Rich and Strange Aeons

When unemployment is very high and there is little or no social safety net, the force of saying to an employee do x unreasonable deed or accept y unreasonable working condition or be fired is essentially the same as saying do x unreasonable deed or accept y unreasonable working condition or I will harm you (by firing you and causing you to possibly starve). So, while right-libertarians happily say that governments "forcing" people to pay taxes is wrong, most have see absolutely nothing wrong with the above scenario.

I find that level of hypocrisy to be sufficiently high that I feel no need to give further thought to libertarian ideology. For me, it's deeply and essentially hypocritical, and comes down to its origins as an anarchist philosophy.

In more standard (ie left) anarchy, the essentially point is not forcing people to do things, which means not forcing them with either guns or false choices like "work in my unsafe mine or starve". Libertarianism kept the part about not forcing people with guns, but abandoned the left-anarchist dedication to collectivism and interdependence. Traditional anarchists distrust governments and large businesses equally and combine this with a more general distrust of capitalism, because it is a system based on economic force - I deeply understand and sympathize with that sort of distrust, but do not share it. Right-libertarians distrust governments but have utterly abandoned their distrust of large business or capitalism, and so their alleged rejection of force is to me nothing more than a decision to be intellectually dishonest by claiming they reject all force because they merely reject to most obvious sort.

I basically stopped being libertarian when I accepted that yes, something are worth collectively mugging people for, or that forcing everyone to put 1/3 of their labor toward useful social goals isn't unfair, and that a shared environment means unitary or dyadic actions which don't affect others aren't always possible, and thus collective decisions must sometimes be made. But I can still feel that tug and appeal of "Don't force people."

For me, that's why my very brief flirtation with anarchism ended. However, I simply do not see right-libertarianism as an ideology that rejects force.