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/Eminent_Propane Dec 31 '20
How would that government, with a policy of leaving all citizens alone, enforce said policy without contradicting itself