I understand the appeal of libertarian ideas for the autistic anti-authoritatian types but ultimately think that they are impractical, juvenile, miss the bigger picture and will never reach broad acceptance. Wordcels like Rand, Hoppe, Rothbard, Huerta de Soto and Miguel Anxo Bastos embody this contradiction by preaching rugged individualism from the comfort of state-subsidized systems they condemn. Societies built upon these principles have turned out to be a failure except for the elite.
Discussion
Few
Can you cite a single system that has not led to failure except for the elite?
Well, no. He's just making the point that these aren't an exception.
There is no elite in a free world. This is the point. Elites are the ones able to rob the others without suffering any consequences because of democracy who legitimize theft.
This is where come "the elite", from the ability to rob the others "legally".
Any power can legitimize theft. Might makes right.
There are mightier and weaker persons in the Natural state. Democracy doesn't need to create that.
Bitcoin incentivizes taking control of all (earthly) Might.
5 weak men are always stronger that any powerful man.
You don't have a monopoly of violence in a free world.
Even the most powerful, are much less powerful in a society where competition is everywhere, that in a world where monopolies are legitimized and praised by people who are afraid of those same monopolies.
Weak men tend to follow powerful men. The idea that everyone has equal leadership qualities and charisma is fundamentally flawed.
Libertarianism depends upon this logical crutch of humans being interchangeable blank slates.
Just have to look at Nostr. No official CEO, but Jack is pushing 300k followers and calls all of the shots. Odell is right behind him.
This is simply how humans _always_ are.
doesn't change the fact that when they are wrong about something eventually reason prevails and the leadership thus becomes one of ideas, not personality.
also, just look at the history of the initiatives that were inspired by these guys. almost none of them lasted. this bitch@ thing will be no different, because it fundamentally has no legitimate use case.
yes, weak people follow leaders, but strong people follow God and the words He speaks.
christianity is one of the most durable error correction protocols for social order that has existed in all human history. over 2000 years old now.
Leadership is primarily "personality", not ideas. Or, rather, it's "ethos" and a bit of "pathos". "Logos" serves the other two. That's what Aristotle taught in the Rhetoric and humans haven't changed much, since then.
Christians follow Christ. We believe the Word because it comes from Him.
Palavra de Deus is how they say it in portuguese
but there's all that identity politics around that, just pointing out the Word is from God.
there's a lot of people who equivocate about the hierarchy of Authority but at least they generally don't say that men > God. but the hole they open in it is wide enough to fit Sin through and i'm not having that.
i follow no man. but neither do i fight them when they sin. i yell at them. like a good polemicist. unless they get close to me then i turn on the charm. ;)
At the opposite it's socialism and keynesianism which rely on the false premices that humans are interchangeable.
Not libertarianism which glorifies individualism precisely because humans are not equals and have different yearnings and needs.
Libertarisnism just explains that putting a monopoly in place by default to avoid ...monopolies is moronic and can't work (in addtion to be completly immoral of course).
Who watch the watchmen ? Did you ever asked that to yourself ? Their is no government composed of divine angels, just men with all their flaws.
So discouraging any competition in any field at all, is at best dumb, at worst evil.
The millennial reign.
Which specific societies have been built on the principles of, say, Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism or Ayn Rand's objectivism?
Sad and depressing to think that you need masters that rob you to live your life 🤣
There is no single society that have ever been build on the non agression principle. You might think it's not possible, that it doesn't work for some strange reason. But I think otherwise.
And one of the most obvious proof that it can work, is that their is no collectivist cunt out there, that is intellectually honest enough to allow secession and let us do our own shit without robbing us.
Like all communists parasites, they perfectly know that if they let it happen, their taxable cattle will be gone pretty soon.
Anyway that you want it or not you will not have my sats, I promess. You are missing the big picture. Bitcoin fixes parasitism.
Learned lack of imagination and creativity let's us believe that the best we can *ever* come up with is a barbarian state where aggression, abuse, extortion and theft is at the base of what makes "society" work.
I refuse to believe we came here to repeat this dogma for infinity.
And cowardice too. Cause being free is also being responsible of many more things.
