"So what he's doing is taking the strictest interpretation of Libertarianism and arguing against it even though no rational Libertarian would ever argue that."
Well, I guess I technically agree with this statement since you included the qualifier "rational", but there certainly are some irrational (in what appears to be our shared opinion) Libertarians that do argue the strict version, and because of their zeal are the ones that get associated with the name. In particular, they are the ones running the Libertarian party itself. Remember how excited the party was that this last election, they nominated someone who wasn't a lunatic?
That's why I refer to myself as a little-L libertarian; I'm heavily influenced, but not defined by my capital-L Libertarianism.
The most strict libertarians I can think of are the anarcho-capitalists. Even they do not desire a society with the absence of laws, but rather they desire a market it law and law enforcement to replace the public monopoly.
You can argue about whether or not that is realistic, but to say they desire no laws is unfair.
And yes, the LP has an overabundance of socially challenged types. A rational man should be able to weigh arguments by their worth and not by their bearers.
This fellow has no idea what the Libertarian ideal is. In his first paragraph he starts building his straw man ("tend to have less contact than the average person") and then it just all goes downhill from there.
Murray Rothbard would have torn this guy to pieces.
He is talking about a group of people who have less than average contact with other people. Some, hard core Libertarians seem to want the government to have a military. Everything after that point is debatable. Some think public roads are a bad idea, others are fine with public police forces etc.
As a movement it has some good ideas, but there is also a huge collection of irrational people that are pro Libertarian and have little understanding of human behavior. For example we removed most monopolies because they where a bad idea keeping a few that are more effective than breaking them up so many people seem to ignore the idea that monopolies are bad. In theory there might be little problem with monopolies until you start to consider how people behave.
PS: The articles of faith that underlie the standard Libertarian predictions of how the world will work under their system are largely derived from the capitalist myth, and share all its imbalances in how it understands and defines human nature. It is my belief that as long as Libertarian philosophy ties itself so closely to idealizing capitalism, or makes itself too absolutist in any other way, an attempt to get people to live by purely Libertarian principles will find itself fighting against aspects of human nature that it doesn't want to acknowledge, and if it doesn't compromise it will fail because it tries to make people only half human.
Well, I guess I technically agree with this statement since you included the qualifier "rational", but there certainly are some irrational (in what appears to be our shared opinion) Libertarians that do argue the strict version, and because of their zeal are the ones that get associated with the name. In particular, they are the ones running the Libertarian party itself. Remember how excited the party was that this last election, they nominated someone who wasn't a lunatic?
That's why I refer to myself as a little-L libertarian; I'm heavily influenced, but not defined by my capital-L Libertarianism.