The Libertarian movement wants us to believe that less government implies more freedom, and more freedom implies more happiness. It's so easily stated, what could possibly go wrong?
Their theory is certainly easy to act on. One always knows what to do next: “See government? Apply axe.” Would that the world were simple enough that such a theory could work. No need to be concerned with messy consideration of consequences. Just take it on faith that the consequences will be Good. But will they be?
They apparently want us to accept the premise that freedom for one is freedom for all. Certainly they never discuss freedom as if it might bunch up, with some people getting more of it than another. They speak of freedom always in the unqualified form, not freedom for Joe or freedom for Sally. Just freedom—all by itself. They want us to think it doesn't matter who gets what freedom because freedom just naturally spreads out and reaches every Joe and Sally equally, with no need to be more specific.
Or maybe they just can't bear to see their simple-sounding message messed up by consideration of practical realities. Such simplistic messages seem to exploit the old notion of “out of sight, out of mind.” In other words, a good-sounding political message might be spoiled by mentioning messy realities, so maybe it's better not to mention them. We live in a world of sound bites, after all. Better a simple message that's wrong than a complicated one that's right.
And so a frequent sound bite of the Libertarians is that any government is bad government, and that any imposition of state power on anyone is bad, by definition. It's an easy message for people to want to believe, and so it has gained ground in the mainstream GOP, and even to some degree with Obama and the Democrats. In these times of debt concerns, who wouldn't want to believe that some easily-administered simplification would just fix everything? But can it really?
It just can't be the case that the less government you have, the more freedom everyone has. That would imply that everyone has the most freedom when there is zero government. In other words, it would imply that left to its own devices freedom just distributes itself evenly throughout society. But as I've noted many times: When there are no rules, bullies rule. After all, who's to stop them once you've dismantled government? Removing the imposition of state power won't remove the imposition of power. Power will still exist, it will just be applied by non-state entities.
There's an implication that more freedom implies more happiness. But suppose you're walking down the street and someone walks up and starts to beat you up because of your race or gender or religion. You protest loudly, but there are no police to come to your aid. As you're being beaten into unconsciousness, the bully doing so just chuckles smugly at you and says, “Hey, it's a free country.” By this they may mean, “the governmental checks on my freedom to do arbitrarily bad things has been removed, so why shouldn't I do them?”
The complete absence of government means more freedom for certain individuals sometimes at the expense of the freedom of others. And if freedom is tied up with happiness, then more happiness for some individuals may come at the expense of others. I'm not saying happiness is “zero sum.” That is, I'm not saying the happiness of one person must always come at the expense of the happiness of another. There are certainly many ways to make one or more people happier without diminishing the happiness of others. But I am saying that some happiness can come at the cost of robbing others' happiness, and that bullies seem to have a knack for finding such approaches.
So there is a point below which eliminating government doesn't make things free for all, nor perhaps even free for most. Rather, there is a point below which other individuals and groups and non-governmental organizations, including some businesses, start to act in ways that resemble governments, at least in the ways they throw around power and exercise control.
We're all brought up to believe that, as individuals, our society will allow us some say about the policies that affect us, for example through democratic process. But without a government that stands up to would-be bullies, whether individual or institutional, there's little hope that ordinary people will have any continued say. If there's no governmental check on the private commandeering of our would-be rights, those rights vanish and private entities effectively become our unassailable masters.
In fact, I would say that government's most important role is to ensure that a baseline of rights are maintained for each individual citizen. If you're looking for a sound bite, I'm saying that government's primary role is to stand against bullies. If government can do that, then everyone can have a decent shot at freedom and it doesn't just collect with a few individuals at the expense of the others.
There's a push lately by those same Libertarians to “make government more efficient” by eliminating those parts of government that they seem to think—or want us to think—are just meddling. They are systematically attempting to disable all roles of government that involve telling individuals and businesses what they cannot do. But if you believe my analysis, these are the most important aspects of government.
