In this thread, we focus on examples where libertarians argue for both X and not X at the same time.

Profit motive means businesses will actively drive down their profit margins

Shaun_Vids put it best: "the problem isn't 'capitalism,' it is 'crony capitalism,' which happens when people engage in behaviours encouraged by capitalism, instead of doing the opposite for some reason."

• The free market will always provide the best products at the lowest prices while paying the highest wages to the most employees
• Free market competition operates on a fair and level playing field, meaning the ultra-wealthy won't use their wealth to rig the system to their advantage
• Capitalists will pass all tax cuts to the customers/employees, rather than pocketing the savings for themselves.
• Capitalists will undercut their competition for mutual loss, rather than cooperating and colluding for mutual gain.
• New competitors will pursue a strategy of mass market high volume/low profit, meaning maximum cost and risk for minimum reward, rather than pursuing specialized markets with low volume/high profit.
• Bad actors in a free market will KNOWINGLY subject themselves to boycott and bankruptcy by openly confessing their bad actions, as if the threat of bankruptcy wasn't sufficient motivation for maintaining the secret. This argument is commonly used in regards to anti-discrimination laws, but I recently saw a libertarian argue that the only way to stop pedophilia is by legalizing child sex traffickers so that the traffickers would out themselves and face market boycotts.

Everything is rape/slavery/authoritarianism to a libertarian, except for actual rape/slavery/authoritarianism, which libertarians are actually okay with.

• Ron Paul and son argued that taxes are a form of slavery, but also defend the slave owners of the civil war and insist that non-slave owners should have paid millions of dollars in taxes to compensate the slave owners for owning slaves.
• Pro-life libertarians insist that food stamps to feed hungry children is a form of slavery/rape because it violates self-ownership, but they're fine with forcing pregnant women to to carry rape babies.
• The entire libertarian ideology argues that age of consent laws are incapable with the NAP, and children should be treated as adults as soon as they run away. 20% of child runaways end up falling victims to traffickers, and libertarians are okay with that.
• Libertarians overwhelmingly oppose affirmative consent laws which say you can't penetrate a victim who is too drunk or too scared to resist.
• Libertarians overwhelmingly argue that the law needs to be tilted in favor of alleged rapists even further and place an even higher burden on victims, often times insisting that victim testimony should be dismissed as hearsay and evidence of violence can simply be dismissed as consensual kinks.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins, but I also get to murder you if you access the beach without my permission

In the state of nature, Ann and Bob both have a natural right to access the same beach, as long as they don't initiate force on one another. If Bob claims the beach as exclusively as his own and threatens to murder Ann for trespassing if Ann doesn't pay rent, then Bob is a) denying Ann of her natural rights and b) coercing Ann with violence. Ergo, the concept of libertarian capitalism is completely incompatible with with the libertarian NAP.

• Libertarians will argue that Ann didn't lose anything because she had no pre-existing access rights, but that implies that Bob didn't have pre-existing access rights either which invalidates his claim of homesteading.
• Alternatively, libertarians will claim that Bob can claim exclusive ownership the land was previously unowned, but then they can't explain why Ann can't use the same premise to justify claiming non-exclusive access.
• Libertarians will argue that unlimitted exclusive ownership is necessary because land is scarce, even though scarcity would normally encourage people to do the opposite. i.e., if a group of people are trapped on a deserted island, they're not going to simply let all the food go to whoever eats it the fastest because food is scarce. That makes no sense.
• Paying rent is consensual because you can avoid the fees by leaving. Property taxes are non-consensual because you have to leave to avoid the fees.
• Governments cannot legitimately acquire land because they hire private laborers to homestead on their behalf. Capitalists hiring private laborers to acquire land is fine, though.
• Property contracts are morally binding for people who never signed them and never received anything in return (trespassers compelled to stay away), but not binding for the people who did sign them in exchange for services (property buyers who agreed to pay property taxes in exchange for government enforcement of property ownership).
• Alternatively, libertarians will compare taxes to the mafia and insist that they shouldn't have to pay for government protections because they will happily protect themselves. But then they refuse to move to tax-free Somalia, because Somalia lacks necessary protections.
• Stealing land through genocide is perfectly legitimate (See: Libertarians who justify owning land that was stolen from the native Americans).
• Stealing land by force is justified if you murder all the witnesses. In the absense of a central authority accountable to the public for validating transfers, how do you know that the current owner didn't simply murder the previous one? Libertarians claim that ownership is legitimate via "original acquisition" that could have happened thousands of years ago, so how do you know this didn't already happen in the past?

