What aspects of libertarians or “pure” ancaps that you think is self defeating?

I used to be a pure libertarian. Now, I don’t know. I am more of a moldbugians I guess. While I like government to be small, I think societies’ norms and laws should be decided by the market.

Network of private cities provide anything libertarians want. Network of competing nation states are pretty similar to network of private cities and if we play our cards right, we can make the world more and more libertarians. Bitcoin allows tax free income already in many area, for example. Tourists don’t pay taxes. For anything we want legal, somewhere it’s legal already.

Yet many libertarians don’t think like businessman. As a businessman, what matters most is I make money. How ethical or principled it is matter but I got to be rich. The same way many libertarians treat their principles as more important than their goals. So some of what they wish is self defeating.

I can think of a few.

Borders, for example. Notice that many libertarians have this mindsets, but smarter libertarians, like Herman Hoppe, Moldbug, David Friedman do not think the same way. They, for example, advocate borders so people can live freely with people they like. It’s called freedom of association. Many purist libertarians are open border and hence many people, including fellow libertarians, can’t live among libertarians.

Voting is useless. Saying that is like saying that infantry is useless. Yea of course voting alone won’t work and have many limitation. But when ownership of a territory isn’t clear, voting is a good way to resolve conflicts with less violent. My favorite ways to achieve libertarianism is making privatized libertarian countries. But when push come to shove, voting is fine. Another variant is that voting is aggression and hence libertarians shouldn’t do it. Yes voting is aggression. So is shooting people in war. Once the game is pretty much voting games or shooting games then you play what’s available. In ideal world people can’t vote to get your tax money for welfare. We don’t live in ideal world. Like Ron Paul said, just steal it back. No borders. There are reasons why we have voluntary gated community. People near you will have power over you. So there are reasons why a group of people want to exclude people from their community. Concentrate on negative choices. Government shouldn’t prohibit drugs, government shouldn’t prohibit prostitution, and porn. And so on and so on. Well… that’s fine. I agree. But what about positive choices? Imagine an arrangements where cities live nearby and one prohibit drugs and another legalize it? To me, that’s good enough. I will just move to cities that legalize drugs. In fact, it’s better. Say conservatives don’t want to live near drug users, shouldn’t we respect their rights too? As long as we have our own legalized drugs cities so what? Abhor power. Wealth is power (I think libertarians do not consider wealth as power). If we define power to be ability to get what we want, then we can’t abhor power. Freedom is power too. Also many business transactions require some understanding of power game. For example, I will lost money if I buy product and don’t complain for more than 2 days. I got to check products I buy within 2 days so I am in more powerful bargaining position. Think all taxes are robbery and hence equally bad. Nope. Inflation, is tax for those who hold fiats. Lottery is tax for those who are stupid at Math. I don’t mind those taxes. Besides, US dollar is just another alt coin. Why should we care that some alt coin value go up or down? Again, positive choices matter here. As long as you an buy bitcoin you shouldn’t care about inflation. Not selfish enough. If welfare parasites starve it’s their problems not us. Not allying with conservatives. Until today, I am still very confused. What is so evil about conservatives in US that libertarian hate them so much. They want to lower tax and they did. That’s all. Yes conservatives often want to ban porn and stuff. But they can’t. No real damage there. They’re against gay marriage. Again, not an issue because no body should get married anyway and government shouldn’t get involved in the marriage in the first place. Don’t think in terms of winning election. Any ideology need to win election or civil war to win. Otherwise, what? You don’t win you become slaves like tax payers I guess. You got to win politically. Not being grateful enough for what’s already working fine. As a businessman I think it’s much easier to achieve more wealth to look at what’s already working fine and then go all the way enlarging it instead of complaining on things that don’t work. We now have privatized currency, namely bitcoin, and privatized taxis, namely Uber, and privatized things. We even have private cities and private government like Prospera. Things are working. Many libertarians just blame welfare parasites. Welfare parasites will be parasitic but we can protect our money.

That’s what I think why libertarian movements is self defeating. Do you agree or disagree?

What do you think?