Over the years, we've painstakingly built up a system of protections for ourselves against bullies, and the Libertarians seem to me to be acting as agents, some witting and some unwitting, of the bullies to dismantle those protections as superfluous. They are not. We have protections for labor, that our workers are not exploited. They want to dismantle that. We have protections for the environment, that we don't sacrifice our long-term future for nearterm financial gain. They want to dismantle that.
Eliminating the aspects of government that protect our most vulnerable people and resources from exploitation isn't a way to get a more efficient government, free of unnecessary expense. It's a way to eliminate the primary function of government, leaving only those aspects of government which aren't a challenge to bullies. In effect, it's the wholesale dismantling of government itself, but offered as a mere cost savings so that people don't question it.
A government “freed” of its ability to put checks on would-be abusers of our human and natural resources will not make most of us more free or more happy. It will make a few free to make the rest of us less free and less happy. We must insist on a government willing to stand up to the bullies before the only freedom many of us are left with is the freedom to be their next victim.
If you got value from this post, please "rate" it.
Further Reading
Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics
on corporations as legal sociopaths.
To Serve Our Citizens
on the agenda to dismantle worker's rights
When Bullies Rule
on Citizens United
Teetering on the Brink of Moral Bankruptcy
on the need for serious banking regulation
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RomanticPoetess
Sandra Stephens
old new lefty
marytkelly
oaxacangringa
CoyoteOldStyle
Salon.com
Comments
“Strict constitutionalists” are fond of the illogical argument that the demands of the Collective impinge on the rights of the Individual. Of course, they do, but that sort of “thinking” is what I call the Libertarian Lunacy, because to make such an argument is to argue against government itself.
The Constitution is as much a defense of the Collective – the Commonweal, if you prefer -- as it is the Individual. Indeed, absent the Collective, the Individual has no rights whatsoever under the law, because the law cannot exist absent the Collective to make, administer and enforce the law. Thus, an argument against demands by the Collective is essentially self-negating.
Libertarians are also blind egotists, as they reject or refuse to see the egotism of the collective goods benefiting everyone. If I were a politician, I'd talk about what 'i' want. The 'i' would be in very large bold typeface.
i want to live in a good house in a good neighborhood. i want to drink pure water and breathe pure unpolluted air. i want my children to go to good schools where they can get the best education they possibly can. i want a decent paying job with humane working conditions and security. i want to live in a place that has good roads, a good police force with a government that i can communicate with and influence in a positive way.
I could go on, but you can see that my individual wants just happen to coincide with a collective need for some kind of reasonable, responsible government that has sufficient funding to regulate otherwise bad behavior that might adversely affect both me and my neighbors' individual wants.
The libertarians of course are but finger puppets doing the bidding of the supercapitalists, who play them as big a bunch of fools as members of the Tea Party.
Unfortunately, until such time as the true nature of 21st Century capitalism is exposed for the demeaning and exploiting system that it is for the vast majority of people, I'm afraid that we're all doomed to tread endlessly of the downward spiral towards the most common denominator.
Complete absense of government is anarchy. Libertarians are not the same as anarchists. The fact that you don't seem to understand the difference, doesn't mean there isn't one.
You say: "government's most important role is to ensure that a baseline of rights are maintained for each individual citizen." Perhaps shockingly (to you?), most libertarians would agree!
Now they would probably disagree with your paragraphs after that sentence, which comes down to which "rights" you think government ought to protect. But when you put up a sentence like that, as though it were in contrast to libertarians, that just seems to show ignorance of actual libertarian positions.
You would not do well in such a test, at the moment.
In that sense, it is like communism--an idea that sounded good at the time because nobody knew any better.
Fortunately, so far, enough Americans are doing well enough to not fall for it in large enough numbers so it is a threat, but that could change since fear and panic are always the operant motivators of the electorate and shit happens. Witness the Tea Party. Witness the demogogues that have so much control.
