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An interesting contrafactual from a former Libertarian. As a small "l" libertarian I agree with some of his points, but am not entirely satisfied with his answer. How libertarians answer these questions is, however, going to be telling, for if they cannot or will not, then they nwill continue to be marginalized in the future:

http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/05/07/politics/why-im-no-longer-libertarian/

Why I’m No Longer a Libertarian
Wed, May 7 - 11:00 am EST | 2 years ago by John C. Wright Comments: 110
The Wright Perspective

I often introduce myself as a recovering libertarian. It is not an entirely serious introduction, but it is not entirely frivolous either.

Why “recovering”? Sad experience teaches that any ideology, even a sound one, like libertarianism, is intoxicating. The appeal of ideology is the appeal of elegance. Just as Newton reduced all motions from the orbits to apples falling to three expressions, every intellectual craves a simple formula to explain the human condition. Libertarianism is based on a single principle that limits the state’s use of force to retaliation against fraud and trespass.

Nearly all the natural moral rules all men carry in their hearts are satisfied by the simple rule that you may do as you like provided you leave your neighbor free to do as he likes. No neighbor may rob, defraud nor attack another.

The intoxication comes with each case that fits neatly to the theory. Natural morality agrees that wars to defend the innocent are permissible, as is killing in self defense. Natural morality agrees that a man should keep his contracts, and so on.

The theory says the state must remain carefully neutral in all cultural and moral questions: the use of intoxicating drugs for recreational use, suicide assisted or no, polygamy, prostitution, gambling, pornography, duels to the death (provided only all participants fully agree!) or, for that matter, copulating with a corpse on the roof of your house in plain view of the neighbors’ children playing in their backyards, and then eating the corpse, all must be legal.

For me, the intoxicating spell ended in three sharp realizations, each one as forceful as a thunderbolt.

Raising children

The first was when I had sons, and I realized that I could not maintain libertarian neutrality on how to raise my children. I had to teach them right from wrong, virtue from vice, and teach them prudence, justice, courage, and fortitude. Most of all I had to teach that morality is an objective truth. But teaching virtue is not like teaching geometry. Such things can only be taught by example. It has to be part of the mental environment. The culture always teaches the fundamental values of the culture, parents or no, because virtue is a habit.

Every moral lesson I wished to inculcate into my children was contradicted by a thousand examples in modern media. They tried their damnedest to teach my children error, to make their filth seem normal and cool. They were trying to addict them to vice, greed and lust most of all, but also to moral apathy disguised as tolerance, and envy disguised as equality. In states where marijuana has been made legal, it’s being offered in candy and soda pop, in order to lure the young and make customers for life.

I realized that the culture surrounding me was my enemy. Imagine being an antebellum Southern abolitionist trying to raise children to believe that all men were created equal, but with the entire slave-holding society, by a thousand silent examples, teaching the opposite. Even with the best will in the world, it is not possible for a mortal man to shield his children from everything in the culture. Should I live in a cave?

Libertarianism says my neighbors do me no wrong by exposing my children to child pornography, provided only force or fraud is not used. There is no public and objective standard of decency, honesty, prudence, and justice present in the libertarian theory: but a libertarian commonwealth could not stand were its children not trained from infancy to be decent, honest, prudent and just. It is, in short, a self-eliminating theory. It is a theory for bachelors.

Turning to Catholicism

The second thunderbolt fell when I became Catholic. Libertarianism says the state must remain neutral in all questions of morals. It must be amoral. But in practice, an amoral society will not remain neutral. A libertarian Catholic should be willing to leave homosexuals alone to form private civil unions in their own way, as long as we are left alone to practice our faith in our own way – but everyone from wedding photographers to wedding cake bakers who do not wish to participate in desecrating our sacraments will be harassed or forced into compliance.

In other words, the state cannot remain neutral between the Church and the Left because the Left will not allow it. As a practical matter, libertarianism is unilateral disarmament in the culture war.

