^^^ Still making this shit up as he goes along.
Don't be such a fucking moron, Dud. Try and come up with an original response. Of course, I can understand how the fact that you're not any different from the standard rightist idiot with a thousand clones who regurgitates the latest talking point might inhibit such a development.
More like in reality. But while we're focused on political economy, let me correct a little misconception of yours as it applies to this thread. The more "libertarian" founding fathers were classical liberals, but would likely be libertarian socialists (i.e. real libertarians) today.
Propertarians (those falsely known as "libertarians" in the U.S.) call themselves the descendants of classical liberals, but there is no legitimate comparison to be made between classical liberalism and this doctrine of propertarianism that falsely masquerades as libertarian in nature. Classical liberal philosophy offers a defense of property rights based on individual appropriation of the product of one's labor that many classical liberal theorists expected to result in relatively egalitarian conditions. No defense of vast corporate structure that modern propertarians defend as legitimate fixtures of fair market exchange and the massive concentration of wealth that they defend as the earned reward of entrepreneurial spirit can be drawn from that philosophy.
It's a frank reality that a defense of private property offered in an agrarian society based on simple markets of exchange between independent producers and artisans where egalitarian conditions were expected to prevail cannot be naturally extrapolated to a defense of private property in a corporate capitalist economy where market and wealth concentration are the prevailing conditions and economic democracy is almost entirely nonexistent. Modern propertarians have effectively co-opted classical liberal arguments just as effectively as they stole the "libertarian" label from European anarchists, thus committing what appear to be property violations more severe than any that they regularly decry. For example, as Robert Dahl (A Preface to Economic Democracy Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) notes:
[A]n economic order that spontaneously produced inequality in the distribution of economic and political resources acquired legitimacy at least in part, by clothing itself in the recut garments of an outmoded ideology in which private property was justified on the ground that a wide diffusion of property would support political equality. As a result, Americans have never asked themselves steadily or in large numbers whether an alternative to corporate capitalism might be more consistent with their commitment to democracy.
Classical liberal arguments are not a sound basis for the alleged liberty-enhancing qualities of private property in the modern capitalist economy, but there are substantive arguments in legitimate libertarian philosophy against such a state of affairs. For example, you might gain from a brief overview in
Section B.4 of
An Anarchist FAQ, entitled
How Does Capitalism Affect Liberty?
Nope...its Libertarian/Conservative. If it was Liberal it would say " ......endowed by a government of men certain rights ; that among these are blah blah blah.....*trails off*
Libertarianism is not a rightist political or economic theory, but originated as anarchist and socialist in nature. The term "libertarian" was first used in print in an 1857 letter by the French anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque, who later published
Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement social from 1858 to 1861. The later French anarchists Sebastian Faure and Louise Michel then founded
Le Libertaire in 1895, which ought to illustrate the term's early usage by anarcho-socialists, largely in an attempt to circumvent anti-anarchist laws. Conversely, the U.S. "Libertarian" Party has only existed since 1971, which means that socialist usage of the term predates its misappropriation by American capitalists by more than a century. As noted by Murray Bookchin, the current American definition of "libertarianism" is merely
"the specious identification of an anti-authoritarian ideology with a straggling movement for 'pure capitalism' and 'free trade.' This movement never created the word: it appropriated it from the anarchist movement of the [nineteenth] century. And it should be recovered by those anti-authoritarians . . . who try to speak for dominated people as a whole, not for personal egotists who identify freedom with entrepreneurship and profit."
However, even apart from the historical definition of the term, we can make an even more dramatic claim that capital and libertarianism are actually incompatible and that "libertarian socialism" is really the only variety of libertarianism (and socialism, to some extent) that can exist. For example, most libertarian socialists would posit that capitalism is necessarily inimical to the maximization of liberty because of the authoritarian elements inherent in wage labor, which include the hierarchical conditions of the workplace and the effectively oligopolistic seizure of the financial class over the means of production which serves as the basis for the nature of wage labor in capitalism. Such a state of affairs wherein a tiny elite control such expansive resources would rightfully be condemned as authoritarian in nature were it manifested through the vessel of a state. Hence, we'd argue that libertarian socialism is a redundant term because legitimate libertarianism cannot exist without socialism and legitimate socialism cannot exist without libertarianism. But because "libertarianism" is understood as a laissez-faire capitalist philosophy in this country, we have to use the term "libertarian socialism."
