this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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I considered myself a "kid" up until I had my own kid. So more a maturity designation than an age one. It took some election cycles to understand what the actual priorities are.
I grew up in a Democrat-majority state, so I naturally blamed the stupid policy choices on Democrats, and I was pissed even when a popular Republican initially won but lost after a recount "found" thousands of extra votes.
Then I moved to a Republican majority state and it had the same problems with stupid policy choices (different problems with different policies), and I realized the problem isn't with ether party, but the two party system that essentially guarantees you'll have poor representation.
That's when I found libertarianism, and now I look less at party affiliation and instead try to find the least insane option. My state will elect the GOP candidate, so there's no such thing as strategic voting on my ballot, I simply express who's the least insane.
This arbitrary milestone that is only meaningful for you doesn't really translate well in conversation no?
More than that, it feels like it hints at, but does not fully confirm a sort of "I didn't care till it affected me personally" angle to it.
Ok, here I was not jumping to conclusions and then you end with libertarianism... the self defeating ideology that really translates to "Don't tread on me, but fuck everyone else" and when asked how things will still run responds with a shrug.
"Kid" is an imprecise term that just means someone who is young and inexperienced, and what it means changes with context. When I went to middle school/junior high, "kid" was anyone still in elementary school. When I went to college, "kid" was anyone still in K-12. When I got my first real job after college, "kid" included most undergrads. And so on.
Here's the first dictionary definition I found:
Yeah, it's ambiguous, that's kinda how language goes. It can mean anything from a baby to an old person, given context. I would hope the context here (voted multiple times) would be enough to show I wasn't referring to an elementary school kid, but a young adult.
Nah, it still didn't impact me personally when I switched my mindset. I've had a pretty privileged life, I grew up middle class and my first job after college provided a middle class lifestyle. Not having to worry too much about housing or food meant much of government policy didn't really impact me. Today, the most impactful policy is immigration since my SO's family are immigrants and we've only been able to help with my SO's parents.
I'm not saying I was out of touch or anything. I had friends across the income spectrum from relatively rich (dad owned a car dealership) to very poor (living off welfare), and I certainly didn't favor the wants of the first group over the second.
I was mostly interested in efficiency. For example, I wrote an essay in high school about privatizing social security (i.e. defined contribution like an IRA rather than defined benefit like a pension) because I was interested in stocks and saw stocks had much higher returns than Social Security payouts. Local politics was very inefficient, and I blamed that on the dominant party. I grew up near Seattle, and as a kid, there were a ton of cancelled rail and monorail projects, mostly in the Seattle area, and any of them would've helped alleviate traffic. They spent millions on these projects before killing them, and meanwhile traffic on the highways continued to get worse and investment outside Seattle continued to languish. And then when they finally built some rail lines, it didn't really solve traffic (made getting to the Mariners stadium easier...) and they had a separate line for the airport that didn't connect to the commuter line, making it only narrowly useful. Around that time, I had family in Utah and they could take the train to the airport, downtown for shopping, and to the local university, and that was across three lines with many transfers between them.
Young me saw Democrats as inefficient and eager to spend, and Republicans as stubborn but efficient. The reality is that both parties suck when they have a massive majority, and they don't really work well together if there's a shot one could have a majority in the next election. In Utah, they've talked about a light rail extension for well over a decade that would increase daily ridership by almost 50% and give an alternative to a congested area, and in that time they built a short rail segment to a relatively wealthy area (~1/10 the daily ridership of the other propsal) and will build a short extension before reconsidering it. That's not left/right thing since they prioritized a liberal area over a conservative one.
Then your understanding of libertarianism is misguided. It's a big tent, with everything from socialists who adore Marx to the far right who want a Mad Max style free-for-all, and you seem to be talking about the second group.
I'm personally somewhere in the middle, and certainly left of the Libertarian Party in the US. I was attracted by the idea of the NAP guiding decisions, and I think people are generally better off with more freedom rather than less. Here are some policies I support:
And so on. I want better, more efficient services, and I think the libertarian perspective is the right way to find that balance.
I think most people assume it means under 18.
Sure, but this context was about voting age people. That was the whole context.
You were still using it as an excuse for not paying attention though.
This sounds directly like it impacts you.
This type of bothsiderism indicates that you still don't pay attention when you refuse to see nuance past this.
Providing better things to richer people isnt a left/right thing??? You basically choose to stick your head in the sand is what it sounds like.
I highly doubt this.
Nope.
Almost none of these policies are actually supported by any libertarian politicians.
This sounds dangerously close to privatizing schools, especially where we're talking about basic education necessary for life (K-12)
Sounds dangerous and vague, once again, almost like privatizing education by replacing a government agency.
This sounds pipe dream like. Everyone dreams of such a thing, and itll happen right after the US switches to a proportional representation system.
Really, Im getting the impression, that like many conservatives (including the ones who call themselves libertarians), you're presenting a prettied up, as clean as possible sounding list of policies that with a little bit of digging reveals that its all headed towards the classic libertarian problems where these ideas only work if everyone is assumed to act in good faith, and somehow privatization is more efficient than a government doing things.
