I don't think libertarianism requires that sort of extreme environment, and I would challenge you to bring some evidence to the table to back that up. I do think some level of social pressure to civilized behavior is necessary in any non-statist society, and that such pressure is healthy, natural, normal, and moral.
For example, I think that people should be able to express whatever they may wish to express, no matter how abhorrent. However, I also think that not a thing should be done to shield any person from the consequences of what they do. Ward Churchill calls us Eichmanns? Fine, let him. But good luck to him finding a job or friends or anyone that wants to associate with him on any level. After all, who wants to be a buddy with someone who thinks you're evil?
That is freedom - both the freedom to express yourself and the responsibility to face the result.
Show me one non-statist society that did not have a correspondingly rigid social culture. Show me one non-statist society that was not monocultural.
I can't find the quote but I believe Lord Acton said something to the effect that as morality in a society decreases so must the power of the state increase. That is the situation we find ourselves in. Individuals are no longer bound by common rules of moral behavior.
I guess we differ on our views of the degree to which public schools are indoctrinating (in some way) rather than educating. I went to public schools, and, as my teachers would attest, nobody indoctrinated me in anything at all. Also, to judge from the drop-out rate and like statistics, I'm not sure that students nowadays are receiving much in the way of indoctrination, either.
Try going to college lately? I'm taking some classes now, it's horrible. I'm taking a geology class to fulfill a general studies science requirement. Some of the dogmatic, leftist assertions I have run across (off the top of my head, the book and the instructor are full of them):
- the greatest threat to the environment is human overpopulation (this is the first sentence in the book, it gets worse from there)
- humans have severely damaged the carbon cycle thru the excessive use of fossil fuels (this was the "correct" answer on the midterm exam I just took yesterday)
These hypotheses are presented as settled fact with no mention that they are, at best, the opinions of some . - the instructor spent an entire section telling us (with several questions on the aforementioned midterm) how science was meant to unite people and religion only served to divide them; how science is fact and religion is opinion; science includes no dogma while religion is all dogma (knowing that to the average American "dogma" is a 4 letter word)
I feel for the 18 and 19 year olds with heads full of mush that don't know any better. The public school system at every level has become nothing but an arena for indoctrination of leftist and naturalistic idealogy. I am determined not to subject my younger children to it, they will be homeschooled.
Because national defense is the primary purpose of the federal government, I believe it should be paramount among that government's priorities. Our nation's citizens should be required to support what ever level of military preparedness best deters our enemies, or, failing that, can handily defeat them
Actually Hoppe deals with this issue in his work The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production from which I posted an excerpt some months ago here at FR. The problem here is you have just provided a rationale for evils such as conscription and mass warfare - these ideas came from the Jacobins the French revolution (see EvKL's essay in the above linked work "Monarchy and War".
Requires it for what? What I'm hearing is that you think that people need to be controlled by either culture, "society", or government. Is that about right?
Yes and this is the difficulty some religious conservatives have with libertarian idealogy, myself included. Man is not naturally good, quite the opposite. A proper understanding of man includes the fact that he is wounded by original sin, therefore government is a necessity.
My appreciation for Hoppe and other Austrians ends when they go off about have no state whatsoever. I don't think this is possible given the nature of man. However the nature of that authority is paramount - the correct principle is subsidiarity - government that is closest to the governed ie small towns and communities that are essentially independent as opposed the massive centralized bureaucracies that characterize the modern state.
". A "gentleman's agreement" won't hold if everyone isn't indoctrinated in the same values.
Very true which is why our society is falling apart under the assualt of multiculturalism, religious pluralism and forced integration. I found the chapter in Hoppe's book on immigration particularly enlightening.