attackfish

There are multiple strains of Libertarian thought. Anarchist Libertarians for the most part are as you described, (though I did meet one who was kinda convinced that he was going to rule the world... strange man) and I feel about the the way I feel abou Marxists. It would be a great idea if people could function without police and laws/have a centrally planned economy where there was no incentive system, but if we were able to do that, we wouldn't need the theories. Randian Libertarians, however, are under the strange misapprehension that the poor are oppressing the rich, and only the people at the top of the economic pyramid are really contributing anything, an everybody else is leaching off of them. They want to see governmental control done away with, because it's the tool by which the poor oppress their superiors. This is the Libertarianism of trendy college kids. Then there's the mass of baby boomer tea partiers. They're not libertarians so much as people who A) don't want to pay for what they get from the government or don't realize how much our taxes do and are under the illusion that most of it goes to welfare and the unemployed, and B) are seeing the privileges that come from being white middle class straight Christian or culturally Christian, able-bodied, etc. slipping away, and because they've been taught by society for so long that they really are the best and deserved those privileges, they believe that without all that busybody government stuff, they would climb to the top of the heap. This is the Libertarianism that is becoming popular right now.