quotes from the text. Absolutely no returns on 4 search engines. One would think Asimov’s work would be pretty easy to find, especially a quote so timely. I’m now skeptical.
E: found it, see previous edit.
“The Sun Shines Bright” is the book where it was collected, but it was originally published in the April 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
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Found it, thank you!
The year is wrong: it’s 1981, from “the sun shines bright”
Yeah, it looks like it’s from the article “Nice Guys Finish First!” That article was apparently published in a magazine in 1980, so technically the OP is right, although it wasn’t collected into a book until the following year.
“The Sun Shines Bright” is the book where it was collected, but it was originally published in the April 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
“Nice Guys Finish First,” collected in the book “The Sun Shines Bright,” but originally published in the April 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Found it, thank you very much.
What book/article is this from?
“The Sun Shines Bright” is the book where it was collected, but it was originally published in the April 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Foundation bro. Probably “foundation” or “prelude foundation”.
I just did a search on both of those books and “libertarians” doesn’t show up. It wouldn’t make sense for it to be in a Foundation book anyway, since those are science fiction books set in the distant future and don’t mention contemporary political movements directly.
Foundation goes over government heavily dude, like very heavily.
The government of a space empire so far in the future that humans don’t even know what planet they originally came from anymore.
Correct, governmental systems don’t change that much.
Similarly the reader does know since robots - empire and foundation are all one contiguous series.
The book was already identified in this thread, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Foundation. It’s a compilation of a bunch of non-fiction magazine articles. Why are you still beating this horse?
This is fucking great, and a point I’ve tried to argue with some family several times. Power exists, it is just a matter of where.
Which may not find me
Is this still true? There have been significant advances in mass surveillance.
In California, something like 53% of the land is public or state property meaning that California has even more land for the public to use than Washington. Poor sap tricked himself into thinking Texas was so great. Texas is a shithole. Sorry not sorry.
This was a huge shock for me when I moved east. I should have looked at the BLM access maps before moving.
Oh yeah, when I first heard of BLM camping, I had to look it up, because there are very few opportunities for it here in the mid-Atlantic states. I had no idea such a thing existed.
OP learns freedom is for the rich.
Kind of. This also hurts the rich, unless they’re really want to pay for a theme park experience.
I don’t care how rich you are, nobody is buying 44% of Washington state.
I mean, the government bought an area over 10x of Washington, so I wouldn’t say nobody… Rich people have a way of wanting the dumbest, most useless purchases, so I wouldn’t put it past them to at least try, even if the government told them it had to stay national park. Not that it’d be dumb for a government to buy that much land, but a person who would absolutely still be told what to do with the land.
Texas sounds like hell
It’s known for it’s one star rating
I just had to. Would make for a nice bumper sticker if it didn’t get you shot down here
Ha! Clever.
Only outside of winter. For winter it’s hell frozen over.
No, that’s in Michigan.
Represent!
No, that would be most of Russia
Seems great to me and I live here 🤷♂️
Have you tried not being poor and buying your own dirt bike track and forest to hunt in?
Just want to point out that there is a difference between “Libertarian Capitalism” and “Libertarian Socialism”; and as per usual, the capitalists were the one who stole the label.
Interesting distinction. Could you or another explane it? My Political “chops” aren’t that good yet.
Libertarian socialism is an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist political current that emphasises self-governance and workers’ self-management. It is contrasted from other forms of socialism by its rejection of state ownership and from other forms of libertarianism by its rejection of private property. Broadly defined, it includes schools of both anarchism and Marxism, as well as other tendencies that oppose the state and capitalism.
Wikipedia - Libertarian socialism
It’s usually a synonym for Anarchism.
The oxymoron “Libertarian Capitalism” is an propagandistic rebranding of landlord feudalism, engineered by a right-wing grifter who thought Adam Smith was a pinko commie.
It’s taken seriously by the folks who despite all of the evidence, think trickle-down economics is a good idea. It’s a joke to everyone else.
It’s the ultimate lie of Neoliberalism - it’s not about Freedom for people (when you are born into a World were all places you could sleep in or grow your food in are owned, you are not Free), it’s about Freedom for Money. Neoliberalism actually strengthens the rights of property, reducing the rights of non-owners.
So if you aren’t one of the 1% you’re even less Free under Neoliberalism than straight Capitalism.
Neoliberalism has Neofeudalism as end-form. The goal is to get back to feudal times, where Lords would be the factual government on their territory, just that it would be justified through god given ownership, rather than god given priviledged status.
It is the same thing though.
the ideological justification behind privatizing everything is to make every man a king. the thing about that is, it means that any time you leave your kingdom you have to deal with several fickle idiot kings whose rules can change from moment to moment and who can ignore everyone and do whatever he wants without appeal. with public ownership there is one king, and he may suck but there are limits on what he can do and if we all don’t like what he does we can replace him or change the limits.
In practice “every man is a king” means he with the most cash is actually a king and everyone else is their serf. It’s a return to feudalism
why do you think the people with the most cash push it so hard?
In my early 20’s I thought I was a Libertarian, but that ended when I figured out they oppose all gun regulations, because after Columbine mass shootings only got more numerous and not less.
Libertarians are not reasonable people.
I also used to think I was libertarian until I started being exposed to the injustices of capitalism. I am no longer libertarian
Oh, hey, same (more or less).
I need somewhere to dort bike
d o r t
The Western US is really pretty special this way, I think. When traveling other countries, even really pretty views or nice beaches, it’s a little depressing many times there’s just no wildish place to picnic or camp or wander freely without a guide or agenda.
TBH, “libertarianism” was originally a left-wing ideal. Proudhon famously said “property is theft” and Malatesta (the most famous libertarian from Italy, where I live) was an anarchist. Right-wingers just co-opted the term like they did with many others.
(like they co-opted d’annunzio, a famous Italian poet. Now everybody knows him as “a fascist” but the nation he founded, the free state of Fiume, was the first nation to recognize the USSR (and the USSR recognized them back, irrc) He was also a member of a left-wing party, saying he was “going towards life” But as always, fascists appropriated a lot of things ideated by him. Worker’s unions had real power in Fiume, compare it to fascist Italy where they were basically 100% subservient to the party and you start to get a more nuanced and “controversial” picture of d’annunzio and Fiume. I suggest people that believe him to be a fascist to study him more, that’s all, from a guy that lives in Italy and has studied him. Rant over. )
It’s actually a bit of a complicated story: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-from-stirner-to-mussolini
Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist, referred to himself as a libertarian, I believe.
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law.
They do respect the right to private property.
Exactly, what they were lamenting about was a lack of access to more socialist approaches where things are held in commons. Delusional.
