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It's not a testable claim, it's a definition. And it's right there in the name. Libertarianism is about liberty. If you're evaluating propositions based strictly on some form of utility that does not assign high utility to liberty itself, it's hard to be a libertarian. If your evaluation often results in non-liberty being chosen over liberty, it's ridiculous to call yourself one.
I do assign high utility to liberty.
But I am not an insane person so I do not afford it infinite utility, or pretend there aren’t issues where tradeoffs exist.
The testable claim is whether in any given case liberty does lead to utility.
Assuming by definition it does, or simply defining utility to be liberty, with no consideration of empirical reality, turns libertarianism into some kind of fanatical political religion along the same lines as Marxism, and it’s just a stupid way to go about political philosophy.
“Libertarianism is about liberty” well sure. What makes you seem uneducated is that you appear to have no awareness of the variety of thought around those concepts and competing movements and subgroups. For instance, there are civil libertarians who are all for personal freedom, just not where one’s labor and wallet are concerned.
One of the primary reasons the term “libertarian” exists is that in the US “liberal” evolved to mean “left liberal” and so another label was needed to mean “right liberal” or “classic liberal.” In Europe, I can identify as a liberal; in America I have to have a different label, whether classic liberal, right neoliberal, or state capacity libertarian.
The point was not “libertarian means anarcho-capitalism and anyone who ever says anything positive about even limited government is a totalitarian statist.”
Yes. And if you keep evaluating that claim and it keeps failing, and you choose "utility" over liberty each time, you're just not a libertarian by any reasonable meaning of the word. "Well I'd be for liberty if liberty led to utility, but it turns out following the instructions of Comrade Stalin (or Lee Kwan Yu) exactly results in the best utility" is NOT libertarianism, it's just plain old utilitarianism.
I'm aware. I'm also aware of a phenomenon where people will call themselves libertarian but then somehow have very anti-liberty policy preferences. I'm not sure why, it's not like "libertarian" is such a high-status name, but it's a thing.
I mean unironically if communism worked as well as it’s supposed to then I would be a communist. But both theory and practice ruin things.
You claim to be aware of the diversity of thought under the libertarian label and yet you continue to act as though there is one true libertarian doctrine, indistinguishable from anarcho-capitalism.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/
https://www.libertarianism.org/what-is-a-libertarian
I’m not aware of the phenomenon you speak of; I’m aware of the opposite, where people say “classic liberal” and never “libertarian” to avoid the association with fanatics.
@The_Nybbler might be slightly too narrow on what it takes to be a libertarian but it really does seem quite strange to call yourself a libertarian and then endorse laws like seatbelt laws. I just call myself a normal liberal so I can go one way or the other but it's hard to take some who calls themselves a libertarian seriously when they take a case where all the relevant externalities are internalized, risk of injury due to not wearing a seat belt, and decide the state should have a say. It just feels like one of the most central cases of not being a libertarian.
All the risks are not actually internalized in all cases here.
Objects in motion wish to stay in motion and all that.
The real mistake is taking anyone seriously or not based on labels instead of actual positions.
On the narrow point of, descriptively, what has the label “libertarian” been used to describe, I’ve cited more than one source showing it does not only refer to anarcho-capitalism, maximum individualism, no legitimate state action, etc.
Scott also self-identifies as a libertarian and he had a recent post talking about how we probably shouldn’t just “abolish the FDA” because that would lead to some bad outcomes. (Scott is also a consequentialist libertarian.)
Here is one of the most influential libertarians talking about the kind of libertarianism I identify with:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/what-libertarianism-has-become-and-will-become-state-capacity-libertarianism.html
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There's an argument that your unsecured body flying around the car interior/out the windshield endangers others.
There's an argument for everything.
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