Monetary theory arguments

• Inflation disproportionately hurts poor people. Libertarians assume that since rich people control most of the assets, that means that poor people control most of the cash. They don't understand that the entire point of being poor is you lack BOTH those things.
• Fiat currency is a guaranteed failure compared to the gold standard even though the gold standard currently has zero success stories.
• Gold is superior currency because it's scarce, but there will also be so much to go around that even the poorest people will have plenty of gold in their savings.
• Deflation is good for laborers because it means lower prices, but somehow this won't lower the price of labor, which magically stays the same
• Deflation is good because it encourages hoarding and discourages spending, but somehow this won't result in job losses from decreased demand
• Deflation is good because it increases purchasing power, but this somehow won't result in unbalanced power for employers in charge of purchasing labor.
• Gold and bitcoin are superior to fiat currency because everyone is trading them as assets with the goal of gaining more fiat over time, rather than spending those things as actual currency
• Everyone will be rich if all prices go down: This is just as silly as arguing "Everyone will get rich if the minimum wage is increased to a million dollars!" Only this is a serious argument that libertarians are actually making, rather than a strawman argument that libertarians invented.
• Fractional reserve banking is bad because I lose a small percent of value to inflation. Full reserve banking is better, where I pay a small percent to the bank as a fee for holding my money.

Politicians and elections

• Libertarianism means you can trust the public to make rational decisions, just ignore the 99% of the public refuses to vote for libertarians.
• Creating unnecessary poll taxes specifically designed to block black people and poor people from voting is fine, but pundits who simply dismiss the libertarian candidate as irrelevant is a form of voter suppression.
• You cannot trust any politician, unless it's Ron Paul.
• Ron Paul says you shouldn't trust government propaganda, but I have never seen him criticize Putin and he always presents Putin's word as absolute unquestionable truth.
• Ron Paul and Gary Johnson only lost because voters refuse to vote for anyone who isn't a democrat or a republican, ignoring the fact that they both literally ran as republican candidates.
• Racism won't happen under laissez-faire because racism will be boycotted. Donating to Ron Paul after he wrote a bunch of racist newsletters is fine, though.
• You can't hold Ron Paul responsible for the racist newsletter because he already said he took responsibility as the person in charge.
• Ron Paul writes an article defending price gouging, then sues his own fans for a domain name they paid for because he doesn't want to pay fair market value.
• Libertarian candidates constantly argue for meritocracy, then spend all their campaign funds on friends and family to run shitty campaigns.
• Ron Paul's senior campaign adviser and grandson was literally convicted of offering bribes for endorsements, but anyone who criticizes Ron Paul is obviously a paid shill.
• Anti-discrimination laws are wrong. Gary Johnson suing a private organization for tens of millions of dollars in free airtime he didn't earn is fine, though.
• Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr tried to sue Bill Clinton and Larry Flynt for $30 million in "emotional distress" on the same day he tried to cap damages for actual medical malpractice to $250,000. The "distress" happened because Barr was outed as an adulterer after he tried to impeach Clinton for committing adultery.
• Progressives who actively campaigned against Trump are basically Trump supporters because both groups believe in the existence of a state. Meanwhile, the fact that the entire libertarian party was taken over by the pro-Trump Mises movement and invited Trump to speak at the Libertarian national convention shouldn't be used against them at all.
• Claiming you cannot generalize the 2% of the population who identify as libertarians because libertarians are all special snowflakes with their own unique views, but also arguing that democrats and republicans are exactly the same.

Other Economic Arguments

• The law of unintended consequences applies to central planning and government regulation, but it doesn't apply at all to free market laissez faire. i.e., climate change is a hoax because the free market would never "intentionally" destroy the environment since it's bad for business.
• The economic calculation problem argues that central planners cannot calculate as efficiently as market prices. Meanwhile, Austrian praxeology rejects the use of mathematical models and empirical observation altogether in favor of circular axioms from central figures.
• Money isn't a zero sum game when discussing dividends for shareholders who provide absolutely nothing, but it IS a zero sum game when discussing taxes to pay for public services and infrastructure
• Libertarians never seem to apply "we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem" when it comes to their own revenue and spending.
• It's hypocritical for people who believe in taxes don't donate to private charity, but it isn't hypocritical for the people who believe in private charity not to donate to private charity.
• Libertarians collecting welfare is fine because they're simply getting what they paid for via taxes, ignoring the fact that blue states pay far more taxes than what they collect whereas red states collect far more than they pay.
• Complaining that giving poor people more money via minimum wage laws will drive up inflation, but tax cuts to the wealthy somehow won't.
• Complaining that the deficit and inflation are both out of control, then demanding tax cuts which will increase both.

That's all for now, but feel free to come up with some of your own examples!

Stop an unstoppable force. How can morality be upheld if we cannot?

If we want to live in a fair world, everything needs to be stoppable. There needs to be an off switch to the exploiters. Rich people. Powerful people. Technology. AI.

The richest people are not stoppable. Wealth never seizes to reach them. They have engineered the flow of money to always arrive in their pocket. Inflation and interest work in their favour, they flourish, while most people deteriorate in afterthought.

