Walking through the woods at night, thinking about how you're happy that the U.S. government set aside lands for beautiful National Parks when you hear a branch break behind you and a low growling.
Terrified, you hear it roar "WELL ACKSHUALLY" before it takes a sip from its Mountain Dew® Big Gulp®
I forgot they got all Ayn Rand-y up there! It's really a story about how easy it is to teach bears that humans waste an incredible account of food and just put it out on the street!
Wow, the party of liberty. Except when you disagree with them. Then it's ok to threaten you, call you "inhuman rot," and drive you from your home. ( @kenwhite.bsky.social you may find this, ahem, interesting)
It wasn't taken over by people who don't understand it; they've always been like this. I mean, look at how many of the old guard turned themselves blue on colloidal silver.
Tons of crackpots, always have been. LP has been 5 weirdos that don't agree about anything in a trench coat pretending to be a party forever. But the left-libertarian subcategory has been almost completely driven out by anti-immigration gun nut types. Culminating in the Mises Caucus takeover.
Literally every single person I've met who identifies as a libertarian has said they are completely for all freedom and then end up aggro-advocating for the opposite in specific things they don't like.
The more they protest they're not "one of those" 'terians, the more egregious it ends up being.
Libertarianism's ideological purpose is to advance the interests of the wealthy and powerful, so it comes as no surprise when, given the choice of their professed ideals or their actual wealth and power, they choose the latter.
A woman I know with an English PhD was once complaining about the tyranny of the Obama administration. With that degree how could she have so little understanding of what the word meant?
That usage is still valid in academic and philosophical circles.
Turns out that there are dialects of language, and while meaning in a word can shift in one, it doesn't shift in another.
Then our language is fucked up because capitalism requires the existence of a state to enforce property ownership.
Libertarianism and capitalism do not mix. Quite honestly, they never will. So I'm gonna continue reclaiming the word and using it in the proper context.
I've met plenty of self described left-libertarians or libertarian socialists (though they do definitely need to make the distinction). Hell, Noam Chomsky calls himself a libertarian socialist
Also, in most of the world, the traditional definition of "libertarian" is still the standard
His linguistics work is highly considered more for what it did *at the time*, which was pretty important, but yes outdated at this point.
His politics I agee are wildly uneven and at times fucking awful.
My point was more that the (arguably) most prominent US leftist is a libertarian socialist
i have a rightwing family member who is opposed to government intervention and espouses the “i just want government to leave me alone” philosophy and he legit no joke has downloaded an app to monitor his driving to get a break on his insurance.
Even if it didn't, it's a fundamentally authoritarian system, granting the capitalist class disproportionate and unaccountable economic (and, thus, political) power.