Going to war

The final thunderbolt fell when the Twin Towers fell. Libertarianism simply cannot be used to decide what is prudent and just to do in war.

Example: A village of farmers are about to be attacked by 40 bandits. The villagers, at the command of the old man leading the village, have hired seven samurai. The terrain says the only defensible spot is the canal. There are three houses on the far side of the canal. Military prudence says those three houses be burned, lest they give concealment and cover to the enemy.

The three houseowners, hearing this, break ranks, throw down their spears, and declare that they will go defend their houses themselves, separately, without helping or being helped by the village. Kambei, leader of the samurai, draws his sword against those three and chases them back into ranks.

Libertarians must call Kambei’s action indefensible. But by any stretch of common sense, his action is laudable, and is not only excused, it is demanded by his mission to save the villagers. Hence, libertarian logic in this wartime case leads to a false conclusion, nay, an utterly false conclusion: not merely untrue, but the exact opposite of truth.

As a father, as a Catholic, as a patriot, I realized that the self-interest crowing libertarian theory by its very nature applies only on sunny days, among adults, in peacetime. It is a peacetime philosophy only, and only among men who adhere to certain basic ideals springing from the Western cultural tradition, that is, men who adhere to Christian cultural norms even if not themselves Christian men.

John C. Wright is a retired attorney and newspaperman who was only once hunted by the police. He is a graduate of St. John College (home of Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books Program“). In 2004 he foreswore his lifelong atheism and joined the Roman Catholic Church. He has published over 10 SF novels, including one nominated for a Nebula award, and was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “this fledgling century’s most important new SF talent.” He currently lives in fairytale-like happiness with his wife, the authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their four children.

Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/05/07/politics/why-im-no-longer-libertarian/#ixzz3uQpgIj7m
 
Charles Koch is, of course, a libertarian, so his views on Bernie Sanders are quite authentic. From Instapundit, with the commentary:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/227133/

EVEN A BROKEN CLOCK IS RIGHT TWICE A DAY: Charles Koch has an oped in the Washington Post, “This is the One Issue Where Bernie Sanders is Right.”

As he campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) often sounds like he’s running as much against me as he is the other candidates. I have never met the senator, but I know from listening to him that we disagree on plenty when it comes to public policy. . . .

Democrats and Republicans have too often favored policies and regulations that pick winners and losers. This helps perpetuate a cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty in the United States. These are complicated issues, but it’s not enough to say that government alone is to blame. Large portions of the business community have actively pushed for these policies. . . .

Whenever we allow government to pick winners and losers, we impede progress and move further away from a society of mutual benefit. This pits individuals and groups against each other and corrupts the business community, which inevitably becomes less focused on creating value for customers. That’s why Koch Industries opposes all forms of corporate welfare — even those that benefit us. (The government’s ethanol mandate is a good example. We oppose that mandate, even though we are the fifth-largest ethanol producer in the United States.)

It may surprise the senator to learn that our framework in deciding whether to support or oppose a policy is not determined by its effect on our bottom line (or by which party sponsors the legislation), but by whether it will make people’s lives better or worse. . . .

Our criminal justice system, which is in dire need of reform, is another issue where the senator shares some of my concerns. Families and entire communities are being ripped apart by laws that unjustly destroy the lives of low-level and nonviolent offenders.

Today, if you’re poor and get caught possessing and selling pot, you could end up in jail. Your conviction will hold you back from many opportunities in life. However, if you are well-connected and have ample financial resources, the rules change dramatically. Where is the justice in that? . . .

At this point you may be asking yourself, “Is Charles Koch feeling the Bern?”

Hardly.

I applaud the senator for giving a voice to many Americans struggling to get ahead in a system too often stacked in favor of the haves, but I disagree with his desire to expand the federal government’s control over people’s lives. This is what built so many barriers to opportunity in the first place. . . .

