I mean, it's really funny because if they looked back at history they would see there was a whole populist movement waged by yeoman farmers - their prototypical independent free citizen - to get paper currency introduced. Because what was happening was that specie was scarce, sitting in vaults, and all the regular people were subject to even worse forms of arbitrary financial manipulation.
From my experiences with Libertarians back in the day, most of them were not well read on history at all. They studied American history and most of that revolved around the federal reserve and them mythologizing the industrial era and how amazing it used to be back then when there were no unions or labour rights and how child labour was some how good. I will never forget getting into a huge argument some years back with a Libertarian who talked about Andrew Jackson and was glorifying him as "one of the best presidents ever". His entire reason why, hinged on conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the banks and how Jackson dismantled the federal reserve.
I've noticed old school Libertarians more and more on r/collapse when I browsed there this past month, usually arguing with Marxists and talking about the evils of the federal reserve and how this country has been set to fail ever since the US moved away from gold and went to the dollar.
They don't care about the abuses regular people go through cause Libertarians have it in their mind that one day they are going to be rich and get to exploit people. The old meme of the guy with the boot on his face and it says "one day I'll own this boot", that's their thinking in a nutshell.
The problem is, at the end of the day it is a hyper-individualist ideology. People are happy with it as long as it works in their favor, and they are dissatisfied with it if it doesn't. Unfortunately for them, an orthodox libertarian society would work for even fewer people than the hellscape we know as neoliberalism. I had reverted to Liberalism for several more years before I eventually ended up becoming a Marxist, and learning history in more detail is ultimately what did it for me.
Edit: It just does suck that the Fed is ultimately evil. They're not wrong about that point, but they completely lack the historical context or material analysis to come up with a solution. No, Gold was not a better system. No, it's not the Jews. It is evil because it will tip the scale whichever way it needs to in order to preserve stability for the ruling elite and global capitalism. It will print free money when the oligarchs are in trouble, and it will constrict supply when it can strangle the smallholders. And no, burning down the planet with Bitcoin farms isn't the solution either. Monetary policy is only one aspect of economic justice, and a system dominated by early adopting tech bros is not going to deliver us economic justice. No more than a financial system dominated at its inception by Hamiltonian slaveowners can.
I agree with you entirely, and it doesn't help for their ideology that America itself is all about individualism with our culture and society through capitalism.
I quit keeping up with Libertarianism around 2014. I gave up on it entirely around 2013 and started venturing into Marxism. To many of us though, like I can relate in a way from being in high school and seeing young people who it appealed to. I grew up in Alabama and the Mises institute is in Auburn.
I can tell you from living there, Alabama pretty much is a Libertarian's wet dream in terms of law. There are little to no unions there. It was one of the first states to enact anti-union laws in the 1960s under the guise of 'Right To Work'. Republicans have run it into the ground and in the early 2010s, AL was one of the few states run by the GOP who decided not to expand medicaid or any other benefits. It don't help that the Dems here are cowards and don't even bother campaigning outside the big cities they have control over, so it's pretty much a Libertarian hell hole with how the state GOP have transformed.
I could never be a liberal cause growing up in a deep red southern state, the smugness that liberals have towards working class people down here like me, always turned me off. There is a reason why southerners do not want to listen to their BS. Libs can't help but so condescendingly talk down to us, much like how they talk down to minorities. I listened to the Libertarian stuff when I was in my teens and early 20s trying to find something out of it, but all it did was leave me confused but it helped set me on the path to Marxism. After hearing them talk all this conspiracy nonsense about communism, I wanted to sit down and start reading Marx and it opened new doorways for me in terms of philosophy.
One of the biggest appeals of Libertarian stuff from the late 2000s was how it was anti-government and seen as something against the ruling class and status quo. There is some serious populism in the rural south cause the people there legitimately feel forgotten by the federal government. It would be a breeding ground for a real Marxist movement because the Dems have long abandoned those states and allowed the GOP to use them as a playground for whatever they want. When Sanders started his campaign last year, he did some speeches in Alabama and got positive reception. Sanders isn't a radical leftist, I know, but it still goes to show, the people here want something different, and it's unfortunate that all we got back then was Libertarian propaganda aimed at us.
