Some years ago, a reader rediscovered me. He said that he was glad to see that I had become more serious in my political writing, and noted that before I had written from a “glibertarian” perspective. That was the first time that I’d heard the term used. And I don’t think it was accurate. I think I wrote from a libertarian perspective. With very few exceptions, libertarian thinking is simplistic. That was definitely true of me. But “glibertarian”? I don’t really think so.
There are lots of definitions of “glibertarian.” Definition Of claims: “pejorative used by libertarians to describe those who use libertarian rhetoric but will not follow the philosophy to the end [and by] liberals to describe those who use libertarian rhetoric and will follow the philosophy to the end.” This is silly. It just means a glib (or shallow) libertarian. I’m sure one can find examples, but I’ve never known anyone to use “glibertarian” to describe a hardcore libertarian.
A Country of Glibertarians
America is largely a country of glibertarians: people who have a generalized notion that the government is bad, without much of a clue of all the things that the government does from them. If a glibertarian thought a little more, they would be a libertarian. If they thought a lot more, they’d move past the “one weird trick” fallacy for fixing society. In general, I think more thought leads more nuance — to the idea societies are complicated and the best ones combine different aspects of different ideologies.
The problem is that most glibertarians never move even to the libertarian level. So they have vague anti-government ideas, which makes them perfect marks for conservatives. Note that conservatives in America love to talk about small government, but they aren’t actually for it. They are just against government programs that help the weak, poor, and even the middle class. They are all for programs that help the rich. And a big part of that is having a huge military. This is why regardless of the state of the economy, the US government debt has always gone up when Republicans were in charge since Ronald Reagan:
Now I don’t much care about the debt — especially when we are in the middle of a recession. (So Obama gets a pass, but George W Bush does not.) But glibertarians do! They have a vague idea that government is bad so cutting it back will be good. There are a lot of glibertarians right now just waking up to the fact that Obamacare was a government program that allowed them to have health insurance. If they weren’t so reflexive in their belief that the government is generally bad, they wouldn’t be such easy marks for the Republicans and their dishonest rhetoric.
Glibertarians Don’t Think Much
This isn’t to say that glibertarians hate the government. I know conservative and liberal glibertarians. And it’s sad. These are the people that have allowed the United States to make life so much harder for normal working people than it is in other “advanced” economies. And this is why glibertarians are more dangerous than libertarians.
In general, libertarians are just screaming into the vacuum. They are dangerous in that the rich use them to come up with reasons why yet another tax cut will make us all better off. The ultimate “one weird trick”: tax cuts for the rich! But mostly, libertarians don’t matter — or they wouldn’t if it weren’t for all the glibertarians who fall for this rhetoric. Note: there are vastly more glibertarians than libertarians.
The big issue is that it is hard to engage with glibertarians. They don’t have much in the way of a political philosophy. They don’t take politics seriously. I can talk to a serious libertarian and find common ground. I can even get them to rethink some of their assumptions. But I can’t with glibertarians. They don’t think they have any assumptions. Their political beliefs come via osmosis, and they don’t even think of them as beliefs but rather “common sense.”
When Glibertarians Wake Up
They don’t think about their politics serious — until they get fired from their corporate or manufacturing job when they hit 50 and find they can’t get healthcare. Then glibertarians can quickly learn that what they thought before wasn’t just “common sense.” And that it’s all a lot more complicated when things aren’t going well in your own life. It’s called empathy — it comes to some suddenly.
If anyone has any ideas on how to talk to glibertarians while they are still doing well, let me know. I’ve come to think that it’s hopeless, which is why I’m come to think our political system is hopeless. I hope I’m wrong. Please: try to cheer me up.
I think we’re most effective when we tell our own stories. One guy I knew, ran a pizza franchise, very glibertarian, wanted minimum wage cuts and lower taxes and the rest. I worked at the group home his brother lived in. He was always very respectful of the hard-working staff there. And I was able to get through to him that our wages were more or less set by the state, and we weren’t getting paid enough. He agreed on that. Not anything else, but it was a story he could understand.
I believe the Democrats should be engaging more people to tell their stories, and not just during election season. Have people talk about how health care saved their life, or their SSI benefit, or how an AG’s office helped them in a fight with a crooked company. That’s much more effective than having some politician say “I know a person who” benefited from this or that piece of good governance.
