This is not a mistake made by libertarians, but rather a fraud perpetrated by authoritarians who wish to elevate their personal preferences to the stature of moral law. To take obvious historical examples, prohibiting the sale of pictures of nekked wimmen and requiring stores to close on Sunday on spurious "moral" grounds degrades the term "morality", and thus makes it more difficult to invoke the concept legitimately.
Those who do wish to advocate real moral objections to (for example) businesses tied to organized crime then find themselves with the burden of cleaning the clintonized semantic swamp gunk off the term.
Oh yeah - being against personal irresponsibility, disaffection and alienation, sloth and laziness, immorality, promiscuity, ideology, and big government is just a "personal preference". Nothing to do with making a better, freer society.
Are you French or something, or did you believe all that postmodernism you were taught at college?
This is not a mistake made by libertarians, but rather a fraud perpetrated by authoritarians who wish to elevate their personal preferences to the stature of moral law.
Absurd. Read through any number of FR threads and you find libertarians condemning virtually any sort of morality as equivalent to government mandates and a police state. In fact, almost every time a moral issue is brought up on a thread, some libertarians leap to the presumption that traditional morality implies the laws to enforce it. This is almost as common as the use of the word "statist" (or "authoritarian" I suppose) toward someone disagreeing with a libertarian's position.
Not to disparage every libertarian, I have certainly conversed with those whose concern was with government enacted moral law, but who recognized the necessity of a non-governmental common morality. But Tomalak's point is valid: Far too many (though not all) libertarians abandon traditional morality due to a fear that it is the enemy of freedom.