Quote:
Originally Posted by MLR
I believe you need to enforce laws with the threat of violence.
If not people will never comply.
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True. If libertarianism could be imperfectly summarized with one principle, it would be the "non-aggression principle". This basically means "don't initiate (or start) an act of violence against a person or their property. The non-aggression principle however does not prohibit you from using violence in self defence of persons or property.
There's are a lot more details to understand, but that's the basic thing.
So in the context of laws, a libertarian who thought that laws were acceptable or necessary would support only those laws which are to do with protecting people from violence (this includes terrorism, warring foreign nations, rape, assaults etc) and for protecting and upholding peoples property rights (your home, your vehicles, your possessions, your business etc). So indeed, those libertarians would be absolutely in support of violence-backed laws in order to protect people and their property. However they wouldn't be in support of laws that infringed on your liberties. So they wouldn't support any laws that prohibited you from taking drugs or demanded that you wore certain protective gear on a motorcycle. As a reminder: this does not mean that they support riding without protective gear and they support recreational drug use. Some will support these things and some wont. All it means is that libertarians do not want government-violence backed laws as a solution to these problems and they highly value the choice of the individual to decide for themselves what to do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zaph42
Didn't read Akima's post, it was too long.  Needs cliff notes. |
I've totes never been accused of being verbose or talkative
See the TL;DR (too long; didn't read) version above.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zaph42
During the last election both my wife and I considered becoming libertarians. So I start to research it and the first thing that comes up is a picture of guy wearing a boot on his head and carrying a 6 foot toothbrush.  |
I sometimes wonder if some of these "libertarian" characters are funded or hired by anti-libertarian folk to make libertarians look bad. I think the libertarian candidate for your last big election was Gary Johnson. He's... well: I think this video paints a pretty good picture of the dude:
Link to original page on YouTube.