At the risk of a thread jack, I wandered into one of the Libertarian subs of Reddit a while ago, in an effort to understand how they would address the issue of public health requirements for vaccination. I wanted to see how they would reconcile requiring vaccines for the common good of all with their credo of complete individual freedom.
Their solution was for people to self segregate. I wish I was joking. In their opinions, people who saw the value of vaccines should just choose to live in a pro-vaccine community and people who didn’t believe in them should all move to other communities where they could avoid vaccines.
Nobody addressed any of the issues this raises. What do you do with someone who is anti-vaccine but chooses to live in a community where everyone else vaccinates? Force them to live among “their kind”? That doesn’t seem very libertarian. If you follow this position to it’s logical conclusion it’s totally authoritarian, is it not?
What if you can’t find a community that mirrors your exact preferred positions? Most people have a variety of opinions on a variety of subjects, not a single position on vaccines that they will use to sort out their lives. So does one have to search for a community that is Methodist, vegan, pro-vaccine, anti-capital punishment, pro-prison reform, etc? Where does it stop?
It’s really hard to take libertarianism seriously after reading that discussion. It may not be fair to judge based on that experience, and I realize that. However I’ve never seen anybody espousing libertarianism be able to address the original reason I went into the sub in the first place.
It seems to be a belief system that is overly simplistic and doesn’t address any of the difficult issues of finding a balance between rights and responsibilities of the individual. Taken to its extreme, it would suggest anarchy, which is why I was surprised to see a proposed solution to the vaccine question which would seem to lead to authoritarianism.
Thread jack over. 🤐