Penn Gilette has always seemed to be driven by a level of honesty and compassion and valued the freedom to choose where to direct that compassion. I think earlier on he viewed other libertarians as having the same level of honest compassion as he does but over time it’s become more and more clear that libertarians are overwhelmingly selfish rich white guys who don’t want to be called Repuiblicans.
I mean in the early 2000s he was calling bullshit on the hysteria over the vaccine autism link saying the alternative of kids dying to preventable diseases is so much worse. He even gave the tenuous link a benefit of the doubt and accepted that even if they did cause autism,t he alternative is so much worse.
There aren’t many people who are willing to evaluate their entire political decisions and come to the conclusion that they were wrong. Even fewer who will admit it publicly. Even fewer still who will accept responsibility and then do something about it.
Of the people I have respectfully disagreed with, the fact that he’s come around is a huge testament to his willingness to be humbled and corrected.
There aren’t many people who are willing to evaluate their entire political decisions and come to the conclusion that they were wrong
I doubt that his ideology actually changed much, but instead he just realized that the Libertarian Party didn’t actually match it like they claimed to do.
The New Hampshire libertarians went full tea party and dragged the rest down with them. I never expected to see anti LGBT rhetoric from a party that enshrined gay rights in their charter way back in 1972, at a time when the Democrats and Republicans were holding hands and chanting “God hates fags” in unison
he viewed other libertarians as having the same level of honest compassion as he does but over time it’s become more and more clear that libertarians are overwhelmingly selfish rich white guys who don’t want to be called Repuiblicans
I had a similar progression myself when I was in my teens, maybe even early 20s.
The basic principle of libertarianism is appealing: mind your own damn business and I’ll mind mine. And I still agree with that in general — it’s just that a single generality does not make a complete worldview. It took me a while to realize how common it is for self-identifying libertarians to lack any capacity for nuance. The natural extreme of “libertarianism” is just anarchy and feudalism.
In a sane world, I might still call myself a libertarian. In a sane world, that might mean letting people live their own damn lives, not throwing them to the wolves (or more literally, bears ) and dismantling the government entirely.
I’m all for minding my own business, but I also acknowledge that maintaining a functional society is everybody’s business (as much as I occasionally wish I could opt out and go live in a cave).
One problem with libertarianism and the other selfish philosophies is that humanity absolutely cannot survive at all without a massive amount of cooperation.
Assholes who think they can do it on their own are completely delusional.
If you eliminate everything from your life that required the cooperation of another human being, it’s likely you’re naked, starving, and freezing to death.
"Oh, I can hunt for food.’
Really? With just your bare hands? Maybe your naked ass will get lucky and nail a squirrel with a rock, but what are you going to do when a mountain lion decides you’re the squirrel?
Even if you manage to make some rock tools and weapons, you didn’t figure that out on your own. Someone told you about it.
Knowledge is the biggest advantage humans have going for them. Without sharing knowledge that others discovered, most people wouldn’t last long enough to matter.
The core political belief I hold is that so long as you are not directly harming someone else, you should be free to do that. That said, I have a lot built up on that.
I do not extend it to corporations or government. I believe that regulation is undoubtedly necessary for a functioning society.
And with laws, nuance is in everything. Nothing is ever so black and white to have a zero tolerance policy.
The perverse ideas that money is speech and corporations are people can make a lot of simple common-sense statements suddenly completely insane.
I support free speech. Money is not speech.
I support personal freedom. Corporations are not people.
Why limit it to direct harm? There’s tons of easily avoidable ways to indirectly cause harm. The most obvious to me are about our natural world: taking anything in an unsustainable way deprives others of opportunity, up to and including their ability to feed themself. Reckless hunting or fishing, poisoning water with agriculture runoff, introducing invasive species for personal gain or through negligence, even just cutting down all the trees around you can have loads of consequences with the impact to animal habitat and increased soil erosion.
The basic principle of libertarianism is appealing: mind your own damn business and I’ll mind mine. And I still agree with that in general — it’s just that a single generality does not make a complete worldview
The problem is obviously that nobody lives in isolation. Everyone takes actions which impact other people.
If there are going to be laws, then the government needs a police force and a judiciary that are big enough to enforce those laws. If there are going to be companies, the government has to be bigger than the biggest company, otherwise it won’t be able to effectively enforce anything. The bigger the biggest company gets, the bigger the government has to be in order to be able to enforce the laws. But, big government is antithetical to the libertarian philosophy. If you want to limit the size of the government but still want government to be able to enforce laws, you need to limit the size of companies. But that’s a regulation, and government regulations are antithetical to the ideas of libertarianism.
