The PEW research center on Libertarians, they are retarded !

Are they crazy ? All libertarians favor Marijuana legalization !!

The rest of that "survey" is a crock too !

 

And your evidence is?

 

Really unsure what this is for i mean if you took at survey of lefties i think most of them would favour legalising, think homosexuality should be accepted and that stop and search should not be allowed.

But unlike libertarians left wing ideas are not based on the crap and false ideas of Social Darwinism.

I think it would be better to say that the libertarian stance on these things is that they don’t care.

They might not agree with stop and search but they wouldn’t care enough to regulate against it,

They might think homosexuality should be accepted but they wouldn’t care enough to stop it been discriminated against

And so to drugs the right wing libertarian ideas on drugs are based in individual rights and free market principles. All drugs would be legalised and unregulated so they would be open to anyone to take, make or sell within the bounds of a capitalistic free market. And along with right wing libertarian philosophy about individual responsibility there would be no public programmes of education or treatment (except for those that could afford it) to counter the market.

The thinking on the left is for a drugs policy that is good for society and the individual. They don’t think prohibition works but neither do they want drugs to become just another unregulated profit making product in a consumerist market.

They also base their views on personal freedom but they also see drugs from a social and healthcare standpoint.

Soft drugs would be grown and made under licence and regulated in much the same way as alcohol.

Those addicted to harder drugs would receive them under medical supervision with the goal of stabilising and then getting people off them.

The emphasis would be on education, treatment, and assistance.

 

lol

 

i'm not sure how we've determined OP's political philosophy just from one post where he disputes the results of a survey? i kind of agree with him; those results don't really make sense considering what libertarianism is.

 

I had a buddy in the years following my high school graduation who had some energy on libertarian as a solution for the direction of our political future. We hadn't the foggiest notion of what politics was like except for what they teach you in American Government (now that I think about it this was when I first started college, but still in the proximity of the aforementioned graduation). But we didn't understand that there were important implications that influence other parts of your life - besides voting, we likely didn't care! This was around the time of Clinton's impeachment. He was a punk fan. Listened to Rage Against the Machine and NoFX and stuff. Really cool guy.

Today, I don't agree with libertarian policies because they seem very conservative leaning to me. As an example, there was a guy trying to repeal a gas tax in California. I think he was libertarian. Now I can see having questions about where your tax dollars go. I didn't think the tax should be repealed though because the money was used to repair roads or something. His spiel seemed to be about the cost of the gasoline.

Well, taxes do pay for things. Can we afford them though? How much does the price go up before it is infringing on a family's ability to acquire goods and services? It's a fair question. I'd like to think there's a good way to get it all done, but I'm not educated about the tax codes and things. Maybe that's what I should be studying!

 

If we want roads, pass the hat. We'd have to buy all the land first, and make sure to charge big enough tolls to pay for it all--and to implement the "free rider" problem! We had a libertarian talk to our college class once. That was basically his national defense policy--pass the hat!

 

Libertarian to me means to allow people to engage in activities of their choice as long as they don't infringe on others' abilities to do the same.

In other words, stop telling people what they can and can't do. Or "live and let live".

But apparently, people have made it more complicated than that. Here's what Wikipedia currently has to say:

Libertarianism (from Latin: libertas, meaning "freedom"), or libertarism (from French: libertaire, meaning "libertarian"), is a collection of political philosophies and movements that uphold liberty as a core principle.[1] Libertarians seek to maximize political freedom and autonomy, emphasizing freedom of choice, voluntary association and individual judgement.[2] Libertarians share a skepticism of authority and state power, but they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling for the restriction or dissolution of coercive social institutions. Different categorizations have been used to distinguish various forms of libertarianism.[3][4] This is done to distinguish libertarian views on the nature of property and capital, usually along left–right or socialist–capitalist lines.[5]

Libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists,[6] especially social anarchists,[7] but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists.[8][9] These libertarians seek to abolish capitalism and private ownership of the means of production, or else to restrict their purview or effects to usufruct property norms, in favor of common or cooperative ownership and management, viewing private property as a barrier to freedom and liberty.[10][11][12][13]

Left-libertarian[14][15][16][17][18] ideologies include anarchist schools of thought, alongside many other anti-paternalist, New Left schools of thought centered around economic egalitarianism as well as geolibertarianism, green politics, market-oriented left-libertarianism and the Steiner–Vallentyne school.[14][17][19][20][21] In the mid-20th century, right-libertarian[15][18][22][23] ideologies such as anarcho-capitalism and minarchism co-opted[8][24] the term libertarian to advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights such as in land, infrastructure and natural resources.[25] The latter is the dominant form of libertarianism in the United States,[23] where it advocates civil liberties,[26] natural law,[27] free-market capitalism[28][29] and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.[30]

 

First I’d point out that in an American context when people say libertarian they mean right wing libertarian I don’t think in many years of been here of any American calling themselves libertarian who wasn’t a right wing libertarian.

So coming to the above statement - well it is a well-known right wing libertarian argument

But they always seem to define it rather narrowly to direct involvement – as in not effecting someone’s life directly or not infringing on other’s choices directly, but when confronted with indirect effects and infringements brought on my their actions then right wing libertarians become quiet. It is easy to comply with living and let living directly by not personally killing another, but it is also easy to allow others to die indirectly by doing nothing to help such people or even working to make those deaths more likely to happen and in greater numbers.

For example many right wing libertarians are opposed to taxation and such things as a universal healthcare programme. Now the lack of such a scheme in the US has a direct effect on the number of people that die unnecessarily in the US so is right wing libertarian opposition to such schemes directly responsible for those deaths?

Same with gun control, a right wing libertarian that opposes such measures might not directly pull the trigger that kills another but where such a murder that does take place is directly the result of lax or none existent gun control is right wing libertarian opposition to such schemes directly responsible for those deaths?

Now right wing libertarians might argue that such deaths do not conflict directly with the "live and let live" directive but to me that argument seems rather weak.

To me what seems to underpin right wing libertarian philosophy is selfishness it’s about caring for oneself and not caring about what happens to others. It’s about getting what they want without caring about what the consequences might be for others.

 

So are we leaving it to people with money -- money to spare after food and shelter and health care and education and internet tolls -- to determine the transportation infrastructure to be used by all people everywhere? Or will the roads be accessible only by subscribers (the nutty situation we are in with our communication infrastructure now) Really?

Money comes from the government. The government creates money and pays it into the economy. Musk and Bezos don't actually *make* money, they suck it out of the economy after the government creates it and puts it there.

So no. Making transportation infrastructure dependent on the largesse of the wealthy is an absolutely nutty way to run the show.

 

It's come to my attention that the Libertarian party wants a similar tax structure to the republican party.

Now I'm not trying to rag on libertarians; I think they have a revolutionary philosophy - they'd like to implement changes in government.

The arguments against taxation though I believe may be counterproductive to solving the majority of the social problems in modern society - poverty, racial inequality, all of those...

They laissez-faire approach if I have it right.... sort of let nature take its course on those issues, but micromanage economy and taxation, right?

Maybe I have misunderstood.

All I know is once I was approached with a tablet at the school and they were saying "do away with the gas tax" and it was because people couldn't afford it. And I thought, no. That isn't what you can't afford. It's low wages that you can't afford. It's expensive education. It's a litany of fixable, common, and simple things that all require someone to buy in.

 

Libertarians don't give a shyt about any of that.