Libertarianism is not about not helping others. Not even remotely. Libertarianism means you can help others as much as you want to.

Which, in the case of most of the people who currently hold our wealth, turns out to be not very much at all. Are you surprised?

Given that about a third of the country would identify themselves as progressives, it's hard to see if they gave of their own free will, there wouldn't be plenty of help to the disadvantaged.

But I rarely (never?) see any rhetoric in DNC politics about party members donating of their own free will to anything other than the Democratic party.

Virtue doesn't scale. Hence taxes for public good stuff because otherwise only the town with a generous Moneybags would have roads or a fire service (and the town with a racist Moneybags would only have a fire service in the white quarter). It's also hard to coordinate - see disaster response.

We're talking simply about charity. There are plenty of wealthy liberals - like Hollywood, Gates, Buffet, Silicon Valley, etc. All the people who donated to Sanders. Plenty of money to give to charity.

Resources are unevenly distributed. Like, why don't the homeless all just pool their resources and buy a house?

Seattle votes heavily Democrat. There's only a tiny fraction of them in Seattle that are homeless.

It's an extreme illustration of a principle that holds at many different levels.

Agreed on both of your points.

"our wealth"?

Some of us disagree very strongly with the premise of capitalism.

Under libertarianism, there's no law against communes. You can set one up!

And if a hypothetical commune became dominant and an existential threat to the existence of a hypothetical libertarian society? The Communist Party of the Philippines operates as a parallel government in many respects, do you think that should be allowed? The Zapatistas?

It's misleading to say that it would be a-ok to start a socialist society in a libertarian society. It (like many aspects of libertarian analysis, in my opinion) ignores the reality of a political situation like the one described.

It's not misleading. Hundreds (thousands?) of communes have been set up in the US. As far as I know, nobody has tried to shut them down. Nobody is stopping you from joining an existing one. You can find them via Google.

More to the point, the notion that communes are a threat to libertarianism is flat out false. Libertarianism is about freedom to associate with and do business with people as you please. That includes pooling ones' interests in a commune.

What you cannot do under libertarianism is force someone to join, or prevent someone from leaving.

The true premise of capitalism is that a person can own the rights to the exploration of natural resources, most commonly land. Everything else is compounded abstraction. I used to think it was more 'artificial' than it really is; but in fact it seems "natural" that people who lived for a long while in a piece of land deserve the right to keep it; and it also seems "natural" that through force you can take and keep land regardless of who 'deserves' its. Not good, maybe, but natural.

My point is that if these things are natural, it is likely that we'd reach a similar structure if we started from scratch.

I don't really think that the true premise of capitalism is going away until we reach a Star Trek post-scarcity level of wealth. I do think we can - and should - combat the ill-effects that come from the exercise of a capitalist system for billions of people.

I think we need to make it better, not a do over

Agreed. I would like to see more people approach Marxism as a critique of capitalism and move forward trying to improve it(capitalism). Unfortunately, there's still a lot of stigma(in the US).

> a lot of stigma

That's because forcible communism's track record is simply horrific. You can create or join a commune as you please, I have no problem with that. But when you try to force people into one, or prevent them from leaving, a lot of people are going to fight you.

I'm not talking about forcing people into a commune, I'm talking about approaching capitalisms flaws using the tools we have available instead of pretending the free market is a perfect system. That's a crazy false dichotomy and is exactly the kind of stigma I am talking about.

The Marxist critique of capitalism includes critique of the capacity for improvement within capitalism; you seem to want people to approach Marxism as a critique of capitalism and then ignore key parts of that critique.

I think Karl Marx is right about a lot things, I think Adam Smith is right about a lot of things- I think our(The US, Global Economy) current system must be incredibly flawed for so much wealth to be concentrated in such a way that a shockingly small group of individuals hold a useless amount of wealth. Redistribution in the form of systems that improve everyone's quality of life is the only thing that makes sense...I honestly don't think how one could see otherwise?

> useless

What do you think wealthy people do with their money?

> the only thing that makes sense

If you want to end human progress. Me, I'm excited about Musk's progress in space exploration, for one example.

The idea that human progress only happens under a free market is totally detached from reality and most of human history. I'm resisting inserting a joke about libertarianism here for fear being a bit too on the nose.

> Libertarianism means you can help others as much as you want to.

What’s the political philosophy that means you can help others as much as they need? Maybe we should talk about that one more.

Marxism.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" - Karl Marx.

With the operative word being "can" there, it's still libertarianism.

True, if we're talking about poor ol' Hayek and Rothbard... but Ayn Rand discourages it and she's the standard bearer. Interestingly, I always found the aesthetics, philosophy, methods of Randianism quite Stalinist.

Rand doesn't represent libertarianism. You'll get a far more accurate version if you read Friedman's books one economics.