It's like asking people to stop believing in god when it's obvious that at least the god they worship can't be real.
It's like asking Cypher in the Matrix to accept that he is a slave. He just can't a prefer forget about everything and continue the rat race forever.
People just can't, and prefer continue to believe that they live in the best system possible, that those speaking and thinking about freedom are delusional incels.
Even if history shows them again and again that the society they take for granted and immutable drastically changes every few decades in ways their weak mind can't even imagine.
Anyway as I said Bitcoin fixes this.
Try to asked that quest to Ai.. they are become neurotic
i don't think you are portraying the life situation of those guys very accurately. you didn't mention mises. mises only narrowly escaped from being arrested by the gestapo and his library was torched. and they certainly didn't get much support from academia or else explain why the nearest you heard of them was Rand from Reagan and Thatcher until Ron Paul started talking about them.
and you didn't mention any of the new guys, like Jeffrey Tucker who entirely lives from his publishing and speaking.
Perhaps my ad-hominem was not super accurate but those I mentioned did many things that were in direct contradiction with their ideas. Huge respect for those who practice what they preach.
i'm not gonna disagree with that entirely but likely they paid for their education and whatever amount of tenure they got was probably merited and you can't really say a bad thing about a university that would tenure these kind of people as professors.
it does have bearing that the education system was not the commie rathole it is now before the 80s. it was less commie. more of it was privately funded. less of the research was paid for under the table to sell products to get approved by the FDA.
“Societies built upon these principles have turned out to be a failure except for the elite.”
I’d be very curious to hear which societies you think were built on the principles of liberty and free trade that were total failures run by the elite. Then of course the ones run by central government and controlled markets that were the comparable successes. 🤔
I never proposed controlled markets and centralized government. In fact I think the combination of laissez-faire capitalism, direct democracy and a strong social safety net is the best system we've created so far. See Denmark, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands or Switzerland.
Countries like the US put the focus on laissez-faire capitalism and offer a very thin social safety net that leaves the less able or lucky behind and is ran by oligarchs and corporations.
I guess you've never been to these countries, romanticising what you read, maybe a little bit better than the place you currently live.
Many European states turned outright autorcatic during the last years. Including the ones mentioned.
I visited them all and lived in one of them for a year.
One example please…
Austrian economist wordcels printing "Do as thou wilt" books like the ECB prints dineros.
🖨️🖨️🖨️🖨️🖨️
I find their discourse very naive, we find joy an meaning in our relationship with others: couples, families, frens, neighborhoods, towns, countries. Communities, not just individuals.
I recently came across an open-source book project called Plurality that critiques both libertarianism and technocracy—not just in terms of who holds power, but in how they imagine society. Both reduce the world to isolated individuals (atoms) and a collective system (whether centrally planned or market-driven). They mainly differ in who commands authority, not how authority actually emerges.
Plurality proposes something different: decentralized democracy rooted in relationships—between people, communities, and their environments. It suggests governance should emerge from these interactions, not from abstract ideals of either individualism or centralized control.
Interestingly, this relational philosophy aligns more with how Bitcoin actually works: not top-down, not purely individualist, but through a decentralized network of mutual verification, incentives, and evolving consensus.
very interesting viewpoint! where can I find the book?
You can download it from their website for free or buy a printed copy in most bookstores. Cool that you are interested to look into it. Once you’ve read it, let me know what you think!
Strong individuals are the basis for voluntary interaction in groups/communities, which lays the ground for voluntary interaction within communities of communities.
Replace aggression with voluntary interaction and you can start calling what you built a society over a sack of barbarians.
It all begins with courageous autonomous individuals.
You raise a compelling point—and decentralized democracy doesn’t necessarily disagree with the value of strong, autonomous individuals. But it does challenge the idea that such individuals exist prior to their social context.
Instead of starting with the individual as an isolated atom, decentralized democracy asks: what actually constitutes an individual? It suggests that autonomy emerges from relationships—especially through one’s relation to property, expression, and influence. These aren’t just things an individual “has”; they’re co-shaped through interaction with others and the world.
In this view, society isn’t built on individuals—it’s built through the relational processes that allow individuality to emerge in the first place.
Who is John Galt?