I don’t expect to agree with every position a candidate holds, but all Americans deserve a president who, on balance, can demonstrate a commitment to a set of ideas and values that will lead to peace, civility and well-being rather than conflict, contempt and division. When such a candidate emerges, he or she will have my enthusiastic support.

I’ve always thought it was strange for Democrats to spend so much energy demonizing the Kochs who are, after all, libertarians who agree with the left on many social issues. Most of their non-profit spending goes to educational efforts aimed at enhancing individual liberty (which explains why they are the functional equivalent of Lucifer to liberals/progressives/totalitarians).

I guess the left needs to have its base hate someone specific who is really rich–their anti-Soros, if you will. Most of the other mega-wealthy Americans either try to stay out of the political spotlight, or they become supplicants to the political left (e.g., Bill Gates or Warren Buffett) in their attempt to ward off its ire. Just ask Chick-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby, Cracker Barrel, Whole Foods, Exxon, and many other businesses that have been the subject of negative publicity and boycotts (largely unsuccessful) after they dared to defy the political left.

Full OP ED here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-koch-this-is-the-one-issue-where-bernie-sanders-is-right/2016/02/18/cdd2c228-d5c1-11e5-be55-2cc3c1e4b76b_story.html
 
The birth of Libertarianism as a Social Movement is (like many such movements) completely unplanned and a result of a totally different project (ironically from the "Left"). The availability of studio quality equipment freed people with artistic inclinations (of whatever political stripe) from the "gatekeepers", and the Internet supplied the supercharging. You will note the counter reaction of the Progressive Left has been to attempt to curtail freedom of the Internet and take over social media (for example the manipulation of FaceBook feeds in the recent past and the banning, shadowbanning and other shenanigans of Twitter against identified conservatives as the latest example)

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/229059/

THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE VIDEOFREEX FROM MARS.

We now take for granted YouTube’s ability to birth DIY performers who eventually acquire large followings and of course, video cameras built into smart phones and tablets have become ubiquitous. But just as DARPA was crafting the notion of an interconnected network of computers in the late 1960s, portable DIY video technology was also being birthed during that period, as authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad write near the beginning of their 1985 book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. Without Sony’s invention, “It’s possible that the underground [comedy movement, which SNL creator Lorne Michaels tapped into for his first stars and writers] might have bypassed television altogether had it not been for the Sony Corporation’s introduction in the late 1960s of portable video cameras and recorders that were affordable by the public at large:”

That technology spawned a movement known as guerrilla television, which was populated by hundreds of long-hairs carrying Porta-Pak units, nascent auteurs who’d previously had no access to the mechanisms of television production and who set out to invent their own kind of programs. One such guerrilla remembers showing up with his partner at the house of a famous Hollywood writer, hoping to tell him some of their ideas. They were laden with gear, their hair hung well past their shoulders, and they wore fatigue jackets and pants. The memory of the Manson murders was still strong at the time, and the writer’s wife, answering the door and seeing the equipment they were carrying, thought it was some kind of machine gun and ran screaming back inside.

In his latest film review at NRO, Armond White explores the Videofreex, one of the leftwing underground groups producing guerrilla television in the years that preceded SNL, the subject of a new documentary Here Come the Videofreex:

Entitlement is quite different from “Civil Rights,” and Here Come the Videofreex helps us understand how the two things became closely linked and then were tied in with the self-satisfaction of media domination. Directors Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin observe those Sixties youth who felt that through the then-new video technology they could more accurately address the proletariat — a sense of righteous free expression like the social networking of cell phones, Twitter, and innumerable blogs. They were eventually crushed by corporate media’s ultimate indifference. CBS sacked the Videofreex but let them keep the “worthless” technology, which led to the Videofreex’ brief pirate TV enterprise.

It’s amazing to see this all laid out in an indie documentary while we currently contend with the bewildering, flip-flopping propaganda of MSNBC, Fox Cable News, and the shamelessly pandering CNN — all 21st-century videofreaks with small regard for reporting or objectivity. Their “news” cycles merely exploit American politics.