Don, I'll take up the issue of the baseline of rights in other pieces. I can't do everything in one or people will tune out. I kind of have to chunk it up. I think you're missing my point, though, on this. While it may be they wouldn't cut to zero, they would happily axe the FDA, the EPA, any protections for Labor, etc. Those are not things that were put there casually, and their rhetoric notwithstanding, they are not a plot on the part of the Left to turn the country communist. I think Old New Lefty puts it well when he says that the US has come to have a lot of important social aspects that support modern life, and the idea that these are all errors, unintended because not spelled out by the Founders is just ridiculous. The founders created mechanisms for legislation and courts for judging the validity of those legislative events, and the nation has survived a long time with those things the Libertarians want to cut, not because no one noticed them and not because Due Process did not run. I can understand that they didn't get their way and that they'd like a change, but presenting it honestly would involve saying “We just don't want those things.” not “Those things are invalid and anyway serve no purpose.” While I'm characterizing and paraphrasing, my point is that the Libertarian party line seems to suggest you can know what is right by simple syntactic rules without thinking about consequence. You yourself have frequently made arguments to me that seem to come down to the same thing—a favoritism of process over result, as if the result even if bad must not be second-guessed. I reject that. I don't think individual results should be messed with in most cases, but I do think individual bad results should be tracked and processes adjusted dynamically to accommodate frequent bad results. That's how we got the EPA, the FDA, etc. And for good reason. I don't support removing them, and this tries to express why. Convincing you is not my personal litmust test for success/failure, so I'm OK with the fact that you disagree, and even with the fact that you say why. I've tried to say here why your disagreements don't carry weight with me, and don't expect you to agree. But at least I've said why. Thanks for visiting, by the way. I'm always happy to know these things get a critical read. They certainly are not injured by that.
Now, that's more of a failing of ideology than of libertarianism, which like most ideas, works better as a working guide than as a detailed roadmap.
I argue a lot with a lot of self-professed libertarians, and it invariably comes down to -- government is coercion, and one should never resort first to coercion.
And -- somehow -- we don't need government to protect us from those who DO resort first to coercion. But unlike true anarchists, they don't even have entertaining stories about how that would work.
Now, that's an anarchist position, really, I agree. But it comes from consistently applying libertarian principles, even when they lead to absurd results.
But of course, those stories amount to inventing government, from scratch. And a rational libertarian would accept a government with a limited role.
But rational libertarians don't control the debate, I'm afraid.
Worse, most libertarians are wild-eyed radicals. They want to just flip a switch and ignore the law of unintended consequences. Not many will sit down and discuss tradeoffs, risks, how to evaluate success.
But that's true of all ideologues -- in fact, I would term it the defining characteristic.
I accept individual liberty as one of the values we seek to maximize in society. It is, however, not the only. I have no liberty if I have no personal safety. I have no liberty if I must work in specific jobs in order to have my health care paid for. And while I may have liberty, it nets me little, if I and my children are starving. Liberty is an illusion, if all my waking hours are spent preserving it, because we have no stability.
Liberty is important. But it is not the ONLY thing that is important, and thus the ideology -- not the idea, but the ideology -- of libertarianism, fails.
The problem is that libertarians, who used to be interesting folks who liked to explore how the world could be different, have been displaced by strident radicals, who call themselves libertarians, just as conservatives have been displaced by strident radicals calling themselves conservative.
Often, these are the same people, and I think they're entirely destructive to our political debate. All ideologues are, but these, because they fly under false flags, and displace actual libertarians and conservatives from the debate, are particularly destructive.
I don't see how you can effectively regulate pollution and carbon emissions without a government agency backed up by various laws and regulations. I'd be curious to know if there is a generally accepted Libertarian position on this issue.
Libertarianism seems to depend on the free market being left to its own devices as much as possible. So we get rid of Education departments and let the invisible hand come up with the optimal solution. It would be more reassuring if it could be shown that the better educated societies followed this course.
This is too funny, rather than provide us with a link of an actual libertarian saying some of the stuff you accuse them of saying you just go ahead and fill the void. I see this post as nothing more than a classic straw man argument as seen by the quotes below (I limited myself to the top three but there are dozens in this post):
And so a frequent sound bite of the Libertarians is that any government is bad government, and that any imposition of state power on anyone is bad, by definition.
