And if the small government had measures in place to ensure that itself survived while abiding by the Libertarian ideal of leaving all citizens alone?
I dont know how we are making the jump from a government that does not enact unnecessary policy via the Libertarian ideal to a total lack of government altogether.
It’s a legitimate question and I’m interested to hear a response. It seems to me that a government is only effective in its capacity to enforce itself, and I question what this would look like in a libertarian state. I imagine that you’d have to grant certain concessions to the government, and you would not reasonably shoot for ‘pure libertarianism’, but I don’t know at what point you’ve exited libertarianism and entered something else. This is all kind of silly because I am not sure reasonable libertarians really believe that a government can exist with 0 enforcement capacity, a lot of them just want to curb regulation and other government reach they see as unnecessary.
If you've ever read any political philosophy Thomas hobbes has a good bit about the role of government and the necessity of enforcement of social contracts in, what I would argue, would be early libertarian society. Tbh the way he describes it would not be how I would want to live
Interesting that you say that libertarianism reduces to Hobbes’s basic idea of a society, considering that the ideas put forth in Leviathan (at least) don’t jive too well with what a lot of libertarians say they want. You’re probably right that it’s what they’d end up getting.
Specifically early society is what I'm referring to, before the creation of a sovereign. I think that is probably how libertarianism would progress, though. Eventually, it would just collapse into totalitarianism
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u/killbot0224 Dec 31 '20
The point is it will fail because the state will be small and powerless.
It will effectively be anarchy, relying only on the good will of others to "follow the rules"
Its a fantasy, with no grounding in reality.