I mean, it's really funny because if they looked back at history they would see there was a whole populist movement waged by yeoman farmers - their prototypical independent free citizen - to get paper currency introduced. Because what was happening was that specie was scarce, sitting in vaults, and all the regular people were subject to even worse forms of arbitrary financial manipulation.
From my experiences with Libertarians back in the day, most of them were not well read on history at all. They studied American history and most of that revolved around the federal reserve and them mythologizing the industrial era and how amazing it used to be back then when there were no unions or labour rights and how child labour was some how good. I will never forget getting into a huge argument some years back with a Libertarian who talked about Andrew Jackson and was glorifying him as "one of the best presidents ever". His entire reason why, hinged on conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the banks and how Jackson dismantled the federal reserve.
I've noticed old school Libertarians more and more on r/collapse when I browsed there this past month, usually arguing with Marxists and talking about the evils of the federal reserve and how this country has been set to fail ever since the US moved away from gold and went to the dollar.
They don't care about the abuses regular people go through cause Libertarians have it in their mind that one day they are going to be rich and get to exploit people. The old meme of the guy with the boot on his face and it says "one day I'll own this boot", that's their thinking in a nutshell.
The problem is, at the end of the day it is a hyper-individualist ideology. People are happy with it as long as it works in their favor, and they are dissatisfied with it if it doesn't. Unfortunately for them, an orthodox libertarian society would work for even fewer people than the hellscape we know as neoliberalism. I had reverted to Liberalism for several more years before I eventually ended up becoming a Marxist, and learning history in more detail is ultimately what did it for me.
Edit: It just does suck that the Fed is ultimately evil. They're not wrong about that point, but they completely lack the historical context or material analysis to come up with a solution. No, Gold was not a better system. No, it's not the Jews. It is evil because it will tip the scale whichever way it needs to in order to preserve stability for the ruling elite and global capitalism. It will print free money when the oligarchs are in trouble, and it will constrict supply when it can strangle the smallholders. And no, burning down the planet with Bitcoin farms isn't the solution either. Monetary policy is only one aspect of economic justice, and a system dominated by early adopting tech bros is not going to deliver us economic justice. No more than a financial system dominated at its inception by Hamiltonian slaveowners can.
I agree with you entirely, and it doesn't help for their ideology that America itself is all about individualism with our culture and society through capitalism.
I quit keeping up with Libertarianism around 2014. I gave up on it entirely around 2013 and started venturing into Marxism. To many of us though, like I can relate in a way from being in high school and seeing young people who it appealed to. I grew up in Alabama and the Mises institute is in Auburn.
I can tell you from living there, Alabama pretty much is a Libertarian's wet dream in terms of law. There are little to no unions there. It was one of the first states to enact anti-union laws in the 1960s under the guise of 'Right To Work'. Republicans have run it into the ground and in the early 2010s, AL was one of the few states run by the GOP who decided not to expand medicaid or any other benefits. It don't help that the Dems here are cowards and don't even bother campaigning outside the big cities they have control over, so it's pretty much a Libertarian hell hole with how the state GOP have transformed.
I could never be a liberal cause growing up in a deep red southern state, the smugness that liberals have towards working class people down here like me, always turned me off. There is a reason why southerners do not want to listen to their BS. Libs can't help but so condescendingly talk down to us, much like how they talk down to minorities. I listened to the Libertarian stuff when I was in my teens and early 20s trying to find something out of it, but all it did was leave me confused but it helped set me on the path to Marxism. After hearing them talk all this conspiracy nonsense about communism, I wanted to sit down and start reading Marx and it opened new doorways for me in terms of philosophy.
One of the biggest appeals of Libertarian stuff from the late 2000s was how it was anti-government and seen as something against the ruling class and status quo. There is some serious populism in the rural south cause the people there legitimately feel forgotten by the federal government. It would be a breeding ground for a real Marxist movement because the Dems have long abandoned those states and allowed the GOP to use them as a playground for whatever they want. When Sanders started his campaign last year, he did some speeches in Alabama and got positive reception. Sanders isn't a radical leftist, I know, but it still goes to show, the people here want something different, and it's unfortunate that all we got back then was Libertarian propaganda aimed at us.