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If you want the extremes:

Libertarian world = no control of the government over any aspect of the economy, no public ownership, only private property is a right, everything is negotiated through contracts between private parties in society.

Authoritarian = almost total to total control of society by the government. Economy, customs, culture, speech. No dissent to the official government line of policies is tolerated, the people are completely controlled and submissive to the whims of the leadership. Decision-making is reserved to the political elites and the people have no voice in the process of it.

One is an economic-political philosophy, the other is a political system of control, not sure why you want to compare both.




"Libertarian" is a relative term, just like "liberal" and "conservative". Someone who identifies as a libertarian does not necessarily desire an extreme libertarian world as you have defined it. For example, a libertarian can oppose civil asset forfeiture abuse and support the legalization of marijuana, while still accepting the status quo of allowing the government to regulate the use of public and common goods.

When people say things such as "Libertarians don't account for externalities" and use a caricature of a "libertarian utopia" to attack libertarianism at large, it pigeonholes libertarians as extremists, and does not paint a realistic picture of how libertarianism actually influences politics every day.


I clearly mention those are the extremes, it's the first line of my comment.

I'm aware that Libertarianism as a philosophy has much broader branches of it, that it includes by definition concepts of freedoms and autonomy. Unfortunately most of the interactions I have with self-identified libertarians (both in Sweden and in Brazil) go towards extremism. As much as most of the philosophies under the umbrella of Libertarianism aren't that extreme that's what I see in public discourse, it's a caricature.

Libertarian thinking is also responsible for inspiring trickle-down economics, free market privatisations across the board and so on. These policies have been, at least, a mixed bag of results with plenty of it being failures (e.g trickle-down and privatisation of healthcare/education). We know, empirically, what the consequences of purely libertarian policies such as the ones brought by neoliberalism can be: monopoly/monopsony formations (i.e corporations mergers), empowerment of elites, diminished power of labour and so on.

Libertarianism defers too much power to private individuals, without much regard to the power imbalances that will arise from its philosophy, just trusting that certain mechanisms will balance it all out. That's my main reservation with the philosophy as a whole.


> When people say things such as "Libertarians don't account for externalities" and use a caricature of a "libertarian utopia" to attack libertarianism at large, it pigeonholes libertarians as extremists, and does not paint a realistic picture of how libertarianism actually influences politics every day.

Is it your contention that people are misrepresenting libertarianism as extremist out of ignorance or malice?

Do you think that is unreasonable to view libertarianism as extreme because people who are 'real' libertarians are forced to run as Republicans, and because in the future the libertarian party is going to become more moderate and reasonable?

I am trying to understand why you expect people to have a nuanced view of a political group that does not present itself as such, because you feel that it should or will be something else.


See my response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33303801 and the Pew Research survey at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/25/in-search-o....

In the U.S., self-described libertarians as a whole do not uniformly hold the views that you assume they hold. When 11% of people in the U.S. describe themselves as libertarians and correctly identify the term per Pew Research's definition ("someone whose political views emphasize individual freedom by limiting the role of government"), yet only 1.2% of U.S. voters chose the Libertarian Party ticket in the 2020 U.S. presidential election despite a 66.8% turnout rate,* you are not accounting for most libertarians in the U.S. when you limit your awareness of libertarianism to what is presented in the Libertarian Party platform.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...




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