re: #233 KGxvi

In the aughts, when I was much more tapped into the discussions among libertarians there were two hot spots where the No True Scotsman would appear:

1. abortion. it used to be that if you were pro-life you couldn’t be considered a libertarian because you were telling other people what they could or couldn’t do with their bodies.

2. immigration. there was a lot more talk about the free movement of people and not having restrictions on the right to work

It got really weird in the late Bush years because so many people didn’t want to be part of the “conservative” movement they tried to take over the libertarian one.

Around that time I went to bed one night as a center-right libertarian and woke up a center-left libertarian.

I had a lot of exposure to them since GMU’s economics program is famous for them and I worked with a couple economics majors on the newspaper together. Nice enough people but really just so absolutist on economics. Most of the left wingers I knew in college were more pragmatic. There were a few die hard leftists but most of the libertarians I met were dyed in the wool about things like ACA being awful awful legislation. Plus from what I learned from one of the few left of center people in the economics majors, they weren’t really given too much head room for free thought on academic papers. I never had that problem in the history department. That’s why I get amused at brobertarians who act like they’re the guardians of free speech. I’ve seen how libertarian institutions deal with dissenting thoughts. They’re not authortarian but dismissive and have I think unfortunately a bit of an oligarchical world view. Where wealth determines a person’s selfworth.