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this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart 1. no you didn't, you retconning fucks 2. your decades of anti-governance "free market" "government never functions" propaganda paved the way for the complete authoritarian decimation of labor, consumer, environmental protections

most of these "libertarian free market think tankers" were paid covertly under the table by America's shittiest companies to argue for ZERO functional oversight of corporate power, then when the corpses, rampant fraud, and mass suffering appear, they're just completely intellectually fucking absent

A lot of these free market libertarians in the last year or DID shift some of their attention to combatting Trump's attacks on free speech. But they want to pretend they didn't play a starring role in paving the way for the total destruction of the federal regulatory state by autocratic zealots

again I know a lot of them, and unless I missed it, I've yet to see a single one of these free market think tank knobs face ANY meaningful reputational impact whatsoever in the Loper Bright, Supreme Court-driven, corruption free for all their policy proposals directly enabled

Make sure to add their replacement of the social welfare state with the Big Brother anti-liberty Palantir-enabled surveillance state

It's not about the freedom of the ordinary person to live out from under someone else's thumb but the freedom of the powerful man to put his thumb wherever he pleases (without having to hear about it from some nagging shrew).

they selling it as the former but it almost uniformly winds up the latter. otherwise these guys would meaningfully challenge corporate power

Libertarians are fundamentally incapable of thinking in terms of systems and view everything through the scope of vacuum-isolated individualism. In their minds, there is no such thing as aggregate effect, and everything is simply a matter of individualized choice in an even playing field.

They don’t understand things like: We don’t grow food to feed people but for profit, and as such, prices are set not to maximize affordability but ROI. This requires prices to be set to the highest amount the most people will be willing to pay, which intrinsically prices out the poorest X%.

These prices adjust as more people are willing to pay more, so you simply cannot break out of the permanent strata of poverty guaranteed by capitalism. To libertarians though, capitalism is an ideal system that all just fixes itself somehow with zero regulation or compensation to eliminate poverty.

Libertarians are just Republicans who want drugs to be legalized.