The all-out war on government started decades ago, and it will take time to undo. People telling their stories could help. And some actual populist legislation like raising the minimum wage to $15 wouldn’t hurt, either! Obama did several good things in office, and few people know about them. Partly that’s because of his basic lack of bragging, partly it’s because many of those good things were very piecemeal reforms. We can think bigger. And we can get people to talk about why this matters.
It seems weird that it seems to take massive catastrophe to get these idiots to change but sometimes that is what it takes.
I spent all election season screaming at everyone I knew, “VOTE!” And so many had the tired response, “they’re all the same.” Some are realizing they’re not all the same, now.
There’s an intrinsic PR problem with good government. When it’s working well for you, it’s not noticed. Nobody thinks about snowplow funding when the roads are clear. They think about government snowplows when they get a ticket for failing to move their parked car. Yet budgets for snowplow funding are hugely important (and those tickets serve the dual purpose of raising revenue PLUS helping get cars off the street so plows can do their job).
We got a lot of “esplaining” to do!
They recognize that both parties aren’t the same right after the second term of the Republican president starts and a major problem hits. Then it is “Save us Democrats!” Only in eight years to completely forget whatever it was that they realised about the other side the last time.
Next time Dems should say “no, now suffer.”
When I was very young, like 8 or so, I was introduced to the ancient Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting times.” I didn’t understand why it was a curse. I thought my times were boring. I welcomed more interesting ones.
Now, of course, I get the curse.
We live in interesting times. Fascism in on the rise everywhere. The elected leaders of America and India are outright fascists; other countries may follow soon.
Apparently, fascism is a human fallacy which can never be utterly disproven as ludicrous. It’ll always pop up.
Yet, so far, people are also popping up to fight it.
People are rediscovering what we never should have forgotten; the power of marchers, together, against tyranny. This was happening before the election. It’s happening with more fervency now. (White people are realizing they’re screwed, too.)
Will it succeed? My crystal ball does not say. Am I hopeful? Yes, I am.
It strikes me as a lack of empathy. To me, it’s very easy to imagine just about anything bad happening to me. Of course, I wasn’t always that way. But I will never understand how someone can be anti-LGBT until they find out their son or daughter is one. That’s just crazy.
Having dealt with them before, it is one part religion and four parts not wanting to admit they are wrong.
Also, I think — I’ve run into this a lot — people who have little validation. They don’t have cool jobs or any serious money. They’re never going to get cool jobs or any serious money. And what does our culture praise? Hipsters with cool jobs, and thugs with serious money.
So praising oneself for being straight, married, having kids is a way of claiming some validation. It’s morally ridiculous, of course, because while relationships and child rearing are enormously challenging, choosing to be straight instead of LGBT takes no effort at all. It’s the default setting, like username “admin” and password “password” on a wireless router.
Some of these people are 100-proof assholes, but many more are just average folks whose dreams were crushed. And being anti-gay gives them something. “I may be a loser, but at least I’m straight — not like those perverts.” It’s as much pride (!) as they’re gonna get.
I hate it as much as you two do. But I do think I understand where it comes from.
You know nothing of glibertarians.
Visit our site to find out more. (You should be able to click through my name and get there. Otherwise it’s glibertarians. Com (remove the space)
There are corporate professionals there, day laborers there, business owners, stay-at-home parents and retirees. We’re a lot broader cross section than you think.
I’m aware of your site. If you want to call yourself glibertarians, fine. But you aren’t by my definition — which happens to be the obvious one. Your site is libertarian. Search this site for “libertarian.” I suspect I’ve written about most topics you discuss.
As for the diversity of your movement: that’s nonsense. You can’t cherry pick some iconoclasts and claim you are diverse.
Ooh, “iconoclasts.com” was the other name we were tossing around when we started it up. But we landed on globes since the domain was available.
As to your perception that there’s a lack of diversity, I’d challenge you to why you feel that way. The founding group of people, which I’m proud to be a part of, fit that description alone. And if you’ve spent more than a few minutes in the comments, you’re bound to discover your assumptions are incorrect.
Or you can sit here in your echo chamber and continue assuming things which you know little about.
I’m not speaking of your specific group; I’m speaking of libertarians in general. People have studied it. But also, I used to be very active in the LP. But that’s the thing about libertarians: they’re as factionalized as the Jewish resistance in Life of Brian. So forgive me if I lump you all together and don’t take your minor disagreements seriously.
