The Atlantic Tells Us About “Good” and “Bad” Liberty
(media.communities.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (58)
sorted by:
You should define what you mean by lolberts, because it's a vague made up epithet for an already vague set of ideas held by a broad spectrum of people. But libertarians - except for the fringe "I just want big government to legalize all drugs and guns and shield me from social responsibility" - are individualists, while socialists are collectivists. They may be Liberals, but they couldn't be indistinguishable unless you ignored that most important dimension.
The collectivist-individualist distinction is far less important than one might imagine, in much the same way as the distinction between capitalism and communism isn't particularly important. Lolberts are any of the non-Hoppians as best exemplified by Reason. Rothbard would have called them modal libertarians.
They primarily act as the deterritorialization force within the progressive dialect because they refuse to acknowledge the reality that power and hierarchy exists. Sovereignty cannot be stripped from the state and given to everybody/nobody. It will always be conserved and go somewhere that will recognizably become the State. Communists literally have the same insane goal of flattening society such that sovereignty is dissolved, but with a slightly different road map to get there.