Reply #36: I was a card-carrying, dues paying libertarian in my younger years, maybe 20 years ago.

[denverbill]

That lasted a few years, and I gradually came to see the results of that philosophy.

It's nice to have a nice clean philosophy of how the world would work perfectly if the government just got out of the way, but throughout history it's proven to not work. Every corporation's ultimate goal is monopoly and let to their own devices they will use any tactic to achieve it. From Standard Oil to AT&T to Microsoft. And without government intervention, we'd be dealing with nothing but overpriced, subpar products. It's also incompatible with basic human decency.

I think everyone needs to go through a libertarian phase though, if only to know why it's ultimately as unworkable as communism.