2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Do libertarians ever piss you off more than conservatives? [View all]frostfern
(67 posts)That's why I call them "glibertarians". It's hard to argue with them because they have these cute little canned arguments, anecdotes, and talking points to counter anything you bring up. They love to argue and must spend an inordinate amount of time learning all the ways to rhetorically counter whatever you throw at them, but no time considering whether any of it really makes sense.
They like to flout their supposedly superior understanding of economics. They have a real fetish for Austrian economics and like to thump people over the head with quotes from Fredrick Hayek or Milton Friedman. They may have a little bit more knowledge than the average joe but immediately run into problems with anyone who has actually studied macro-economics. Their understanding is about as deep as a puddle. They only study as far as they can use it for rhetorical advantage.
I've also noticed a lot of idiocy in the way they respond with "but you don't understand economics" whenever you express an opinion against their free-market dogmatism. They don't seem to understand the "is aught" problem in that they positively advocate for a specific economic setup while pretending they are somehow value neutral. They cannot be truly value-neutral when they decide to positively advocate for a certain economic setup because they are ultimately appealing to how the world "aught" to be in their utopian vision with has almost nothing to do with any objective study of economics in the real world. In the real world the study of economics really boils down to the study of inordinately complex systems of human behavior, with varying degrees of competition and cooperation. Economics has absolutely nothing to do with "freedom". When they talk about economics all they're doing is dressing up their ideology in a bunch of jargon to sound more intelligent and sophisticated than they actually are and hopefully intimidate whoever they are arguing with into giving up. It's so ridiculously futile.