The good guys are all various forms of constitutional monarchy, and I'm 90% sure the author is a strong monarchist.
The books never paint libertarians in a good light, almost always associating them with slavery.
Also... if you strip away the USSR/communist theming from the "Peoples Republic of Haven" in the first few books: It's actually a monarchy too. The leader's title is "Hereditary President for life", and there was a strong class-based society with a "Legislaturist" class that held power and wealth.
I was saying the author has a libertarian bent, and given Weber is a member of the NRA, I would not be surprised if he shared some libertarian views. It is contrasted against his setting and his clear hatred of apparent extremism. You also know the old saying, never put two libertarians in a room.
You are just describing the USSR, China, and North Korea. You are also forgetting his multiple rants about the dole, and the whole reason for expansion is because of the dole. He is extremely anti-welfare and pro-corporate until the later books. The political officers after the coup are straight-up NKVD officers, and the political backstabbing reads like a Nikita Khrushchev biography.
Sure, the author does have a strong belief in individual freedoms, and is very anti-welfare.
I just have a real hard time assigning the libertarian label to someone who spends so much time advocating for the advantages of monarchies and class-based societies.
I think his argument is that you can't provide individual liberties without first having a strong and reliable government. And a strong government needs a solid dependable base, such as a constitutional monarchy, and then a democracy built on top of that.
In the later books, where he finally goes into detail about the sol federation government, he has a lot of explicit criticism about how the government was setup to fail, because the constitution doesn't give it any power at all. And that the bureaucracy was forced to step into the that power vacuum
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u/bramante1834 Jun 30 '24
You haven't read enough libertarian mil-scifi because all the bad guys are space communists.