Libertarians are a self selecting bunch. Very few were raised into this philosophy. You can appreciate that my self identification as a libertarian is a careful, reasoned decision and not one that was flippantly made. It is the philosophy that is the most accurate and truthful to me.
Read my comment again. I self-identify as a libertarian as I see individual freedom as paramount. But I kept going with the analysis to realize that the Libertarian Party does very little to represent that ideal.
My apologies, I thought you were accusing libertarians of authoritarianism (the irony!).
I find the Mises Caucus at least useful in pushing to do more than simply be an affinity group for people pretending to play politics. I find partying with LP officials to be very hilarious, what a group of odd balls. But the party itself has no hope of electoral victory, which is why everyone should vote Republican in the current iteration of two-party politics from the libertarian lens.
My point is that even if there were an electoral victory, the Libertarian Party would not bring individual freedom. They are operating from an assertion that starting with a list of moral axioms, every implication will be morally right by construction. By itself this is terribly mistaken (see Godel), but it goes askew even sooner when a few poor axioms are allowed to remain through "pragmatism", regulatory capture, etc.
As for the current political environment, I'd say that bureaucratic authoritarianism is at least the devil we know and can be routed around by individuals, whereas autocratic authoritarianism is at best a wildcard that stands to destroy a good chunk of the laws that have actually been restraining naked power.
Libertarians are a joke because they refuse to realize that allowing corporations unlimited freedom means that the individual has less freedom. Their entire ideology just removes the boot of the state and replaces it with the boot of the corporation.
Speaking of jokes, it's always funny to us libertarians when we see government proponents talk about "freedom" being lost to the corporations under a libertarian system of (non) government.
The government as it is the world over pretty much controls your entire life; It dictates what you can and can't do with your own body, it forces you into various forms of indentured servitude, it marks you and keeps track of you like an inventory item, it controls what you can say (where and with whom even), it takes your children from you and puts them into essentially indoctrination camps for "education", it comes up with arbitrary rules that you have to jump through hoops to abide by, and it can even take your children away if you don't teach them the approved things, it can take arbitrary control over any and all of your possessions for whatever reason, it orders you to harm your fellow man, etc... And most of all, it gaslights and forces you to go against your own morals or things you consider wrong, whatever that may be. And just to rub it all in? It says you have to do and abide by all these things whilst still loving government because it's "Democracy" and "Democracy" is pure and noble and fair.
Libertarians are not a joke. Some of the most powerful people on earth are libertarians. The people who write off libertarians are blind.
I prefer corporations because I can voluntarily choose to take my business elsewhere, or even better, create my own competitor. Why I dislike the government is that it's the ultimate monopoly, with guns, and operated mostly by power-hungry sociopaths who will use that power to destroy innocent lives.
Given the corporation or the state, I take the corporation every time.
Don't be fooled by powerful people who claim to be libertarian, but are actually only interested in promoting freedom for themselves while denying the same to others.
Your second paragraph is setting up a false dichotomy. It's not the corporation xor the state. Fundamentally, corporations as we know them are creatures of the state - government chartered legal entities, running on the government's legal system, with government granted liability shields. But the main point is that where the nominal state disappears, the corporation(s) step into the power vacuum and become the inescapable government. To be able to take your business elsewhere or create your own competitor, you need individual rights. While the underlying physics supports this directly for some abilities, for others you need coordinated collective action. This often takes place through the state, meaning that blanket calls to dismantle parts of the current government can often serve as cover for enabling newer less-constrained government. Think yin-yang and NP/Turing completeness circular reductions, not towering software builds.
