Originally a comment on The book that continues to inspire college sophomores.
The functional difference between glibertarianism and nihilism is close to zero.
I was just speaking with a fellow attorney who is a big Ron/Rand Paul supporter and a self-professed libertarian. The funny thing is that we agree on Step 1 of many issues:
-government spying is an absurd violation of our rights -bank bailouts just served to enable the unethical and likely criminal behavior that played a huge role in the collapse -we shouldn’t be engaged in silly foreign wars -the drug war is stupid…etc.
On all of those issues, we’re basically in agreement that our government handled and continues to handle those issue poorly. The difficulty comes immediately when he tried to explain how to correct these things.
His solution to the problem of bank bailouts was…to just let them go under. Fine, I say, but then something has to take it’s place. We just had a fiscal collapse, how will the country keep running?
He refused to admit that this was a problem until I asked him how farmers would continue to exist. They buy seed on credit and pay back the loan when the crop comes in. If there is no entity in existence that can offer that first loan, how are people going to plat crops.
His answer, stunningly, was that the government should have loaned it directly. Yes, indeed, I say, welcome to the wonderful world of progressivism.
He was infuriated with his own answer, but literally could not come up with another explanation. He was smart to understand what a non-starter private lending would be, given the recent, you know, Apocalypse in the financial sector.
They’re like pissy high schoolers who are too cool for everything: this sucks, that sucks, this is gay, that’s lame…yet they never actually explain how anything could possibly work in their world, save for some nonsense about the gold standard.