Libertarianism is based upon hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure. Hedonism by it’s very nature is Godlessness.
Economics doesn’t tell what one should choose, it explains what those choices will cost.
Tell that to the countless folks who were ripped off by indulgences.
That’s like someone who rejects Christianity because its message is redistributionist. Or because it believes we have Original Sin. That is knocking down one aspect and thus throwing out the essence.
Mises was not saying pleasure was good or necessary for humans. He was saying that’s how we behave. And if that’s the case, a tyrannical gov’t and the serfdom that results would be far, far worse than a rights-based, law-based minimal gov’t. Minimal gov’t requires humility and virtue in the soul, and statism believes we have none.
This is all stuff and nonsense.
There isn’t a WORD in HUMAN ACTION that implies that man is just a pleasure-seeking animal.
HUMAN ACTION demonstrates how the human mind chooses among what is DESIRABLE. It nowhere says that what man desires is only PLEASURE. The rational laws of choice (praxeology) apply to the highest, most altruistic DESIRES just as much as they apply to desires for pleasure or material things. They are all desires, and the human mind and will evaluate them all according to the same laws.
The fact there are a lot more Conservatives and liberals than there are libertarians suggests that the others are getting most of the pleasure, sarc.
The libertarians base their belief on the constitution, basically the idea is that a few men has no right to dictate to every one else , the right to the pursuit of happiness, etc.
Most libertarians believe it is their right to decide for them selves how to live their own life and the ones who take it serious also believe you have that same right.
The problem with people tacking a name onto them selves is stupid because what ever name it is can be misleading because every one can or at least used to be able to think for them selves and no two people thinks exactly the same.
Some people can be very liberal on certain things but conservative on others.
Just another long, fancy sounding call for government to force us to follow the right path. The problem is , who forces the goverment to follow the right path. The Bible, as well as subsequent history, is full of examples of governments following the wrong path, and forcing the wrong path on their subjects, and that sort of government outnumbers any righteous variety.
They call this sort of thinking “progressivism.” It’s shown up in various incarnations, some claiming religious justification, some claiming class justification, but the worst ones are the ones who claim to be forcing us on the right path for our own good.
The Founders allowed for so much, in this land of the free. They realized there were large differences among themselves, so of course they had to invent a system that allowed for vast differences to co-exist.
Nevertheless, as a philosophy, Libertarianism reduces things to a point where meaninglessness is a problem. To say that everyone should be free to their own pursuits, and take it to the nth degree, is not exactly expressing the moral/spiritual undergirdings of our Founding, is it?
Yes, God gave us freedom to choose, even wrongly, and the Founders based everything on that, and made the people sovereign, not the government.
However, unless people are engaged in expressing that moral/spiritual undergirding the Founders understood, the ability to hold any kind of system together, much less the one the Founders made, disappears.
For examples, look at the Democrats. (No, Republicans aren’t perfect, but they aren’t the Democrats, either). Look at what they have become. Look at what they are trying to force upon us, against our will.
They have long violated the beliefs of our Founders. For them, it’s all about POWER and CORRUPTION.
They have now succeeded in corrupting the news media, with the willing help of the media itself, who wanted to be corrupted and who want Obama, Reid and Pelosi to rule us rabble out here with an iron hand.
You say Libertarians have the answer?
They are busy supporting same sex marriage and drug legalization. Not all of them, but enough of them. They couch the marriage issue in different lingo...they call it “marriage equality”.
There is a moral component here, people. If Americans lose the moral compass, and the ability to unite at least a majority to vote accordingly, our Founders understood America as they founded it WILL NOT SURVIVE BECAUSE IT CANNOT.
All the long winded sophistry on this thread by Libertarians to the contrary, Libertarians in real life are hedonists. I see it all the time here in Alaska, we are swamped with ‘em. While against gun control, they are anti-religion, atheists, new age, dupes of Dan Brown’s Di Vinci code stuff, for the legalization of marijuana - they are a bunch of dopeheads - could care less about the push to homosexualize America (many of them queers themselves), the push for same sex marriage,etc. and etc.
These long haired hippy type antichrists come up from places like California in droves to “get away from it all” and head out into the bush to practice their hedonist lifestyle. As a Christian first, and political conservative second, I loathe all of it. Ask one of ‘em what party they identify themselves with, and they will tell you to a man they Libertarian.
I loathe Libertarians. They are hedonists not conservatives. I wish they’d go back to California where they came from.
As I understand it, though, the problem with Mises is more that he's a top-down rationalist thinker. You also need some bottom-up empiricism to understand the world, and people who embrace Mises as their hero-thinker don't always recognize that.
For me the problem with libertarianism is similar. Libertarians try to get outside what's going on and build a system from the ground up, but we're born into a situation where some assumptions and commitments have already been made and some unpleasant realities have already been learned from experience.
The rational-ideal model doesn't always have much to say about where we are now, where we should go from here, or how to procede. A road map of Utopia isn't that helpful when you're trying to get from one real world place to another.
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Statism
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Leftism ------+------ Conservatism
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Libertarianism