A personal blog is not an echo chamber. Since you don’t know the vast extent of my reading, you really can’t say if I live in an echo chamber. If I had to guess, I’d say this is the only article of mine you’ve ever read. And if you read the 8,000 articles I’ve published here over the last 7 years, you’d see that my thinking has evolved. But I know libertarianism very well, and don’t need to rush out to hear arguments I’ve countered years ago. There are far more interesting things to be reading.
You’re recent articles:
The Awesome Adventures of Dumbass College SJWS!!11!! (Read that rant about a hundred times before)
Soak the Rich? (Misidentifies the tax — and the year; an argument I’ve been reading for decades)
Philosophical Ideal Versus Market Forces (a strangely 19th century argument being made in the 21st century)
I’m glad you have a group that is writing on a regular schedule. I hope it works out well for you. But there’s nothing new there. And call yourself “glibertarian” all you want, your site is typical libertarian. The echo chamber may be with ye.
You are always so nice. I should grow up to be like you. *punches nazis* But at the present time, I am not.
“The ultimate “one weird trick”: tax cuts for the rich!””
As opposed to the wonders of raising taxes on the rich; the wisdom of which is given the Glib treatment here =
It wasn’t a special tax on yachts; it was a luxury tax. My interest is taxing the rich more is not about screwing them; it is about fairness. Most taxes in the country are regressive. I believe in progressive taxation. Taken as a whole, taxes in the US are barely progressive. This is why conservatives (which includes libertarians) love talking about the federal income tax: its just about the only tax that is even moderately progressive.
As for unintended consequences, if this happens frequently, why is it always the luxury tax (which almost no one supports) that is brought up? The answer is obvious: it’s all you’ve got. The primary taxes supporting Obamacare worked exactly as they were supposed to.
And leftists (and even liberals) have a lot more ideas than taxing the rich, so the basis of your comment is nonsense. But rather than comment, why not read some of the 8,000 articles on this site. It might help to get out of the libertarian bubble for a while.
Serious questions:
Why would you believe in progressive taxation?
Doesn’t progressive taxation punish success? If you think not, explain why please.
How are luxury taxes “fair” when they target an item that is only purchased by a small segment of the population, yet the manufacture of those items inevitably includes people of all socio-economic groups? (An example would be the tax on yachts mentioned above that was meant to be punitive but all it ended up doing was costing 15,000 people their jobs and having “the rich” go elsewhere to buy their boats.)
Thanks.
I’m not in favor of luxury taxes; I don’t believe in most consumption taxes at all. The fact that libertarians continue to bring up the 1991 luxury tax shows how little they have to support their beliefs.
I’m in favor of progressive taxation because humans are social animals and one person’s success is not theirs alone. All this talk of “punishing success” is just the modern version of eugenics. Sure, no one talks about it that way because of the Nazis. But why else is it fair that I make more money because I was born smart? Personally, I think I should make less money since my brain is my favorite toy. I wrote a little about this recently, American Libertarianism Is Fascism-Friendly.
This question that I get all the time from libertarians has buried in it an assumption that the current economic system is the best one that we could have. That it is natural and not government mandated. That economics is the ultimate arbiter of value. I could go on. This is why I abandoned libertarianism: it is built on top of a pile of assumptions that libertarians are generally unaware of and regardless will almost never admit to.
Why is it that you went on and on about the luxury tax? I posit that it is because you live in an echo chamber. The only time I hear anyone talking about a luxury tax is when conservatives are using it to claim taxation is bad in general. In all my time writing this blog, I’ve only brought up “luxury tax” once — and it was to make fun of conservatives who complain that the poor pay no federal income tax (often erroneously stated as “no tax” at all).
So why are you all over the luxury tax? Why did you assume I would be for it?
It was brought up because it,is,exactly the type of punitive tax targeting a specific group of people that ultimately doesn’t affect its target nearly as much as it does others further down on the socio-economic scale.
As for you saying “why should I make more money because I was born smart”, well that makes me take you less seriously from a philosophical point of view. You completely dismiss effort out of hand and attribute financial success to innate ability. Try selling that argument to an athlete with world-class ability but no work ethic and ask him why he’s flipping burgers and Tom Brady, arguably less physically or mentally gifted as many other QBs but with a superior work ethic, is hoisting Super Bowl trophy after trophy. Nobody is born on third base. And wh are you to impose your guilt onto others financially? Nobody is keeping you from voluntarily paying more if you think your fair share is greater than what the government is mandating. But desiring to point government guns at me and extract them from under threat,of imprisonment merely because you feel guilty is pretty sick.
