Why would someone flee libertarianism and become a liberal?

[★Ŕ♡MΛŔƐ★]

Interesting personal story. Here's part:

I began to think about real people, like my neighbors and people less lucky than me. Did I want those people to starve to death? I care about children, even poor ones. I love the National Park system. The best parts of the America I love are our communities. My libertarian friends might call me a fucking commie (they have) or a pussy, but extreme selfishness is just so isolating and cruel. Libertarianism is unnatural, and the size of the federal government is almost irrelevant. The real question is: what does society need and how do we pay for it?

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/28/why_i_fl...a_liberal/

[0bamnio]

Because they lost their mind.

[Oswald 3]

I dont hate Obama because of FOX. I dont even watch Fox. Do Libs ever think people may find the Liberal party apalling because the rat has vaporized hundreds of kids With drones and is a conniving hypocrit

And Its not just FOX. The NYT, Washington Post, CNN, BBC and others have increased criticism of his administration

And here come the "well Bush" retards...I dont support his policy either so shut your traps

[proudtoes762]

They hate themselves. Or they are just wanting someone else to take care of them because they are weak.

[spot the cat]

Maybe because they are sick of basing their whole way of thought on people who lived and died before the world was industrialized. That changed how the world works, no?

[Deino]

Yeah yeah compassion.

It always takes the form of voting for higher taxes on other people with more money than you.
If you want to help the poor, do so. But the fact that you don't need help should prove that the system in the US is far from impossible. And the fact that rich people have succeeded and already pay more in taxes than you (even if not by percentage) and do more to produce jobs and develop the community etc doesn't mean that it should be your call to obligate them by law to pay out even more.

I believe in compassion for my family, my friends and whoever I can afford to assist on a reasonable basis.
But making compassion into a legislation is wrong, and it demolishes the purpose of capitalism. Plus, it doesn't even help the poor that much. It just scatters money around that gets taxed, practically taking it out of the economy.

[kenneth h]

Libertarian philosophy is a totalitarian system of very small ineffective governance where there is a capitalist free for all. Winners take the prize. This would lead to the same human condition there was under feudalism and the rule of Kings. Libertarians are currently running Somalia.

[Andy F]

You're kind of mixing Q and A with this post, I think. I guess you're asking why YOU left libertarianism for liberalism -- the implication being, why does it make sense for other people to do the same? Which is a real question.

My answer: it was partly the American civil rights movement that led me to reject my teenaged libertarianism. I read a book on life in the segregated South -- actually by a white journalist who dyed his skin chemically so he could experience for himself what segregation was like -- and was totally horrified by what it said.

I believed at the time that any property owner, like the owner of a restaurant or a gas station, should have a perfect right to discriminate against anyone -- it should be a free country, etc.

But in reading John Howard Griffin's "Black Like Me," I realized that the "freedom" enjoyed by white store owners in the South was a form of brutal tyranny, and almost prison-like conditions, for many black people in their communities. .

This told me that the "property rights" that are central to libertarian ideology have limits, or should have limits, and that the "free market" isn't always best.

A second reason I gradually stopped being Libertarian and turned liberal (at least back then) was that I lived in an area of New York State near Niagara Falls, where unregulated "free market" conditions in the local chemical industry had resulted in cancer-causing poisons getting into everyone's drinking water.

A third reason I finally saw the logical flaws in libertarian worship of the free market came in graduate school, when I learned about market flaws & market breakdowns that sometimes render the free market worthless, as the English economist A.C. Pigou explained in the 1920s.

When honest libertarians look at real life in our highly complicated capitalist system, I think, the smart ones will recognize that the goal of "individual liberty" is worthwhile, and that suspicion of an all-powerful State is usually justified. But they'll also come to understand that TYRANNY and UNFREEDOM can come at the hands of capitalist employers, capitalist polluters and even impersonal market conditions.

The hard truth for many libertarians to accept is that to protect REAL individual liberty, government intervention or informal social control over the market is sometimes urgently needed. There's nothing in private property & free market competition that guarantees freedom & individual liberty automatically. Life's more complicated than that.

-- democratic socialist / former liberal / former libertarian

[Arnie]

"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so." Ronald Reagan
The Liberal ideology is a theory which holds forth beliefs that have no basis in reality.
They are Advocates of a policy that empowers a strong government to enslave its people with a high tax burden incident to the support of extravagant and unnecessary social programs destructive to both the work ethic among the lower class, and the incentive to innovate and succeed among the working class.
The problems we face today are because the people who work for a living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living.
A democracy will continue to exist up until
the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous
gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from
the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally
collapse over loose fiscal policy
A broken government can't be fixed by the same government that broke it.
@

[Michael]

Yes you are exactly right; what does society need? And how do we pay for it? All libertarianism says is lets not use VIOLENCE to decide those 2 things. The very fact that you care about poor children is proof that poor children would be cared for, without you being forced to at the point of a gun.