Thread on Libertarianism

1.
Libertarians are useful for one thing: highlighting government inefficiency. Other than that, they’re almost useless and have little to no understanding of human nature.

2.
The fatal flaw of Libertarians is that they can’t see that their ideology contains a programming error that ensures the death of that ideology: an ironclad belief in democracy.
3.
Arthur Conan Doyle was correct when he said: “While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.”

Libertarians (outside of a few in the Mises Institute) all believe in democracy.
4.
Democracy has proven to us that, regardless of what people say as _individuals_ about freedom or taxes, they _collectively_ vote for benefits and larger gov’t.

Example: simply look at US debt and what its government's largest expenses are.
5.
This ensures the death of the libertarian experiment because more benefits & bigger govt also expands govt authority and regulation. Govt has no reliable subculture of restraint to prevent this, because representative govts exclusively comprise those who WANT to be in govt
6.
Ergo, those who want to be in govt (ie, ran for election) will, in the aggregate, always find ways to increase their power and authority over time. In the US it started by politicians trading votes (power) for the treasury (benefits, entitlements, etc) in the 1930s and 1960s.
7.
It's been exacerbated by adding a massive surveillance state since 2001 and Covid authoritarianism since 2020. And I haven't even mentioned corporate welfare which has been going on, in some form or another, almost since the country was founded.
8.
The only libertarians I've even heard of that don't believe in democracy (because they see it as incompatible with liberty) are the Hans Hermann Hoppe type, who believe in a quaintly hallucinatory dictatorship, ruled by insurance companies.
9.
But the notion that (corporatist) capitalism = “freedom” is laughable. Anyone who's watched the news for even the last month, or ever dealt with a corporate HR Department, can see that corporations are at least as dictatorial as governments are, if not more.
10/Thread

Libertarianism is a system designed to fail because it doesn't account for human nature. One can put all of the laws and checks and balances into a system to prevent statism from happening... and still it will happen. Always.

More from World

I'll bite, Mr. Gray. We can even play by your rather finicky rules.

Let's begin with some of the things you have said about Xinjiang, notably absent from your more recent media appearances, but still present in your blog about your 2014 biking trip.


The following is taken from an ongoing list I keep of people who have been to Xinjiang and written/spoken about their experiences. It is separate from the testimony of detainees and their relatives I also keep. Jerry is on this

Jerry, your article for CGTN, as well as your various Medium pieces, belabor themselves to emphasize the smoothness of your time in Xinjiang. Why did you leave out so many details from your log of your 2014 trip? They seem relevant.

For example, would CGTN not let you speak about Shanshan, the town that evidently disturbed you so much?


Why, pray tell, after noting how kind and hospitable Xinjiang police were to you in 2019 for CGTN—and how you were never told where you could or could not go—would you omit these details?

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