For my friends who call themselves Libertarian: most of you aren’t really aligned with the Libertarian party though you may like some of the more theoretical notions of Libertarianism: the ideology. Saying “I’m against big government” is equivalent to saying “I’m against open wounds” – yeah sure we all are but its how you define it that matters.
Libertarianism has salience but the reality leads to a convergent point of promoting inequity in our system. The inequity is of an economic kind that can actually kill people and tear down our current freedoms,. Libertarianism, like many political ideologies was conceived in a vacuum of reality but wasn’t constructed through trial and error like other ideologies. Its easy to say “real socialism doesn’t work” since its been tried and failed many times (and yet is still an on-going experiment in many arenas) but Libertarianism hasn’t been tried anywhere (except Chile IIRC) because the immediate effect would be chaotic and deadly for so many. Nobody wants to tear down the protections we have spent hundreds (in some cases thousands) of years erecting for the benefit of the whole society. Perhaps only the very insulated, the very clueless or the very sociopathic would be amenable to that.

And then there’s the factual point that most of Libertarianism’s economic “thinkers” have open disdain for evidence-based systems favoring a simplistic “so long as I get mine, we’ll all be happier” kind of philosophy

But to put it in the simplest terms evar: I will never agree with “true” libertarian philosophy because it relies almost entirely upon judicial review as the ultimate balance of liberty clashes. We circumvent such incredible inefficiency by having enforceable laws. Needing the power of enforcement is crucial to having effective laws in the first place (no, I cannot be An-cap) and it takes money to fund enforcement on many levels. Taxation, executive and legislative branches are necessary to have freedoms in the first place. Legal punitive measures will never be enough. And in many cases (food purity, medicine safety, worker rights) legal punitive measures would not substitute because people would be DEAD before they could pursue recompense and change. Fuck that. regulation is necessary to protect us all against sociopaths who would kill us for a penny. Regulation is also necessary to protect and harbor those who are vulnerable to the “good intentions” of those who believe in social Darwinism (yes, those people truly exist)

We are no longer in a cottage industry world. We need the size of government to equal the size of corporate interests in order to not be victimized by economic sociopaths