The complete absence of government means more freedom for certain individuals sometimes at the expense of the freedom of others.
In fact, I would say that government's most important role is to ensure that a baseline of rights are maintained for each individual citizen.
The extremes is unworkable in a civilized society however they can survive as a fringe group and have an impact but if they gain too much power then disaster is inevitable.
A close look at many other lower profile libertarians actually might indicate that some of them are much more reasonable and less extreme. I've encountered some "libertarian anarchists," on the internet as well as "socialist anarchists" and other variations that use many of the same names with different interpretations. In this case the more important thing is to sort through the details regardless of the label.
However when it comes to the highest profile libertarians, which I assume you meant, I agree.
Bob Kerns: You summarize things very well. You're right, that there's a distinction between "rational libertarians", vs. extremists. Although I suppose that's probably true for any popular political philsosophy. Presumably, when attacking a philosophy, one would want to attack its strongest arguments, rather than pick on the wackos at the fringe.
But if we dig a bit deeper and introduce known human nature, we easily arrive at anarchy as, again, a consequence.
If we attack libertarian philosophy (it is a philosophy, but just barely), we focus on the fact it's ignorant of power, dysfunctional and would have to be applied by violating its own admonition against coercion, as most people don't want it. It's been some 170 years since the roots of libertarianism (classical liberalism) sprouted, yet no society has been foolish enough to adopt it.
Libertarianism is a theory of liberty for the sake of theories of liberty. It is an abstraction that could only exist in a society of True Believer Libertarians. In the history of the vastly superior Liberal philosophy, the same observation is applied to the only way a Christian theocracy could function.
Because that describes either a very small society or an abstract construction, libertarianism is entirely unfit as a organizing principle or an un-governing governing system.
Or, as I am prone to say:
Libertarianism isn't designed to work and meets all of its design requirements.
Another knock against that heterodox ideology-parading-as-philosophy is it rejects the American system of liberal social contract philosophy, aka the Constitution. Nothing funnier than some libertarian saying they are constitutionalists. That means they don't know what libertarianism is or the basis of the Constitution. Just as false is saying The Founders were Libertarians. That's just out-and-out bullshit.
PS--Let us not quibble over the various hyphenations of libertarianism. The LP version -- Right Libertarianism -- is, practically speaking, the only game in town.
Well said. There's a blogger on OS who speaks of his "conversion" to libertarianism without a touch of irony. My observation is many "believers" use it as a secular religion unaware of their hypocrasy given the reality of their lives and what govt. provides.
And what's scary about that is there's no argument with another man's faith. It's ultimately where fanaticism comes from as we have now seen better than ever before in our lifetime. My final contention with them is to give credit to god for what is god's and man for what is man's.
I give the movement a name but not to dismiss it per se. I give it a name because sentences get too long when I keep having to say “those guys who keep wanting to slash our government.” I'm rounding off, but I think not unfairly. My sentences would make sense even if you replaced Libertarians with “axers” or “minimalists” or whatever.
There is one sense in which the actual fact of Libertarianism matters, and that's that people often don't vote a whole ticket. They vote for an issue or two that they care about. And right now I think a lot of Ron Paul supporters are really just people who want an end to the war on drugs or an end to the military wars or some sort of reduced invasion of Privacy. Heck, I want all of those things. But I won't vote for Ron Paul or his ilk because the cost of the extra baggage is too high for me, while I think other people are ignoring those other baggage issues (elimination of government agencies) whether because they just don't realize they're there or they don't understand the significance of those. And yet the people who would actually get elected on such a platform would claim mandate on their entire platform, just as when the GOP swept the recent election, taking control of the House, people were voting their pocketbooks and the GOP immediately started passing morality cleanups instead of economic issues. That inability to go a la carte and need to talk whole tickets is a serious problem, and for that reason the Libertarian ticket is a problem because the individuals running on that ticket are not even bound by the platform and may deviate in ways you may wish to defend as “not really Libertarianism” but it won't matter if those people get elected and start meddling.
