I sense from Tucker’s posts that he and I are on a similar wavelength in our disbelief regarding the failure of libertarian ideas. I’ve since moved far past the disbelief and come to several conclusions as to why freedom and civil rights have appeared so brittle and so little defended over the past year. A big part of it is the fact that libertarians operate in a bubble that has little contact or influence with the outside world. Some fruits of libertarian ideas do emerge: marijuana legalization, deregulation, the opening of markets, etc. But the ideas behind these results are never communicated, and never take root. Most of the advocates more marijuana legalization have no conception of the principle undergirding it, which is why they can go from the issue of legalization to advocating for socialism in a single breath. This has been my experience with just about every single cannabis activist. Libertarians do a poor job of spreading their ideas in the real world. They prefer to talk to each other, and write for each other. Another reason why libertarian ideas have failed utterly is also due simply to human nature. Most people don’t want freedom. The powerful don’t, and the masses, not understanding what gives them their current level of creature comforts, also don’t. The powerful craft messages for the masses that short-circuit whatever capacity for critical thinking that they have.
Another problem: a relatively free, prosperous economy produces a vast hedonistic consumer class, people who have never felt the need to grapple with ideas or understand how we as a species arrived at our present state of civilizational development. A crisis comes along and they have no idea what to do. So they do what they’re told, usually by the same people who created the crisis.
I've been what one would call a libertarian for decades. There were moments when we believed these ideas were the future. Now look around and we see absolute calamity. Figuring out what went wrong is a priority.
— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) July 15, 2021