As for the whole “you didn’t build that” argument, you think it’s logical to tax someone that develops a social networking platform that the entire world benefits from and the engineers that helped him/her do it at a confiscatory rate relative to the net takers who will never contribute in a net positive to society because they’re born smarter? And you call the opposite view modern eugenics?
Wow. Just…wow.
Well good luck with all that. Oh, and if you’re interested in paying your fair share rather than sticking a gun in my ribs, you can go here: https://www.pay.gov/public/form/start/23779454
You asked me two question, I answered them both. I asked you two question, you answered neither and instead went on a typical libertarian rant (“a gun in my ribs” — oh, please). And that’s because your argument against me is a straw man. I’m just not playing along by being what all your libertarian friends “just know” leftists think.
You apparently think “work ethic” is something people will into existence. I recommend reading a little about free will. Put down the Bastiat (Or worse: Rand!) and pick up the Aquinas. When it make it to the 20th century, get back to me.
Also: everything you said about Tom Brady etc has been said in favor of eugenics. Personally, I’d find it chilling. But it seems that libertarians really don’t have a problem with eugenics — except for the name.
When you first posted here, I didn’t assume who you were. But your last comment shows you to be a libertarian cliche. Comment on if you want, but you really are just wasting my time now. I doubt seriously you could say anything I haven’t heard dozens of times. So I won’t be reading or responding to you comments. But someone else might want to talk to you, so feel free.
Read my reply. My first paragraph answers your first question.
I suppose I never answered your second because it is a strawman. I never said or implied that you supported the luxury tax.
As for the gun in the ribs comment, I don’t know how else to put it. Tell me, what is the penalty if one refuses to pay their “fair share” according to the government? Does it involve being put in a cage? Are the people who enforce the tax scheme carrying guns?
Hard work = eugenics.
Well, I’ve heard about all I need to hear from you to form my opinion. You’re a fool.
Good day.
And you’re a troll. Goodbye.
This person apparently is unaware that progressive taxation takes into account hard work like Tom Brady’s by not forcing him to pay the full top tier amount right away.
Then again, the person is a walking libertarian cliche machine that has a slightly better way of yapping.
And no I am not going to respond to you in anything other than mockery. Frank’s the expert and while sometimes I disagree with him vehemently, he does know his shit about this nonsense. :)
Furthermore, if I’m reading you right, you should be proposing an IQ tax rather than a progressive income tax. After all, why should I pay more in taxes than the lazy people that are smarter than me but earning half of my income that I earn by working my rear end off while they sit around and do less?
Or does your belief that intelligence translates to financial success only go so far?
Since this one slipped in: yeah, if you could take it a step past that, you might start seeing the need for progressive taxation. But you are just going to go with one sentence I wrote and assume that it is the entirety of my political thinking. (Have you read the two articles I linked to? Of course not! You’re a libertarian! You don’t need no stinkin’ information because you have the perfect first-principles ideology!)
You are a hair’s width away from being labeled a troll and banned.
Hey, you wrote it, not me. I was just asking you to square it with effort. Which you refused to do.
Also, I like how you call someone a troll that challenged your philosophy that treats success like a cancer. Oh, and you won’t need to ban me. I’ll just disappear. I have hundreds of comments today from people all across the social-economic spectrum to read at my site. I don’t want to clutter up the tens of comments you’ll get this week.
No one, and I do mean no one, has ever become successful alone. Anyone who claims that is being disingenuous and yes, A TROLL.
Tom Brady is a Superbowl trophy winner because of an entire system that lets him not have to follow a plow but spend his free time practicing football. For which he is amply rewarded. Yet the idea that he should pay any of that back through the form of taxation puts you into the vapors.
You also used the level of commentary to insult Frank for not putting up with your crap. He doesn’t care about the number of comments-never has and never will. It is nice of course but it isn’t why he does this blog.
So I am glad you got banned and can’t respond to this. Because I am not as nice as Frank is and never will be.
NFL football is socialist. The stadiums are mostly, if not entirely, publicly financed. The top ticket buyers (luxury suites) usually are businesses who get an “entertainment expense” tax writeoff. The merchandise is protected by copyright law; you or I can’t make Minnesota Vikings t-shirts and sell them on a street corner near the stadium.
You or I also cannot hire football players from the NFL and form our own team which plays the Vikings. The NFL, and all major pro sports, have antitrust exemptions allowing them to prohibit direct competition. The NFL is also allowed to prohibit teams from hiring players who are less than four years out of high school. This legal age discrimination is to maintain the popularity of college football. Which serves as free minor-league training for pro football. Most top football colleges are state-funded schools.