And, incidentally, you try to label me a lot, and I'd think unfairly. I presume you don't think it unfair but merely expedient. But it allows you to dismiss my ideas more readily because you want to say “oh, this is a piece about Libertarianism and since he doesn't understand what a real Libertarian is, I can safely assume there is nothing here to debate” or you can safely assume that I am not debating it right or whatever. I'll take some credit for the confusion in bad writing if you don't see my point is not about that party, but by your aggressive desire to go meta and quasi-ad hominem to critique my understanding, my approach, etc. rather than just answering to the issues I raise, you really drag the discussion far afield from its intent. If you agree that government should not be cut beyond a line, just say so. Don't say something mysterious about how since I don't understand, I don't see the line. You didn't say where the line was for you, perhaps because you don't want to debate it. All you did say was that the Constitution was irrelevant, a statement I'm pretty confident a lot of Libertarians would disagree with you on.
In the end, I think the problem is that you and I have a fundamentally different view of risk itself. You appear to think that if there is a possible confusion, and people might deviate from the ideal, it's safe to assume that the ideal will prevail an the deviations are ignorable. So you're comfortable with a vague term libertarian which you think has some standard definition and some large group of people who seem to agree with that, and that somehow—I don't know what—market forces?—something will rein the deviations back in. I, on the other hand, am making the point that when you amass your followers by sound bite, there is a huge opportunity for confusion about what the rules of the game are.
You're perhaps familiar with the way the term “hacker” was co-opted by the world from its original benign meaning. I'm still one of those that clings to the old-school use of it as merely a doer of great deeds. But I don't kid myself into thinking I can engage in a conversation with a normal person in the real world and correct them every time they use the word. They own the word by virtue of their numbers and use it in the way they do. I can remark on my own meaning as a fun story at a cocktail party, but that doesn't make every sentence they use with the word hacker in it wrong because secretly they don't know the Right meaning. I feel the same about your scholarly understanding of libertarianism. I don't think there is a central meaning, and if there is a central meaning, the only rule that passes a “prisoner's dilemma” test (which is what's required for a huge mass of people to converge on a meaning on their own without having a big national convention to sort the word meaning out) is the constitution. Which is why you so often see people saying that they should cut all kinds of things because they were not in the constitution. If you think there's another well-understood and well-accepted line, I'd like to know it. And I'd like proof that the average person on the street who says the align with libertarians knows it too so I can feel comfortable that your normative definition has any consequence at all. I do not see that in their movement. I see a hunger for simple truths in a complex world people would rather not understand.
(I think the Dems have made a tactical mistake in not embracing an end to the drug war, not being more quick/believable about ending the Iraq/Afghanistan conflict, and pushing on things like torture and the Patriot act. All of these things are not incompatible with the Democratic position, only with standing Democratic policy.)
I think you're right that as fear closes in, and I think it will due to food, fuel, and climate issues, people will reach for simplistic solutions such as those the Libertarians offer. The rhetoric of the Libertarian party glosses the difference between the good of the nation and the good of its individual people; they talk in a way that often makes you think they are the same. But in fact a lot of people may be swamped by the ill winds that blow in the name of the good of the nation... metaphorically, it would likely not be dissimilar to the way the Patriot Act has made us all less safe and more personally invaded in the name of safety and keeping invaders at bay; the Libertarians promise an analogous approach to making us happier and more able to afford things, which I suspect will make us less happy and less able to afford things.
And you're right, since it's a faith thing, there's very little argument to be made. There is no mechanism to this. And if there are casualty's, we probably won't hear “God's will” but we will hear “it's what you elected.” A lot of the Libertarian plan will end up giving people impossible choices so that when they choose one of them rather than saying government did it to you (what you'd say if there were only one bad choice), they'll smugly say that you chose it (the one of several bad choices)... not that much of an improvement.
I also agree with you that liberty is just one of many values people have. That's not to say people don't value it, but they either need to assure their other needs or they need to assure that liberty will lead to the assurance of their needs before it can really matter.
