Yeah, I'm mostly going off personal anecdata here -- most of the Libertarians I know are of the well-meaning, "if the government would just get out of our business everybody would do their own thing and the world would be great" sort (I live in Alaska, so a vague distrust of the guv'mint is practically a lifestyle up here). I think the comparison to Marxists is spot-on; it's exactly the same sort of idealistic thing that would work great if people would just ... stop being people. But it's fundamentally idealistic.
Randian Libertarians are more like what most people seem to mean when they speak of Libertarians, except they don't seem especially representative of Libertarians in general, at least in my experience; they're mostly either assholes to begin with, and would be assholes no matter what their political philosophy, or new converts who haven't actually done the mental legwork necessary to figure out the dark underbelly of their shiny new philosophy yet ...
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branchandroot
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Date: 2011-09-09 06:50 am (UTC)Randian Libertarians are more like what most people seem to mean when they speak of Libertarians, except they don't seem especially representative of Libertarians in general, at least in my experience; they're mostly either assholes to begin with, and would be assholes no matter what their political philosophy, or new converts who haven't actually done the mental legwork necessary to figure out the dark underbelly of their shiny new philosophy yet ...