Arguing for the idea that the government should generally let people mind their own business as long as nobody is getting hurt, or that consenting adults are knowingly and willingly consenting to being hurt, that’s fine. Same with the idea that regulations shouldn’t be overly burdensome. There’s always going to have to be a line drawn somewhere, but it’s fine if you tend to want that line to be drawn in a way that allows for more freedom vs. more babysitting by the government.
The ridiculous bit is when libertarians try to argue that some extreme form of libertarianism is possible. Anarchy is certainly possible, but it isn’t something that most people, even libertarians, think is a great plan.
The extreme forms of Libertarianism or Anarchy are only possible if everyone engages in good faith. They have no built-in protections against bad actors. Someone wants to divert a river for any reason? Sucks to be downstream.
You might consider Anarchism ironically. It’s leftist libertarian basically, and is not “no government.” It’s about removing hierarchy, which destroys freedoms of people.
I used to call myself a Libertarian too, and I eventually ended up on Anarchism.
Thanks for the link. I’m not up on the latest in anarchist philosophy. The last meaningful work I read on the topic was probably In Defense of Anarchism by Robert Paul Wolff.
Yeah, I don’t have any problem with libertarianism in theory. Pro-civil liberties, anti-racism, anti-war, pro-choice, pro-guns, free markets, etc. I disagree with the value of some of it, but I can see why someone might thoughtfully and sincerely come to that sort of rationale. I’ve never really had a problem with Penn’s (and Teller’s) views because of that.
But the reality is that the majority of modern libertarians are just narcissist capitalists that do not like rules or laws that restrict them from doing anything they want. That or, way worse, they’re Ayn Rand ideologues who genuinely believe that self-service is a moral imperative, charity is immoral, poverty is personal failure, human life is measured in productivity, and the sick, poor, or malformed should be left to whatever fate the market gives them. Those types are some of the worst people on the planet. They see a wealthy capitalist as inherently a leader and role model and think he should be unconstrained from accumulating more wealth without concern for society, employees, or individual rights. We’re living in the light version of their ideal, and it gets closer to that ideal every day.
The libertarian party used to be considerably different as well. It certainly became something different entirely around 2012-2016.
Agreed. If right-libertarianism could work at all, they’d need to be on the frontlines of boycotting companies that do bad things.
They claim that the government doesn’t need to force desegregated lunch counters; people would stop eating there until that place either changed or went out of business. Alright. Are they going to be the first ones to stand up and boycott companies that do anything like that? Because from what I saw, they were the first ones to say “they technically have a right to do that” and then do nothing. Almost like letting them get away with it was the actual point.
Gilette seems to have caught on to this trick at some point.
I feel the same with Unions and the broader Right. Like the whole point of Unions is they’re the “free market” equivalent of government regulation. If you’re pro free market but anti-union, then you’re not actually pro free market, you’re just pro exploitation.
They don’t just think companies have the right to do that. They also think companies have a right to create restrictions that prevent you from doing anything. If you go to a protest you may be fired, for example. It creates a situation where the ruling class can prevent dissent because you need food, water, and shelter at minimum, and they can take that away if you are a dissident.
When I was younger I called myself a libertarian. This was progression from a somewhat conservative family, with my ideal that people should be left to do what they want as long as it doesn’t harm others. I eventually progressed towards a leftist mindset and now consider myself an anarchist. Same idea, except libertarians mostly want no protections and are pro-hierachy, which leads to a lack of freedom not more freedom. If companies are free to do what they want they will use their position to remove the freedom of workers to make choices freely, for example.
I still hold most of the same ideals as I did then, as I’m sure Penn Jillette probably does too. I just have a better view of the consequences of the policies that they push for.
Edit: reread this and it comes off as accuaation. Im not accuijng you, just typed the thing in second person.
Often l have found that libertarians aren’t so much pro hierarchy, so much as blind to the role they play in the existing heirarchy.
It seems common to not turn a critical eye to yourself to see where you actually fit into the scene of things, and missing that you are in fact doing harm yo others by being ignorant of the impact of your actions is super on brand.
Libertarianism always felt like 2/3s of the way there, where the only remaining domino is to recognize “wealth is a thing I have because of circumstance… If someone else had this wealth, what would they do with it, and if they had Elon Musk billions what would that look like?”