Co-director Raskin had worked on the 2013 Our Nixon, the most compassionate of all Watergate documentaries, which most reviewers misunderstood — seemingly deliberately. Today’s media politics all result from class privilege: Millionaire newsreaders follow the dictates of their behind-the-scenes tycoon bosses (broadcasters committed to the status quo and partisan politricks). They’re determined to influence the voting and polling patterns of viewers and readers. This is what the now-aged provocateurs of Here Come the Videofreex teach us. Parry Teasdale, Davidson Gigliotti, Skip Blumberg, Chuck Kennedy, Carol Vontobel, Ann Woodward, Bart Friedman, and others recall their pasts without guile, even as they lament their inability to fully “democratize” the U.S. media.

And note this: “When a veteran hippie mused, ‘Turning people on to video was like turning them on to grass,’ it seems stunningly naïve. It’s also au courant.”

Which dovetails well with an encomium to a man who also seemed to singlehandedly craft his own culture during the early 1970s, David Bowie. As Nick Gillespie writes in the latest issue of Reason, “David Bowie Was a Time Traveler from Our Hyper-Personalized Future — The star who made it cool to be a freak,” though a very different “freak” from the Videofreex, needless to say:

In 1987, he returned to West Berlin, where he had made an exceptional set of records in the late 1970s, including several with his muse and protégé Iggy Pop. There he played a concert so loud it could be heard in communist East Berlin. The Internet abounds with footage from the show, which is capped by an absolutely brilliant version of “Heroes,” his ballad of doomed lovers who literally meet in the shadow of the Berlin Wall to steal a moment (“I can remember standing by the wall, and the guns shot above our heads”).

Just days after the concert, President Ronald Reagan also performed in Berlin, delivering one of his most memorable lines: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Who’s to say that the example of Bowie, who personified not only the freedom of expression but the sybaritic desire that the Communists had unsuccessfully tried to stamp out, wasn’t as important to the Wall’s destruction as the arms race? The day after his death, the German government tweeted, “Good-bye, David Bowie…Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall.”

Bowie was exceptionally well-read (his list of 100 favorite books ranges from Madame Bovary to The Gnostic Gospels) and was renowned for his knowledge of blues, folk, jazz, and experimental music. (He introduced U.S. audiences to the German avant garde perfomer Klaus Nomi on Saturday Night Live, of all venues.) Yet only fools look to celebrities and artists—especially rock stars—for moral instruction and political programs. We’re wiser to seek artists for inspiration and ideas on how we might expand our own horizons and think about our own possibilities.

It’s in this sense that Bowie was a time traveler from our own future, where we all feel more comfortable not just being who we are but in trying out different things to see whom we might want to become. Certainly, an entire species of performer, from U2 to Madonna to Lady Gaga to Jay-Z (who sampled “Fame” in his 2001 track “Takeover”) were influenced by him.

And unlike many rock stars, Bowie created continuity with earlier forms of popular music, not only by covering various old songs (“Wild Is the Wind” is a memorable instance) but by incongruously appearing with Bing Crosby on der Bingle’s 1977 Merrie Olde Christmas TV Special, which gave birth to Crosby and Bowie’s enduringly beautiful and strange duet of “Peace on Earth/The Little Drummer Boy.”

Back in 2007, I wrote a piece for the Rand-themed New Individualist magazine titled “Welcome to My.Culture — How Emerging Technologies Allow Anyone to Create His Own Culture.” (Somehow, when the piece went to the Web, the subhead replaced the editor’s original title from the print edition, unfortunately):

Through television, newspapers, radio, and advertising, the mass culture of the twentieth century created easily understandable points of reference for virtually everyone. Often, these were low and crude and coarse. But everyone knew who Ralph Cramden was. Who Batman was. Who Vince Lombardi was. You might not have known who Gene Roddenberry was, but you knew that NBC had a show starring a guy with pointed ears.