It's kind of like language itself. We have dictionaries and occasionally go to a dictionary to settle a dispute. But, frankly, I only trust dictionaries that aggressively seek new uses because those that try to be normative, since who really learns language from a dictionary, so why on earth would we think a dictionary is the right way to know what a word really means unless it's busy studying us rather than lecturing us. Same with political parties. They fancy themselves things that tell us what we think, since we foolishly call them leaders. But they ought to listen more and say less and we'd go far.
The point is I would still rather vote for a politican, like Obama, than an ideologue like Bush. The problem is in how much leeway they have based on who elects them and pays for them. I'm not sure the actual "issues" matter so much any more. The Rove coalition I think especially changed all that. They won't allow anyone to govern but themselves for reasons that have nothing to do with what will benefit the country.
Perhaps, the best that could happen is if the Libertarians start a third party, but it's not likely given GOP solidarity, and the fear that create it as outlined recently by Pat Buchanan in his new book.
Guilty as charged. But that's because I have come to realize that you're not interested in perspectives different from your own. It appears to me, through your (past) actions, that you mostly rationalize gut feelings that you already have, rather than honestly work to understand the point of view of those who disagree with you. You find it "tiring", and find it easier to just label those others as a kind of "evil", rather than actually understand what they're trying to say.
So yes, I've given up trying to discuss the content of real issues with you.
I commented on this post, because the entire first half was apparently about what libertarians believe, but you seemed to have very little understanding of the core of libertarian philosophy (much of, but not all of which, I respect a great deal).
Now you say that the post was "really" about the FDA and EPA? But you didn't even mention those organizations until the comments! (The closest you got were some lines at the end about protections for labor and the environment, but if that was your main point, you really buried the lede.)
"the Constitution was irrelevant"
Did you even do the most basic research? Check out wikipedia on libertarianism. Pages and pages of content there, covering centuries, and the only mention of the US Constitution is in the description of the recent Tea Party political movement in the US. It's true, the Tea Party does talk a lot about the Constitution. Perhaps that's the label you should have used?
There's a relationship there, but it's hardly the case that Tea Party = libertarianism.
"You appear to think that if there is a possible confusion, and people might deviate from the ideal, it's safe to assume that the ideal will prevail an the deviations are ignorable."
Nope!
(Well, I don't know how I appear, but it's not at all how I do in fact think.)
"If you think there's another well-understood and well-accepted line, I'd like to know it."
Try Paul J. O'Rourke's first paragraph in the comments above. He's highly critical of libertarianism, but at least he knows what he's arguing against.
"Libertarianism is the Scientology of politics."
“The only good government is the one that is so limited that you can't even tell it's there, and let's you succeed or fail on your own.”
I agree that the US Constitution has nothing to do with libertarianism, but a quick Google search leads to several websites that link the U.S. Constitution to the libertarian ‘philosophy’ (very short excerpt):
Is the U.S. Constitution Libertarian?
Libertarian Party (US) (Wikipedia)
http://www.lp.org/search/node/constitution (search word constitution)
Part II to follow.
http://www.tomwoods.com/
http://mises.org/journals/jls/19_2/19_2_6.pdf
Since Paul was mentioned above, Don may be interested to read the numerous comments written by libertarians (all followers of Tom Woods) on his piece:
Ron Paul Says Founders Ignorant of Constitution
You say that perhaps you misused the term "libertarian". So let's pretend you never wrote that. You say that your real point was about how government protects us from bullies.
Think about it this way: government can protect us from Others, or from Ourselves. You seem to have considered only the two cases: either government protects us from both, or from neither. You gain our sympathy by suggesting how horrible society would be if Others (strong bullies) imposed their will on us. But then at the end, you conclude that therefore government ought to protect us from Ourselves (FDA, etc.).
