No, libertarianism is just the delusional belief that eliminating governmental power will eliminate power itself. Libertarians are just as authoritarian as the rest of them, you just prefer tyranny by capital over tyranny by institution.
Libertarianism is the idea that we should strive for a minimal functional state. What you described is anarchism, which can be thought of as the extreme version of libertarianism where a minimal functional state is simply no state.
In practice, most American libertarians these days are little more than anarcho capitalists, even if the definition you provided is technically correct. The weakness of libertarianism as a political movement is that nobody can agree on what minimal functional state is, which in turn makes the movement susceptible to external influence. And in recent decades right wing moguls have pumped a lot of money into this weird form of libertarianism in an effort to get people to be ok with basically any Republican deregulation initiative.
You see, I fully agree here. I have also been desperately trying to avoid explicitly referring to anarcho-capitalits because I realize that I'm already sounding like a pedantic nutcase in this thread. But saying that it's a weak idea because libertarians can't agree on what a minimal state would look like is like say that liberalism is weak because liberals can't agree on how much support should be given to whom.
I agree, I just think it’s somewhat exhausting/pointless to make that explicit distinction every time it comes up, especially when it’s inferable from the context.
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u/TryingToBeUnabrasive Oct 26 '19
No, libertarianism is just the delusional belief that eliminating governmental power will eliminate power itself. Libertarians are just as authoritarian as the rest of them, you just prefer tyranny by capital over tyranny by institution.