Today, however, we’re looking at that shared culture in the rearview mirror, and with mixed emotions. In fact, we’re witnessing the death throes of mass culture. It’s being replaced, not by the elder President Bush’s “thousand points of light,” but by a thousand fractured micro-cultures, each of which knows only a little bit about what’s going on in the next micro-culture thriving on the website next door.

As James Lileks of Lileks.com and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Buzz.mn told me a couple of years ago: “Take a basically divided populace—the old red and blue paradigm—and then shove that through a prism which splinters it into millions of different individual demographics, each of which have their own music channel, their own website, their own Blogosphere, their own porn preferences delivered daily by email solicitations. I mean, it’s hard to say whether or not there will eventually be a common culture for which we can have sport, other than making fun of the fact that we really lack a common culture.”

This trend has both good and bad aspects. But before we turn our attention to that—and what it may bode for our future—it might be useful first to review how we got here.

Though I have no doubt that I’ll be repulsed by their reactionary socialist-anarchist message, I’m looking forward to seeing the Videofreex documentary, at least when it comes to Amazon Prime or Netflix. Decades before YouTube, iPhones and GoPros, their taking advantage of the first portable video technology was itself the real revolution (a textbook example of McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” aphorism). Gillespie makes a very good case that Bowie was a similar sort of revolutionary — and the recording studio technology he (and his frequent producers Tony Visconti and Nile Rodgers) mastered is similarly now available inside of a reasonably-equipped PC. And as old media continues to be an even vaster version of the vast wasteland that JFK’s FCC Chairman Newton Minnow infamously described, making your own culture as an alternative seems more important than ever. Think of it as the Nockian Remnant with iPhones.
 
An interview with perhaps the highest profile Libertarian candidate of all; Garry Johnson, Libertarian candidate for the President of the United States. The video is quite illuminating, although I could have done without questions like "What is your favourite car" or "do you believe in aliens". For people who continue to spout nonsensical disinformation about Libertarianism, this is a quick, good "go to" place to get some real Libertarian POV. IF you like what you hear, then there are plenty of other places for serious research and discovery:

https://pjmedia.com/video/meet-the-candidate-hilary-and-donald-are-afraid-to-debate/?singlepage=true

Meet the Candidate Hillary and Donald Are Afraid to Debate...
BY STEPHEN KRUISER APRIL 5, 2016 CHAT 56 COMMENTS

Gary Johnson is polling in the double digits-- a first for a Libertarian candidate! He sits down with Stephen Kruiser to discuss his chances, and how there is a viable possibility he might wind up on the general election debate stage.

WATCH GARY JOHNSON ANSWER 44 QUESTIONS IN 3 MINUTES YOU NEVER THOUGHT A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WOULD ANSWER ... ON THE NEXT PAGE >>>

Does he believe in aliens? What's his dream car? What website does he visit most and much more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCI2XR8JxJY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFtIJS2p0Vo
 
Sadly, yes. The best that small "l" libertarians can ope for and work towards is shrinking the scale and scope of the State, but the positive incentives to support an expanded State seem insurmountable (until the positive feedback leads to a collapse, which is also not a recipe for Libertarianism):

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437967/libertarians-rand-paul-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-donald-trump-nationalism-socialism

How’s that ‘libertarian moment’ working out?
Las Vegas —

Yeah, I told you so. As the presidential campaign season kicked off, many of my friends and colleagues insisted that the United States was having a “libertarian moment.” I thought otherwise, and argued (in Politico) that the admirable Senator Rand Paul, the closest thing to an out-and-out libertarian with any currency in mainstream political circles, would have a hard time seeking the Republican nomination not in spite of his libertarianism but because of it. The idea that Americans are closet libertarians who desire a regime of economic liberalism and a hands-off approach to social questions is not supported by the evidence.

