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The fact that even someone like Noam Chomsky describes himself as as a libertarian socialist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky tells about the dominance of libertarian thought in the US political thinking and of the diversity of libertarian thought too.

However, in common thought libertarianism usually means very liberal economic philosophy that tends to oppose practically every form of government control in economy.

Minarchism, a moderate form of libertarianism acknowledges the necessity of a state government, but claims that it should be minimal and only protect the liberty and property of each individual. They at least admit the fact that we cannot live without laws, legislation, police force etc. However, some right wing libertarians claim that minarchism can actually be closer to Big Government thinking than to genuine libertarian thought. In a similar vein some libertarians themselves claim that anarcho-capitalism is the only logically consistent form of libertarian belief.

Personally I can understand people being afraid of (potentially) totalitarian governments. That understandable fear seems to motivate many libertarians too. But I cannot understand the belief that the economy (big corporations etc.) all by itself, could control crimes and other such bad things in a society without the help of any government control.

Corporations are typically driven by profit as their highest goal, they need not have any higher ideals than that in order to be successful, although many corporations may also have some higher goals like good service to their customers etc.

For example, many very successful international criminal organizations work much like big corporations too. What makes them criminal and different from other business is legislation and government control. In a total anarchy there would be no higher power saying that this or that action would be criminal, practically giving all sorts of criminals free hands to kill, rob and do what ever they wish.

Nowadays almost everyone (except the totalitarian governments themselves) seems to oppose totalitarian governments and supports individual freedoms. However, as to libertarian politics, corrupt corporatocracy is a serious danger too, a weak government controlled by big corporations. I doubt it would support individual liberties and rights much better than a totalitarian state government would, all by itself.

I think the key word here is democracy. People who oppose democracy seem odd to me; they would either like to replace democratically elected governments with some supposedly enlightened elite (basically a one party system) not responsible for its actions to the people, believing that the elite always knows things better than the people do - or they support anarchy and see democracy as a too slow and bureaucratic form of government. However, I'm sure that even primitive stone age people, like all other societies too, had their own kind of very sophisticated social organization and rules and did not live in total anarchy. Organized, transparent and balanced democratic decision making can sometimes seem slow and bureucratic with all its phases of consulting experts and listening to various parties etc. but that may simply be the price to be paid for balanced and good decision making.

Anarchy always seems like a temporary phase in society before people get their society arranged again or someone takes the power by force. Better to hand the power to democratically elected governments that use power transparently, take care of legislation and other basic needs of a society, and are directly responsible to people for their actions than to believe in some Utopian laissez-faire anarchism that would have no laws and no entities to prevent crimes and other counter-constructive actions from hurting everyone.

Edited 2008-09-28 21:41 UTC