Need I go on? I must, I must! Tom Brady is an incredibly lucky man who has never been seriously damaged by injury (that we know; brain injuries from repeated concussions can show up later). Whether one’s leg bends this way or that way when being tackled is pure random chance. If it bends the wrong way, a football player’s career is ruined. While football players are aware of these risks and choose them voluntarily, they are random. One might as well say we shouldn’t tax casino jackpot or lottery winners.
Additionally, many athletes do not play pro sports because they enjoy it. They do so because of the money. They are denied other opportunities to make a decent living which they might well prefer, and which would have immensely more societal value. Top NBA draft pick Greg Oden wanted to be a dentist. That dream was unavailable for him because he grew up poor. His pro basketball career was cursed by freak injuries from game #1, and he eventually slid into alcoholism and domestic abusing. (He is doing better, now.)
Additionally, it is unlikely NFL football would ever have achieved its current popularity had the United States not become an extremely violent nation, one addicted to war and dismissive of crimes against the poor. These are government policies. Less militaristic countries (which includes, currently, all of them) do not care much for NFL football. They prefer “futbol” — AKA, soccer. (Canada likes hockey, but that’s because hockey rinks are cheap to build. Spray water on ground in Canadian winter. Presto, hockey rink.)
There is absolutely no worse way to defend libertarianism than by pointing to the success of a pro athlete, and no professional sport in America more socialist than football. Teams split up every dollar of TV revenue equally!
Oh, and BTW, there is one publicly-owned, non-profit team in all of American pro sports. It’s the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. Thousands upon thousands of Packer fans have one share each. Thereby assuring the team will never bolt town for a fancier stadium. Volunteers shovel snow and work concessions. 60% of concession revenue goes to local charities.
The Packers are grandfathered in. Every American pro sport has bylaws which prohibit nonprofits or municipalities from purchasing teams. Which many cities and states would like to do; the teams are cash cows, and if taxpayers are on the hook for building stadiums, they should get to own the team. Nope! Banned in America, except for the Packers. (It’s not uncommon in Europe.)
Free market, my shiny metal ass!
Shoulda lost the fifth paragraph. Don’t mix political anger with Surly beer!
“No one, and I do mean no one, has ever become successful alone.”
I may not have done it alone, but you weren’t one of those who helped me. So why should you benefit from my success?
Indeed, progressive income taxation sold on the basis of reinvestment contradicts itself. If the government’s actual expenditures were so key to success, then success would be more uniform and progressive taxation would be unnecessary. Yet success is not uniform at all, which reveals that what governments actually spend most of the proceeds of progressive taxation on don’t have much to do with success.
The conflation of socially beneficial goods, like roads, schools, police, etc. with everything government spends tax money on is fallacious. Most of the money goes to waste, of one kind or another. This is plainly evident by the fact that, despite decades of constantly increasing spending, spending levels have no more than a very loose correlation with quality of service. It is not what is spent, not even how it is spent, but how closely connected the spending is to the people who paid the taxes that funded it. If it’s your money, you care. If it’s somebody else’s money, you don’t.
No, the core purpose of progressive taxation is not reinvestment but redistribution. We take from Bob not so much to give to Sally who helped him succeed but to Jimmy and Mary who did not. We do this not because we want to pay back what was done to help Bob succeed but because we want to elevate the fiction that individual choice and responsibility are largely irrelevant, and deny the reality that functional families, communities, businesses, and societies are built by individuals with the sweat of their own brows, not the money taken from unrelated others.
Presumptuous that you think Elizabeth is benefiting from your success. I’d respond to what you have to say, but this material has been so well covered that if you were open-minded you’d have read it — and would be embarrassed to spew it here.
“Most of the money goes to waste, of one kind or another.” This is certainly true of military expenditures. We have anti-ballistic missile silos in Alaska which are easily defeated by, um, rain. And yet the “Star Wars” missile-defense contractors have annual conferences where they meet-‘n-greet to discuss new ideas for a missile defense plan which will, probably, never work. That’s enormous waste.
I’m not sure how one assumes libraries, schools, museums, and care for the old/sick are wasteful. Remember, one of the best arguments for Social Security / Medicare is that adults in their most productive working years were being hampered by having to take care of their parents or grandparents. Social Security / Medicare took some of that responsibility off their backs, meaning they could be more focused on their day jobs.
