Can You Name One Successful Libertarian Country? Sure.

 

Lambton Harbor, Wellington, New Zealand

Thom Hartman asks: Can You Name One Successful Libertarian Country? This clearly shows, at the very least, the failure of libertarian messaging, and the importance of clear semantics.

Can you name one successful libertarian country?

If you mean minarchism, which isn't actually libertarianism as such, but rather one rather shallow, ideological, right wing strain of libertarianism, then none.

But if you mean maximizing economic and individual liberty, ALMOST ALL OF THEM.

Most of the most successful countries on earth generally have the most freedom -- are the most "libertarian."

According to the Human Freedom Index, these are the most libertarian countries: New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and Germany and Sweden (tied in 9th place).

I would say they're pretty successful (Honestly not sure about Estonia yet -- noobs). While not a direct correlation, there is enough correlation between liberty and success to imply at least partial causation.

That's practical, pragmatic, real world libertarianism and its effects.

Anyway, libertarianism is not really what Thom is implying, but right wing ideological libertarianism has crashed and burned in part on what he is describing, and that rotten shell of Randian/Hayakian thinking is another piece of the puzzle of what wrecked the right and helped create Trumpism.

This thinking was promoted by people like the Kochs giving money to every right wing cause, and helped foster the libertarianism-to-fascism highway.

It has been promoted by the LP, and is partly why they see little difference between the neo-fascist Republican Party and the social democrat Democratic Party.

People are just not communicating and are just not looking outside of their own bubbles.

Libertarians Want What Progressives and Liberals Say They Want

(President Gary Johnson and Vice President Bernie Sanders of Earth JW-42017)

When I look at what people actually say and do, the mainstream left, from Bernie to Obama to Hillary, claim to want to make America more like Sweden and Denmark. Both of those countries are more libertarian than the USA by the numbers. If they want Sweden or Denmark, that's not socialism, that's regulated capitalism with a safety net, and more personal freedom than the USA, with higher taxes and a bigger/more comprehensive safety net.

Most conservatives never say what they want, since it's in Cloud Cuckooland of the past or future, but they seem to want Singapore. Free economy with a police state to "win the war on drugs/terror/etc." Or Russia. Russia's right wing, authoritarian federalism....new conservatives seem to like that.

In practical matters, we have a lot in common with liberals. We both want to move society in the same general direction: more liberty overall.
In ideological matters, we THINK we have more in common with conservatives, but I'd say that was a marriage of convenience largely due to the Cold War, and we created a narrative that worked.

If we set aside utopian dreams and ideological rigidity, imagine what we can do. For now, we want the same basic thing: a society with more economic and personal freedom. We can work together to make that happen, and create more liberty, opportunity, and abundance.


Reference: https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index

The Case is Clear

The case for liberty has never been more clear. There are now about a hundred countries that are (true, flawed, and hybrid) democracies with (overly) regulated capitalist economies with safety nets. Actual socialism is a dead issue. The new game is social democracy.


Are these countries perfect? No. Are they better than what they had a century ago, or even fifty years ago? Heck, yeah.

Each one of these countries -- from New Zealand, to Denmark, to Singapore and Hong Kong -- each place makes a separate case for economic and personal liberty, and the more deeply we look at each one, the more we see that it does.


I think it behooves us to study these places, and learn from their failures and successes. Libertarians have the ability to go beyond left and right here, and look at actual liberty in these places, so we can make our case to Americans even more. The world has changed, and the facts are with us.

https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017