In the event, the two presidential candidates Americans got most excited about were Donald Trump, a nationalist, and Bernie Sanders, a socialist. Between the two of them, they make a pretty good national socialist. Trump won his party’s nomination and Sanders ceded his to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is (arguably) a little bit more of a nationalist and (arguably) a little bit less of a socialist but in many ways a much better distillation of the partnership between big government and big business that characterizes our current political moment.

How’s that libertarian moment working out for you?

I am writing from FreedomFest, the annual Las Vegas gathering of libertarians ranging from those we’d recognize as ordinary conservatives to the Libertarian-party types, goldbugs, marijuana obsessives, and the rest of the merry liberty-movement pranksters. The discussions have ranged from libertarianism in the Islamic world to Black Lives Matters to New Hampshire secession, a subject that may be of some interest to my fellow Texans.

The conversations here are familiar: The proponents of free people and free markets have a “branding problem,” and, if we could only figure out the right words to say in the right order, then people would flock to our banner. At the Planet Hollywood hotel and casino, a famous libertarian activist sweeps his hand over the adult video games, the burlesque dancers at the Heart Bar, the people wandering around with foot-high daiquiri glasses and says: “Hopefully, the whole world will soon look like this.”

And we libertarians wonder why we’re losing.

The Las Vegas area is in fact a pretty good test case for libertarian theory and an excellent example of its limitations. The legalization of prostitution in nearby lightly populated counties was supposed to provide all of the benefits familiar from anti-Prohibitionist arguments: moving prostitution off the streets, bringing it under responsible regulation, eliminating the influence of organized crime and criminal exploitation, etc. A drive down West Tropicana, where the street corners are full of underage girls and lost addicts plying the oldest trade in the oldest fashion, suggests very strongly that this hasn’t happened. So do the arrest numbers. So do the human-trafficking operations that help stock the nearby massage parlors. The casual marijuana peddlers offer similar testimony about the state’s relatively liberal marijuana laws. So does the fact that you can go to jail for organizing a dollar-a-point bridge game here where “gambling is legal.”

Las Vegas’s vice economy isn’t libertarian at all: It is one of the most tightly regulated economies in the United States, staffed by union members and dominated by politically connected cartels and their friends in elected office.

The real world does not unfold according to our neat ideological models.

Legalization of drugs and prostitution probably would reduce the harm these do to the world, and that is a strong if not dispositive argument for the libertarian approach. The idea that the world would be better if it looked more like Las Vegas — rather than more like, say, Provo — isn’t a very good argument. It isn’t a very popular one, either. There’s a difference between a world that has a Las Vegas in it and a Las Vegas that has the world in it.

There are many very bright and thoughtful people here, but the level of self-delusion one encounters is remarkable. There’s not a lot of Trump love here, but there is a Trumpkin faction, too, arguing that his disruptive effect on the political consensus opens up opportunities for libertarian reform. Maybe it does. It also opens up opportunities for the opposite, and given Trump’s own views — which are anti-libertarian in every significant way — that seems much more likely.

The people who don’t like free markets and free people, who want to control who you can buy from and sell to, or regulate who can criticize a politician and when and how, don’t think that way simply because libertarians have never figured out how to translate the gospel into their language. They have other values and other agendas. The white nationalists in the Trump camp and the Black Lives Matters activists opposed to them do not secretly want to be libertarian individualists on the Randian model: They want their identities affirmed by state action. They want a politics of Us and Them. Populist movements cannot survive long without a Them.

The complexity of the real world exceeds what can be adequately addressed by our ideologies, and the variety of real human beings — and real human experience — means that there are real differences in basic, fundamental values. Most people do not want their values to be tolerated — they want their values to prevail. The terrorists in Nice and Orlando are not fighting for toleration. Neither are the neo-socialists now migrating from the Sanders camp to the Clinton camp or the Trumpkins who are sure that their frustrations and disappointments are being artificially and maliciously inflicted on them by a nefarious elite.

And that’s why we are not having a libertarian moment, but a nationalist-socialist moment. I told you so.

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437967/libertarians-rand-paul-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-donald-trump-nationalism-socialism
 
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