Unless one believes that “rational self-interest” dictates that a family member should simply leave the old and sick to die. Anyone who believes that should have a staredown with my wife, who spent ten years sacrificing the growth of her small business to look after her dying parents (got sick before they were eligible for Medicare). I would advise against this. She is not a person to be fucked with.
Furthermore, I suspect that few people who profess “government spending is waste” and, henceforth, business spending is all-knowingly wise, have any experience with the higher officials running either business or government. On this site, we have a regular writer who knows government pretty well, and she’s open about its upsides / flaws.
I’ve spent considerable time with corporate executives, and they are mostly groupthink morons. They’re simply not curious or creative people. Have 10,000 of them try the same new idea, and one will eventually get it right. Hooray. Innovation. What a treasure.
There are things the government has no reason to interfere in. Like the manufacturing of Barbie dolls or claw hammers. (Except to make sure they’re not made out of some toxic substance.) Yet there are additionally things which should not be run by the profit motive. Such as care for the elderly / sick. Prisons. National defense.
If one is to argue that the profit motive is preferable in every case, I demand specific data. There may certainly be areas where it’s been demonstrated how the profit motive does a better job than government funding. But you need to provide examples to back up your case.
I fear you are on a hopeless quest. What I usually get back is how much better the American economy did than the USSR’s. It’s not even necessarily true, when you consider where the two countries started. But more to the point, it is meaningless. As I’ve been saying for years, libertarianism is a religion. It is based on faith. And it is one reason why it’s not even worth talking to libertarians. You end up in a maddening two-step. They make some kind of theoretical argument. You counter it. So they move to a practical argument. You counter it. They move back to the theoretical argument. And on and on.
Or as with Sloopyinca, they start off seeming reasonable enough, but the longer they talk, the more they are clearly just alt-right. Such “libertarians” are just fascists who haven’t thought their philosophies through.
“I” and “you” were used rhetorically there. It is not literally about me and Elizabeth but about the relationship between the people who pay the tax, the government that turns tax revenue into spending, and the people to whom that spending is directed. The less connected those groups are, the less effective the process will be in delivering second-order effects (i.e. social goods rather than raw redistribution).
Put another way, progressive taxation framed as such is cargo culting. The government does the dance of spending other people’s money and then everyone expects the “cargo” of education, infrastructure, security, etc. to arrive. But if it wasn’t there to begin with, it’s never going to come, because money doesn’t produce the skills and desire to make it happen. Proponents of progressive taxation like to point to real-life examples where socially desirable outcomes are most evident but fail to recognize that these same people and places are the least dependent on the redistributive nature of the tax.
I am not responding to the entire corpus of your blog. I am only addressing the specific implication that progressive taxation is repayment of social investment. My mind is quite open, if you have something which you feel adequately answers my criticism, then please do reference it and I will read it.
I understood what you meant. I just wasn’t taking you seriously.
Saying that redistribution is cargo cult doesn’t mean anything. You clearly don’t read economics. There is a lively debate in the field about how high levels of inequality reduce productivity. But you aren’t going to learn that by reading Reason and hanging out at Glibertarians. Redistribution does indeed have economic effects. Those effects can be good or bad, but they are very real. Your idea is that there exists some kind of pure economy where the government doesn’t affect things is nonsense. Such a thing doesn’t exist and can’t exist. But I don’t want to get into an argument with you. Either you will eventually get past “Minimum wage is bad; it’s simple supply and demand” or you won’t. If you don’t worry about monopsony, then you aren’t a serious thinker. And if you think redistribution is wrong, I really think you should read, Inequality: the Monopoly Analogy.
Sorry, but my experience with Sloopyinca has made me think that everyone coming here from Glibertarians is just alt-right in libertarian clothes. (I will, however, engage with you if you comment on one of the many other articles I’ve written about libertarianism here — assuming you comment about what I’ve written and don’t just spout talking points.)
I will tell you this: it amazed me when I was a libertarian that the people who understood capitalism the best were the Marxists. But I understand now. Marxists have to argue against the default system. Libertarians (and conservatives and liberals) are cursed with never seeing the major assumptions they bring to their thinking. I’m not a Marxist, but I highly recommend you read at least the first volume of Capital. At least it will give you some idea of your hidden assumptions.
You should check your WordPress inbox occasionally. There’s a bit on the Magic Floating Libertarian Island you might have some fun with editing, or just rewriting from scratch. I promise you the author won’t mind if you choose option #2.