Confessions of a recovering Libertarian: How I escaped a world of Ron Paul hero worship
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/03/confessions_of_a_recovering_libertarian_how_i_escaped_a_world_of_ron_paul_hero_worship/
When I was 15, I was that kid people wanted to punch in the face. I sent emails to Wolf Blitzer and Glenn Beck asking them just how in the world they could’ve said the Libertarian Party was “fringe.” I booed when my classmate mentioned the New Deal in a presentation on “The Great Gatsby.” When my Ron Paul 2008 sweat shirt went missing on a family vacation, I immediately implicated the CIA in the abduction.
I am not that kid anymore, which bodes well for the continued integrity of my facial structure. My views haven’t changed as much as you might expect; I maintain that centralized government power, whether in the economic or social sphere, results in corruption and abuse more often than not. But when people ask me where I stand ideologically, I cringe at the thought of responding with “freedom” or “limited government,” phrases that I once seemed destined to have tattooed on my forehead. Now, I’m more likely to stammer for a few seconds before coming up with something like, “Hey, uh, it’s pretty sunny out there today, no?”
People always told me that my staunch libertarianism would erode when I went to college and saw the world through a wider lens. I didn’t believe them, just like I didn’t believe their claims that Ron Paul would fall short of the presidency, but we know how that turned out. Contrary to how the story often goes, there was no professor, classmate or piece of reading that exhorted me toward neoconservatism or Marxism. Instead, it was consorting with my fellow libertarians that drove me away.
My realization of the libertarian tragedy began, as most tragedies do, with social media. I attended college in Washington, D.C., a place that may not appeal to libertarians as much as it does to mainstream partisans, but still has a fair number of freedom-minded folks who call it home. When I was accepted for study, I connected with my school’s College Libertarians Facebook group. They were a tight-knit bunch, but they embraced my eagerness to join their ranks. Soon, my Facebook feed was filled with all kinds of Ayn Rand quotes and Gadsden flags. Posts like the one claiming that public schools, the very institutions that employed many of my family members, were “replete with agents of state-orchestrated indoctrination” (good job with the SAT words there, guys) were enough to keep me from ever showing up to a College Libertarians meeting.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and pro-choice. If that helps 
I said I was proud to pay taxes to support social programs, safety nets for poor people, government programs and regulations to keep us safe, etc. It wasn't because I just believed in taxes because that's all that Democrats want. Republicans support taxes, too. They just want to use them to give a boost to some corporations over others, and pay for wars and military hardware. I think you're starting to make assumptions here 
you didn't really have to reply to a post that was made to someone else. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're being extra polite and not extra defensive. 
Not that I am one, but just wanted to point out I'm not on the "shit list." Sorry about that
I'm pretty sure my single vote is completely irrelevant compared to the work I can do to help them get popular support. So, I disagree. The best way to help Democrats is to help teach them about issues and problems within their districts, help them come up with ideas on how to address those issues, and then market them to their constituents to help them get popular support. I.e. to get everyone you can to vote for them, not just to vote for them directly. And that is what I have been doing (though not as much of as I should) 
Too many anti-left assumptions, anyway.
You mean *THESE* people?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchocapitalist
Anarcho-capitalism (also referred to as free-market anarchism, market anarchism, private-property anarchism, libertarian anarchism) is a political philosophy which advocates the elimination of the state in favor of individual sovereignty, private property, and open markets. Anarcho-capitalists believe that in the absence of statute (law by decree or legislation), society would improve itself through the discipline of the free market (or what its proponents describe as a "voluntary society"
"Anarchocapitalism: Because restaurants that kill people while not observing health code standards will eventually go out of business - that will teach 'em!"
or
"Anarchocapitalism: Because poop in your beef from unregulated slaughter houses is just one of the chances you take when grocery shopping - down with the FDA!"
or
"Anarchocapitalism: Because getting equal treatment under the law is always better when you pay a privately funded competitor - it isn't really leaving you open to a "protection plan" from competing gangs of Mafioso!"
or
"Anarchocapitalism: Because safety regulations in the work place are for sissies - just ask a coal miner or oil rig operator!"
