this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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Maybe I'm oversimplifying but I tend to think money is the problem. Supposing all wealth were equally distributed, libertarianism makes a lot of sense to me as maximizing personal freedoms. It generally becomes a problem when people use wealth to abuse others, either by hoarding wealth and restricting the freedom of others that way, or by using inequality to purchase things that no person should be able to purchase.
Another thing to keep in mind is that libertarianism wants everyone to focus on the individual, when society itself is an organized group that looks toward the collective (ideally, anyway)
Without guardrails or penalties for being caught, people that abuse the system will hoard wealth and power until they can call the shots
Or get shot , libertairanism slides into feudal/oligarchical structure if left unchecked
These thought experiments are fun and truthful and all but I really dont see much value in this speculation tbh. In my 40something years in different cultures I've became a staunch believer in Golden Mean of politics. Use the right tool for the right job. Times are good - work on more fteedoms, times are harder - maybe it's time to tighten up the belts.
But what if the hard times are caused by rich people abusing the commons? Should we just keep tightening our belts while the rich take more and more?
I agree in general, like if there's a drought expect less food. But most of our scarcity is artificial. I believe there are solutions to the challenge of surviving.
No the golden mean also applies to your example too. If rich get too toxic it's time to bring out guillotines
Oh interesting, that's not what it sounded like. Is that your personal view, or a tenet of the Golden Mean? Is there a particular thinker that you cleave to more than the others?
The Wikipedia page is pretty nebulous on this, other than allowing for a limited aristocracy (and monarchy?? Lol no thanks on that).
I'm not sure how you'd decide exactly how limited this aristocracy is without importing from other philosophies and value systems.
Golden Mean is a philosophy of Aristotel who said that all things have a golden mean (or balance) where existence is optimal.
Basically avoiding any sort of extremism will always be the most efficient path because of uncertainty and imperfection of our existence.
He mostly applied it to virtues of living like justice or wisdom. Sure you can close yourself off and study non-stop or fight all of the injustice in the world without sleep but this is not sustainble and diminishing returns reaches a point where the energy input is no longer returning positive results or even decreasing the overall output.
Imo this applies to basically everything including politics. Because political systems are so complex (and people are so complex) it's imposible to control the systwm without leaving space for imperfection. So you can be a socialist but you still need to respect some individual freedoms, you can be a libertarian but you still have to admit that some things need to be forbidden for smooth sailing basically.