this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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You mean abolish all labor laws and enforce all contracts to the letter by the government. We know that this is going to lead to company towns, slave contracts and similar setups. We had those everywhere before the workers won those laws. You end up with a capitalist class ruling everything in a nearly aristrocatic fashion. This is already the case in many ways, but this would make it so much worse.
Clearly a moderate position is needed here. Let's start by repealing the Taft-Hartley Act.
Proving my point - you have not read anything about the Libertarian party platform, because those are not positions they hold. You are talking about the cartoon version of libertarians that you made up out of the whims of prejudice.
Here's what they actually stand for: https://www.lp.org/platform/
2.11 is very clear about abolishing all labor laws. 1.0 is very clear about "Individuals are inherently free to make choices for themselves and must accept responsibility for the consequences of the choices they make. " hence slave contracts are legal, as long as you do sell yourself for any reason. The rest is just pure and simple logic. States are one of the systems redistributing wealth, obviously not perfectly, but richer people are supposed to pay more taxes then the poor. The rest is distributed via social security, which the Libertarian Party is against as stated in 2.13 and 2.14. With contracts being enforced and no limits on contracts being placed, they replace many current laws. Hence you get an aristocratic class. Eve worse 3.7 expressly allows for governments to be completely ignored, if they hurt their freedoms.
I have no doubt that most libertarians are actually good people and mostly are pissed at a lot of stupid government rules, which are absolutely real. However it is like a lot of things an overreaction, which could hurt a lot of people.
I guess you could read that into it when you are determined to believe that's what they stand for, but I don't read it with such a pessimistic outlook. I understand that the general premise they are going for is individual liberty and not freedom for businesses to do whatever they want.
But anyway there's no chance they could do any of that, even if a member of the party was elected President. They could at best achieve some improvements to our liberties and at worst no changes. So I will keep voting for them unless a better option is available.
What you want to look at is anarchists. They want government protections for people from exploitation and harm, and freedom for the individual. Libertarians want freedom for the rich and powerful to exploit people however they can/want and for governments to protect them doing this.
Basically boiled down and (over)simplified, Anarchism = freedom for the people, and Libertarianism = freedom for those with the means to hold it.
I guess you don't read into it with any historical outlook. because historically slave contracts are what happened when we had no labor laws. They could do worst the no regulations has done terribly worse. And most issues with today are lack of regulations we let corporations do whatever they want.
The free market will protect the environment? Please explain, because that sounds absolutely absurd on its face.