Freedom is not freedom without power to exercise said freedom.

There is no law preventing me from doing 100 pushups right now. Yet I also find myself powerless to do it.

Does that mean I'm not free to do pushups?

The word 'freedom' has many different meanings.

Freedom in the Libertarianism context (and in most contexts) means lack of coercion or constraint imposed by government or other institutions. It doesn't refer to freedom from natural or physical constraints. That wouldn't make any sense to advocate for.

Does this clear it up for you?

The lack of economic freedom experienced by many is a direct product of the economic policy enforced by government and advocated for by libertarians, ie, it's directly the result of government coercing people to adhere to its decisions and libertarians support sufficiently many of those decisions to be culpable.

Libertarians are nothing but outright hypocrites in arguing that government shouldn't be required to pay the economic damages of its coercing people to adhere to policy they favor (eg, maintaining a free-market, private-property based economy with courts enforcing contracts) while preaching about how people shouldn't be coerced.

Libertarians disagree with your assertion that the government has implemented free-markets, and therefore reject the idea that they support current policy.

My point isn't contained to the present system:

Even in theory, libertarians are hypocrites because they fundamentally advocate for failing to pay for the externalities of their coercive system, and all supposed benefits of libertarianism can be traced to temporary boosts caused by (inefficient) capitalization of that failure to pay for externalities. Libertarianism enriches a few by creating 0.9 units wealth for every 1.0 units of collective suffering it implements over the current system, but hides this fundamentally externality driven mechanism behind the spread of the suffering (not a lot to everyone) and calling it freedom for many to be allowed to suffer at the hands of others without the instrument of state to implement collective relief.

Libertarianism is nothing but a sham political and economic movement that is wholly and fundamentally dishonest about its benefits and costs, by design, deeply self-inconsistent in its models and policies, and is intended to trick people in to accepting serfdom in a return to feudalism by calling it "freedom".

Libertarians, as a rule, just seem to have not thought very hard about their position or be selling you something (usually that you should be a serf because they fancy that they won't be a serf too in the new system).

Is there any economical system you disagree with but don't consider dishonest?

Sure, lots of them. Now, many of them are still hypocrites, in that very often a model will claim to address something as a top priority, but not actually address it. (Ed: not a hypocrite to propose a model that doesn't work out; hypocrite to continue to claim it will work when errors are discovered or it can't help, even in theory.) Which is why I called Libertarians so -- they bark about externalities when their model is fundamentally about not being accountable for externalities of coercing others to obey your model.

However, the dishonesty of American Libertarians stems from something further than that. Namely, American Libertarians are neo-feudalists in practice, but won't own up to being neo-feudalists.

I find this to be dishonest: they, so far as I can tell, have done this purely because they want to advocate neo-feudalism and its benefits without having to justify the benefits in terms of the costs, so they use terminology where it's harder to find the costs in academic literature and deny that any such costs exist. Nothing different than creationism rebranding as "intelligent design" or anti-abortion as "pro-life".

It is simultaneously amusing and frustrating how completely wrong this is. Coercion and constraint imposed by government (or similar institutions) is absolutely central to libertarianism! The whole point of property rights is to constrain people from doing things. E.g., you own a beachfront property? You get to constrain other people from swimming there, and the government is there to help if necessary. And so on.

Saying that libertarianism isn't about coercion and constraint is like saying that the GPL or copyleft in general isn't about copyright. Both are equally wrong: the GPL absolutely requires copyright law in order for it to work, and similarly libertarianism absolutely requires coercion and constraint.

It's just that there's this sleight of hand where for some reason, most people are so used to property right that they don't even notice it anymore. Talk about successful framing!

This is pedantic. The clause, "except when necessary to prevent the violation of one's rights" is understood by most, and isn't relevant to this conversation.

Precisely. The inability of a person to choose their desired path because they need money to feed their family is textbook economic coercion. We've long passed the point where lack of resources (especially food) is a physical/natural constraint.

What would a person who had a family that needed feeding do in the absence of government entirely? My guess is that they would perform some kind of activity in an attempt to feed them. You can take money and even capitalism out of the equation entirely and people would still work. That Russian family that cut themselves off from the outside for 40 years in the wilderness still worked to survive. The food didn't grow itself and then climb into their mouths to be eaten.

What does "choose their desired path" mean exactly?

most of them also have a very narrow view of "coercion", though, and will hotly deny that economic coercion is a valid concept