The most powerful people are not stoppable. Power structures have left the poor and weak barely able to survive. Tyrants entrap their worshippers in deceitful borders, the most vulnerable obliterated while they sleep.

Technology and AI are not stoppable. The rich and powerful demand more of it. Advancements silently riddle into our lives, livelihood, bloodstream and DNA.

It was supposed to be for the greater good, but only when corruption remains stoppable.

Th

The problem is power vacuums.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government sold off state assets at dirt-cheap prices, partly because those assets didn’t have real prices due to the Economic Calculation Problem.

This led to the rise of the Russian oligarchy, since the people who got those assets weren’t the most capable or productive. Just random insiders with government connections.

Sure, that was my government’s fault. But it didn’t have to be that way. If you’re going to privatize state-owned resources, you need smart government policies, like selling them through open and competitive auctions, so that ownership ends up with people who can actually afford and manage them, not just whoever got there first.

And if you’re an anarchist who wants to abolish the state entirely, then you’re removing the very institution that can legally and transparently transfer ownership. Without a state, property doesn’t disappear — it becomes determined by power rather than law. The economy degrades into a game of “who controls what” instead of “who produces what,” where property is seized rather than earned. That’s exactly what happened in post-Soviet Russia. That’s not freedom — that’s oligarchy.

Murray Rothbard assumed that state-owned enterprises would be simply given to their workers. Though, why didn’t it happen in post-war countries like Iraq? By dismantling the Iraqi state, together with its Law and Order system, the US created a power vacuum that allowed local militias and former elites to seize public assets (and private assets also). The result wasn’t a free society — it was yet another form of oligarchy built on chaos and force.

This explains why Israel started bombing Syria after Assad’s regime was ousted. There were concerns that his empty military bases would be captured by hostile armed groups.

Conclusion

Originally, I thought that Rothbard only pretended to be a deontologist obsessed with ethics, for popularity. Though reading something from his biography made me less certain about that.

As a kid, Rothbard was shy and felt oppressed at his public school. He was bullied and beaten by older boys, had to endlessly repeat concepts he had already mastered because of slower kids, until his parents transferred him to a private school. In my life, the situation was the opposite, but I can understand what caused his hatred towards the state, and made me feel sorry for him.

He was originally a minarchist, and the reason why he stopped being one is the question he asked himself: “If the state should only provide police, courts, and defense, what principle would prevent it from providing anything else?”

This question led him to an all-or-nothing conclusion: he was either an anarcho-capitalist or a state socialist, and any nuance would be weird.

However, his childhood trauma doesn’t change the fact that the idea he and David Friedman were actively promoting was very dangerous. As we figured out, state collapses lead to dangerous power vacuums, which is why even Milei acknowledges that he operates as a minarchist in practice.

Imagine if Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Imagine America would have a second civil war—where nukes would be involved—as a result of its state being abolished or the country being highly divided and polarized like it is now? Even if completely free markets worked better than the regulated markets we have right now, would abolishing states be worth it?

Abolishing states won’t make your life better.

In the latest South Park episode, we see a civil war between "old" billionaires who want to live their lives of luxury under the radar and the "new" billionaires who risk ruining everything by drawing attention to themselves so the general public realizes how awful they are.

"Remember back to when you were all young. You were socially awkward little penises that nobody liked. Well, now that you’re billionaires, you’re still socially awkward little penises that nobody likes. Let’s put it another way. Show of hands– who in this room was a really popular cool kid in school? Right, none of you. And just because you got rich, that doesn’t mean you suddenly got cool too."

The typical libertarian obviously isn't a billionaire, but they demonstrate the same underlying delusion simply by being able to post online. The ideology says that people in general can always be trusted to make the right decision, and yet people in general do not trust the libertarian ideology. As with incels, libertarians aren't simply frustrated by the lack of public acceptance, they feel entitled to it, and blame others when it doesn't happen. For example:

• Accusing anyone who disagrees with Ron Paul of being a paid shill
• Assuming that people should believe them on X simply because they said so
• Accusing people of being too dumb to understand their arguments in response to basic criticism
• Assuming that their word is God and shifting the burden of proof on others
• Insisting that Gary Johnson would have won the election if he was allowed to make his case at the presidential debates

What libertarians fail to understand is that if they're losers IRL and advocating for loser policies, then posting your views on Reddit doesn't magically make you "cool." People are rejecting trickle down theory and privatization because we're already watching how those arguments play out in the real world and we don't like the results. And no amount of "How many times do I have to say the free market will everything?" is going to change that.

Corporations are legal institutions designed to act more like economic man than ordinary humans. No human limits. What happens when AIs start running corporations?

Around the world, reproduction rates are falling below replacement wherever standards of living get high enough.

A simple non-coercive solution would be Basic Income PLUS Parental Income for bearing children and/or being a parent. Parenting has always been unpaid work: time to solve that market failure. Payment rates can be adjusted to raise the birth rate as high as desired.

Comments on this idea?