It's a bit more complicated. Basically, here's a description of the two areas:
For reference, the current system is about 30k daily riders. I get that the first option is significantly cheaper, but its impact is also significantly less since it only relieves some traffic on one local street. The second option could relieve traffic on a major arterial highway and encourage more businesses with high paying jobs to open up in the region.
Basically, the conservatives in the legislature want the cheaper option, not the most impactful option. Where I grew up, the Democrats wanted an option, not necessarily the cheapest or best option.
For the record, I want both options to be built. I'd much rather us spend more on rail than highway expansion (a recent expansion near #2 was $1.7B, double what it would've cost to build a rail line that could've solved the same problem).
Are these "libertarian politicians" in the room with you? The closest I've seen is libertarian-leaning conservatives, like Thomas Massie or maybe Rand Paul. But they're pretty much only "libertarian" in the fiscal sense, and even that's a stretch since it's not based in libertarian principles, but just wanting to spend less.
The foundation of libertarianism, IMO, is the Non-Aggresion Principle. It's not private property, unrestrained capitalism, or anything like that, but the idea that we should prefer policies that respect freedom to those that don't. So if we're going to raise taxes, it needs to be for something important.
I think welfare is important, since w/o a social safety net, bad luck or bad choices could ruin you and enable others to take advantage of you. If you always have the option to walk away from your job and still have access to basic necessities, your boss really doesn't have that much power over you so they're forced to respect you to keep you working for them. That solution is a lot more attractive than a whole slew of laws governing the workplace and welfare programs that often require a lot of work to gain access to. I support the NIT/UBI because it'll significantly reduce the amount of power the government and corporations have over poor people, and encourage people to take more entrepreneurial risks, which benefits society at large.
No, the research I've seen shows that the best outcomes are produced by a mix of public and charter (i.e. 100% publicly funded, privately run) schools. Charter schools and public schools both need to step up to retain funding otherwise parents will move their children to a better performing school. Areas w/ 100% charter schools seem to lose that competitive drive, and areas w/o great school mobility tend to stagnate as well.
However, since charter schools don't have bus service, they're not as available to poorer households. Hence the stipulation that bus service is moved to the city to manage, so everyone has equal opportunity to choose the school they want.
What's dangerous and vague? School costs skyrocketed when federal student loans became commonly available (look at the admin spending of universities before and after Obama), because it lowered the barrier for more people to pay for school. On the flipside, since they're not dischargeable w/ bankruptcy, they stick with you even if you don't graduate w/ a degree.
I don't think college is right for everyone, and instead of a federal student loan option, we should encourage high schools to work w/ local businesses for apprenticeships, much like how Germany handles things. Basically, in your final two years, you can choose a college track or an apprenticeship, which would make getting a job in the trades directly after high school an option. I had a friend go to an IT-specialized high school, and he was able to get a job making $15-20/hr right out of high school (he ended getting a college degree in IT), instead of the then-common $7-10/hr jobs for high school grads.
Also, university tuition could also be funded by companies who want first dips after a student graduates. We need to be very careful on what these contracts look like to avoid indentured servitude, but I think we can find a happy middleground where companies get first pick of students they fund (hiring is very expensive) and students get to avoid getting saddled w/ debt. Likewise, private loans tend to be more humane since students have the option to declare bankruptcy, so lenders will be less likely to fund a student pursuing a program with a low chance of making enough money to repay the debt.
Does it? My state (Utah) has that in the Constitution, and it works pretty well (Utah is 49th in the nation for state debt per capita). If the Legislature says something needs to be done, they also need to fund it.
While I complain about our mass transit priorities, the fact is that our mass transit punches above its weight. The first line (the one I want expanded in option 2 above) existed before the Olympics, the Olympics added another, and we've since built two more and a commuter line. If everything was stalled in the Legislature due to funding not happening, mass transit would be the first to go.
It can work, but it would be a lot harder to add today than having it be there on day 1. That said, I think it's worth pushing for, especially with the shutdown nonsense every few years.
Sure, I'm focusing more on the ones that many leftists would agree with, because Lemmy very much skews left. My point here is to show that libertarians don't necessarily all want to strip government to its bones and leave the poor to fight for the scraps.
Here's an article about the libertarian case for Basic Income, and the Negative Income Tax in particular was championed by Milton Friedman (PDF warning; Wikipedia alternative), who was a conservative economist with libertarian leanings.
Basically, the Negative Income Tax would replace much of our current welfare system w/ a cash-based system. So the $168B I quoted earlier wouldn't necessarily be something I'd want to add to the current spending budget, but funded from a few other cuts to hopefully make the new system largely a drop-in w/o any spending changes. If it replaces Social Security (pipedream), it would probably reduce total spending and increase revenue (just removing the income cap on SS would generate $300B or so; eliminating benefits for high incomes would allow it to expand to everyone).