Eh, you should come join the rest of the mature adults in society as soon as you learn the value of the social safety net. It seems to happen a lot once people discover:
1) they are not immortal
2) trying to stay employed while getting cancer treatments or lying in the hospital is "challenging"
3) being a "good, valuable worker" doesn't mean your job won't disappear during fourth quarter cut-backs
or any combination of the above, plus a few more shocking realizations about real life.
"anarchocapitalist" --
Sigh. Welcome to DU.
That caricature of libertarians aside, yes, libertarians do want to help poor people. They just see different problems than you do. For instance, the social safety net is woefully insufficient, but at the same time creates very negative side effects, such as contributing to the social belief that people should be "rugged individuals" and that living at home, or depending on friends and family should be shameful. It makes people not care about their own actions and future planning, because they just believe that government will take care of them. And it unfairly takes care of people who have actually fallen on hard times, and people who are in that situation because they are assholes, whereas without it people who have fallen on hard times would still have friends and family to lean on, while the assholes would actually get the results of their actions. Plus the safety net administration system is horribly corrupt and inefficient, while performing essentially the exact same function as insurance. If we can have a huge variety of car and home insurance, why can't we have the same for the rest of the safety net?
Yes, charity may have been insufficient, but charity isn't the only way to help meet basic human needs. As mentioned, people used to have close families and friendships, and helped each other. Now everyone has to move out when they are 18, have their own house/apartment, and be independent. As someone who came from a country where this was not the case, and where it was normal for families to share the same house and resources, the situation I found here in America struck me as very strange. Since then, if I see some poor person living in their own apartment, complaining about being poor and barely being able to afford rent, my first reaction is "You're not poor yet. Move back in with your family, since you obviously can't afford the luxury of your own apartment. Then if things are still bad, I'll believe that you are poor." Also, it is actually more difficult to establish a charity with current government and banking regulations that without. If you just try to raise money for some local cause, your bank will close your account and take all the money, unless you register your charity with the government, and registering and getting approved is not easy (a bunch of new charity startups are actually using bitcoin for that reason - no need to register or threat from banks seizing the money). Heck, some state and local governments are even fighting the poor problem by simply making it illegal to be poor, such as making homelessness illegal, or requiring people to maintain houses they live in in ways they can't afford.
As for taxes, libertarians aren't complaining about taxes because they want corporations and businesses not to pay, or because they don't want to pay taxes to support safety nets. They complain about taxes because taxes, progressive, corporate, or whatever, aren't actually paying to support poor people. They are paying to pay off the national debt, to pay for our industrial complex, and to pay for corporate subsidies to give certain corporations monopoly control. All of these things libertarians are extremely against too. Every time taxes are increased, the end result isn't a bigger safety net, or more help for the poor, it's more money for the government to spend stuff on for itself, and congressmen to spend on pork in their own districts. Things like safety nets have been paid for by borrowed money for years now (budget deficits aren't even covered by our tax revenue 
) So the hope is that if taxes are reduced, at the least it could reign in wasteful spending, and leave the middle class with more money to spend on things they need. If the government is going to continue borrowing money to spend on its own stuff, like wars and safety nets, it can just continue to keep borrowing as it always has.
So, yes, the goals - stop corporate monopolies, help the poor, empower the middle class, increase employment, reduce wasteful government spending, get rid of corporate subsidies and military industrial complex, and even reduce pollution and environmental destruction - are the same. The methods, and perhaps understanding of what exactly is causing the problems, is different.
It's nearly impossible to get those things done when private companies run prisons and get paid to detain minor offenders, when private companies sell military gear to police, when private companies sell tons of anti-privacy toys to TSA and DHS, and when all those private companies that get paid with our tax dollars then turn around and give the money we gave them right back to the politicians we picked to decide on these issues. It's the only reason I drifted away from trying to influence politics: I almost lost hope that things can be improved at this point 
On the other hand, regarding the "all talk, no action," at least some of those guys have been busy on some things, mostly behind the scenes. Bitcoin and OpenBazar are poised to do to the drug war what BitTorrent did to the record label industry. Tor, bitcoin-based mesh networking, and Bitmessage are working on making government spying impossible, and some other "dark" projects are slowly dismantling the rest of the corporatist corruption.
