Saturday, April 29, 2017

Why are there no libertarian countries?

Why are there no libertarian countries? - George J. Dance, Nolan Chart:

April 29, 2017 - "'Libertarians and anarchists often get challenged with an annoying question,' Warren Redlich, the CEO of Independent Political Report and a former Libertarian Party candidate, recently wrote:  'If libertarianism is so great, why hasn’t any country tried it?'

"There is no doubt that the question has been asked often, and that it is meant to be annoying. Consider the source: Michael Lind. Lind, for those who have never heard of him, is a writer for the New America Foundation who has achieved some online notoriety as a professional anti-libertarian. (A google search on 'Lind libertarianism' turns up more than 100,000 hits.)

"Lind first came to my attention when he proclaimed 'the collapse of libertarianism as a political force' back in November 2007 – just in time for the birth of the Ron Paul Revolution. In fact, though, he was heralding 'the utter and final defeat of … the libertarian counter-revolution.' before that, and he has continued to do so since: most recently in 2015, when he pontificated that 'the libertarian moment [Rand Paul] symbolized is over.' (To be fair, he also pontificated in his 2015 article that 'There was never a libertarian moment in the United States' – which gets one wondering just what keeps collapsing.)

"But constantly heralding the end of something that never existed in the first place must get boring after a while; so in 2013 Lind came up with a new angle: the above question, smugly packaged as 'The Question Libertarians Just Can’t Answer.' That had such a great reception that he followed it up within days with two more articles, with equally-revealing titles, 'Why Libertarians are Basically Cult Members,' and 'Grow Up, Libertarians!'

Given this genesis, there is no wonder that anti-libertarians ask the question often, and that they do so mainly to annoy libertarians. But there is really nothing annoying about the question itself. The absence of libertarian countries is a phenomenon in need of an explanation, and trying to provide one could shed some light on little-explored areas of political theory. So it is worth attempting an answer."

Read more: https://www.nolanchart.com/why-are-there-no-libertarian-countries
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1 comment:

  1. Jean-Serge BrissonApril 30, 2017 at 5:13 PM

    In today's political climate, bureaucracies, large multinationals, and power hungry politicians, band together, whether willingly or by chance.

    But they all have one thing in common....power.

    There is a fortune to be made if you wield the right amount of power.

    Unfortunately, there isn't much power when you reduce governments to its minimum.

    Multinationals don't have much capacity to influence governments if the bureaucracy is small and restricted on what they can do.

    Politicians can't wield much power if they have been restricted, or curtailed on how much they can interfere in the rights of the individual.

    So, when it comes to promoting libertarianism, there simply isn't anything for those who are in power to take advantage of, because they thrive on reducing, and eventually eliminating individual rights for "group rights, cultural rights and even climate rights" which can and are used to diminish individual rights, till the day that the people will plead with governments and corporations, to take away the rest of their rights, in exchange for the necessities of life.

    Agenda 21 is one of the roads that will eventually lead us there if it is not challenged.

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