There is an intermediate political philosophy. It is possible for government to protect us from Others, but not from Ourselves. This would imply strong support for national defense and police forces, but at the same time a rejection of the FDA, the war on drugs, foreign wars of choice, anti-prostitution, etc. You should think of it as the "everybody should just leave me alone" philosophy. Also sometimes expressed as, "everyone can do whatever they want, as long as their actions do not directly infringe on the rights of others". And, in particular, any mutually agreeable contract between two consenting adults is valid.
(Topics like "pollution" make this more complex, and these people generally suggest market-based solutions to such problems, but that's too much detail to go into right now.)
People who hold these kinds of intermediate views (halfway between anarchy, and Big Government), generally label themselves as "libertarian". (Sometimes, "small-L libertarian", to distance themselves from the official US Libertarian political party.) Anyway, libertarian political philosophy, which you don't seem to have considered in your original post, is an interesting intermediate perspective to consider. You should check it out.
I don't recall saying I had misused the term Libertarian, since I don't recall acknowledging that there can be a canonically correct arbiter of who is right and who is wrong in their use. There may be traditional meanings, but I don't think the evidence shows that people follow those. I said and will say again that I used the term as the name for a group I wanted to talk about. That you don't like my chosen name for that group is of little consequence to me, other than that it confused you. I clarified my meaning and having done so think it's an irrelevance and a distraction to discuss the matter further.
You are further incorrect in thinking that I think there are only two positions. I commonly complain that there are many positions, and it is the rhetoric of the Right, not of the Democrats and not of me, to say that there is only one position. That's because the people who are trying to pin people into something they can dismiss are the Right, who want things to be in crystal clear form. I think the world is messy and full of hybrids. I defend the right of Labor Unions to exist but I don't mean to defend every labor union policy. I defend the need for the FDA without regard to whether every action of the FDA being what I want. I want there to be such an agency, but that is not a binary matter in that endorsing the existence of an organization is not endorsing its every policy. I want someone who is paid to think about these matters though. But that's still a wide space.
I think government should be minimal, but not necessarily small. Minimal might be large. I have a theory of things government should do, and it includes things people can't do on their own. Defending the food supply and the environment are things I cannot as an individual consumer do for myself. How that defense is mounted the legitimate topic of discussion (elsewhere). But it would be wrong to assume that you can infer from my support of the organizations that I am in lockstep with them in every detail.
For what it's worth, I also support the continued survival of labor unions even though as soon as their continued survival is assured you'd find that I have some beefs with details of how some of them work. I would rather live in a world with unions rather than without, but that doesn't mean I endorse their every position. I don't want to discuss that position either, but I offer it as an example of what I mean when I say it's not binary.
Libertarianism has two main justifications: consequentialist and libertarian moralism (natural-rights libertarianism). I don't buy the argument that there is so many different libertarians that you can only pick the easiest one. Libertarian moralism is huge deal in the US (sometimes goes with the names like libertarian consititutionalism)
You are arguing only against consequentialists justification. What you discover very fast if you are actually debating with them is that if consequentialist argument succeeds, natural-rights libertarianism takes its place.
Libertarianism has very strong normative component based on morality. Basically the idea is that humans have certain natural-rights (property is fundamental right). If you set up the game (society) in libertarian way and don't violate the rules of the game, any way of playing the game is within the rights of the individual. You can bully people if you do it within the rules. More freedom does not automatically imply more happiness, it's up to the people to win or lose in the game. Losing in the game equals deserving to lose.
Confronted by Hypocrisy
"…Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who has compared Social Security to slavery, and had just gone on a long exposition about how it was unconstitutional, abrogated our freedoms and was just a downright terrible idea in general….
…I bet you know the answer. Of course Ron Paul cashes his Social Security checks. Sure, he has the means not to have to accept them. As a former doctor, and from those kindly old newsletters he published in the 1990s that helpfully warned us about all those criminally inclined and "fleet of foot" black men walking - or perhaps running - among us. But much like his idol, the late Ayn Rand, who thought Social Security was evil, until she accepted it and Medicare under her husband's name, and more recently Congressman Paul Ryan, who utilized Social Security survivor benefits to attend college, Ron Paul is a hypocrite of the highest order."