Some good points in this essay by Robert Locke in The American Conservative about the fatuity and insularity of the mutant species called American libertarianism.

My positions are much closer to the classical liberal, but, for a long time I believed I was one too.

Now, I don’t.

Whatever the merits of libertarianism in theory, in practice most American (and Indian) libertarians strike me as faddish, dogmatic, insular, shrill, and intellectually superficial.

And not a few of them here seem to be flim-flam men of various kinds. I can see why they would embrace a content-less notion of liberty.

And, I no longer think libertarian anti-war positions are really meaningful either. I think most of  that is  posturing, unlikely to have any impact and adopted solely for the sake of  popularity.

There are a few exceptions, like Justin Raimondo and the Independent Institute  left libertarians (Long, McElroy etc.), who are honorable sorts. Then there are a handful of (real) Christian libertarians.

But the common or garden financial world libertarian is a wretched fraud and fools no one but himself…maybe not even himself. Libertarianism  in the financial world is mostly an ideology that allows the  predominantly Jewish elites (assiduously supported by their Gentile chamchas) to excuse uncivilized and predatory behavior toward the community in which those elites derive their income, while simultaneously posing as victims.

Gentiles accept this kind of thing because they are relatively powerless.

The PC cries of anti-semitism are only meant to prevent the masses from recognizing, naming and fighting this kind of ethnic supremacist thinking, no different in its way, however offensive the comparison might sound, from Nazism.

And there are also a whole lot of corporate sociopaths who mouth libertarian slogans as an excuse for their aberrant behavior.

Meanwhile, where the fight has counted, even the honorable  libertarians have been AWOL, or busy defending various shady personalities, compromising themselves in the process.

“Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the absence of government impingement upon freedom with freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state, individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny.

Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.”

One criticism of that last paragraph. Libertarianism is more a theory of how society is best ordered. It doesn’t set itself the task of choosing the individual ends each person pursues, i.e. how they will use freedom. Nor does it really say all choices are equal. It says all choices are equally valid choices. A different thing,

A more accurate criticism would be to point out that when all choices are allowed to be valid choices, it leaves open the possibility that some of the choices will end up destroying society as a whole.

A simple way to put it is this. Without a clear and correct idea of what is the good life, and without some restraints on individuality, preferably imposed by social codes and mores more than a proliferation of laws, libertarian societies will tend to move very quickly to totalitarianism.

That is precisely what has happened in the US, although observers keep trying to say the answer is “more liberty from government.” Yes, of course, government should be limited.

But before that can happen, we need something else. More self-restraint.

Can’t have one without the other. Or you get a criminal society. And a criminal society will always tend toward totalitarianism.

But you’ll never hear that from libertarians.