196

I did not know economics at the time. I also grew up in a conservative household but never understood the opposition to gay rights and legalized drugs.

It happens to people when they see selfishness as a core virtue.

If you grow up in an echo chamber, libertarianism can seem like the best option. Growing up my understanding of things other than capitalism/status quo was "the cold war was a thing that happened". So like when I started to break away from my parents politics, I went under "libertarian" cuz my thoughts were, the government should leave you alone, and I didn't understand anything on the other side enough to genuinely agree or disagree with it. If you've heard of the Overton window, it's kinda like a personal Overton window, what is an "acceptable political option" to you. It's hard to break that shit, but it's possible, I can see how people get there, but there is a clear path out usually.

They believe someday they'll magically become millionaires and it'll be their turn to exploit those below.

I called myself libertarian at the beginning of highschool.

My political beliefs went from edgy ultra-communist to what could only be described as (edgy) ancap. In my head, the idea of a light set of laws, in particular the US constitution, with ideals of individual freedoms sounded amazing.

From the perspective of the US education system, the constitution is holy, and the best thing to happen to mankind. I truly believed that strong personal freedoms and the ability to rise from rags to riches was incredible. The ability for an immigrant to move from an oppressive world to a free one was idyllic. And I was told that libertarianism was the way to do that, that a free market is what caused that.

At that time, I made some new friends, and by god am I thankful one of them told me “lmao, the free market is kinda shit, and we really don’t have one” before I became obsessed with right wing pundits.

An idyllic view of libertarianism is not that bad, dare I say nearly a good one. But holy shit does it devolve into one of the worst political systems in practice. Granted, an idyllic view of nearly any political or governmental system is nice, but the ideal view of any system doesn’t really matter in practice.

To answer your question, I genuinely think the only way to consider libertarianism a good thing is to either:

• try and shed your edgy early political views and miss the mark spectacularly
• fall for right wing propaganda like I did
• Have no understanding of politics in practice.
• fail to realize the moment you askew rights for personal freedoms, you effectively give then up and allow someone with more economic power to have the personal freedom to trample yours.

If you combine Econ 101 with American ideals of negative freedoms, libertatianism is what you get, and to be fair it sounds great on the surface. If you then turn a blind eye to all systemic issues that ruin that ideal of freedom/fairness you can even keep believing it!