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Libertarians are very hard to take seriously because of shit like this. Nothing about Donald Trump is Libertarian.
They just won something they cared about: perhaps you should be taking them even more seriously than you did.

And even if you are not a fan of a political group, you are the one being judgemental here on a factor that is very unlikely to be universal within the group.

Treating anyone according to political labels is divisive.

They got a single guy out of prison, but pretty much everything else in Trump's platform is diametrically opposed to libertarianism. It's hard to think of anything less libertarian than tariff-funded big government!
and what would voting for Harris have gotten them exactly?
Tariffs are not good for free market diehards. However the nuance is that foreign countries like China do not operate on a fair playing field, they want free access to our markets but prevent our champions from entering their's. Something must be done here. I'm not convinced tariffs are the best tool, but at least it's something.

In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day. There will be a massive downsizing in the federal workforce and the regulatory state over the next 4 years. This move towards small government is the thing that excites me most.

> In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day.

Just to be clear, all they did is rename the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service. The Digital Service already existed; it hires tech workers from industry on short-term rotations to work on government projects. Now that thing that already existed is called DOGE, and it will continue to do nothing more than bring in industry engineers to make websites for the government. If there’s a “massive downsizing in the federal workforce,” it won’t be because of “DOGE.”

Trump has is proposing a 10% tariff on China, and a 25% tariff on Mexico.

Also he's handing out tariff exemptions to his political allies like candy.

There's not some high minded principal or strategy here. It's graft and spite. Trump even seems to be holding out the tariff threat as leverage to force the sale of TikTok.

Look you can agree with this stuff if you want but none of it is remotely aligned with libertarian principles. Even squishy ones.

> Trump has is proposing a 10% tariff on China, and a 25% tariff on Mexico.

Wasn't it 60% for China, 25% for Canada and Mexico and 10% for the rest of the planet?

He's said it a dozen different ways but as of yesterday it was 10% on China. Maybe tomorrow it will be 100%, it's not like the narrative is consistent apart from that there will be some level of tariffs.
> our champions

Wait, what?

Biden could have taken the wind out of Trump's sails by commuting Ulbricht's sentence when he was in office. If you don't think a group's interests are worth listening to, don't be surprised when that group votes for someone who does.
Very little about the Libertarian party is libertarian. Yet another party carrying water for authoritarianism, with the difference being that the implementation is through corporations.
Libertarians are a self selecting bunch. Very few were raised into this philosophy. You can appreciate that my self identification as a libertarian is a careful, reasoned decision and not one that was flippantly made. It is the philosophy that is the most accurate and truthful to me.
Read my comment again. I self-identify as a libertarian as I see individual freedom as paramount. But I kept going with the analysis to realize that the Libertarian Party does very little to represent that ideal.
My apologies, I thought you were accusing libertarians of authoritarianism (the irony!).

I find the Mises Caucus at least useful in pushing to do more than simply be an affinity group for people pretending to play politics. I find partying with LP officials to be very hilarious, what a group of odd balls. But the party itself has no hope of electoral victory, which is why everyone should vote Republican in the current iteration of two-party politics from the libertarian lens.

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Libertarians are a joke because they refuse to realize that allowing corporations unlimited freedom means that the individual has less freedom. Their entire ideology just removes the boot of the state and replaces it with the boot of the corporation.
The boot of the state is very much going to remain intact in this administration.
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Speaking of jokes, it's always funny to us libertarians when we see government proponents talk about "freedom" being lost to the corporations under a libertarian system of (non) government.

The government as it is the world over pretty much controls your entire life; It dictates what you can and can't do with your own body, it forces you into various forms of indentured servitude, it marks you and keeps track of you like an inventory item, it controls what you can say (where and with whom even), it takes your children from you and puts them into essentially indoctrination camps for "education", it comes up with arbitrary rules that you have to jump through hoops to abide by, and it can even take your children away if you don't teach them the approved things, it can take arbitrary control over any and all of your possessions for whatever reason, it orders you to harm your fellow man, etc... And most of all, it gaslights and forces you to go against your own morals or things you consider wrong, whatever that may be. And just to rub it all in? It says you have to do and abide by all these things whilst still loving government because it's "Democracy" and "Democracy" is pure and noble and fair.

Libertarians are not a joke. Some of the most powerful people on earth are libertarians. The people who write off libertarians are blind.

I prefer corporations because I can voluntarily choose to take my business elsewhere, or even better, create my own competitor. Why I dislike the government is that it's the ultimate monopoly, with guns, and operated mostly by power-hungry sociopaths who will use that power to destroy innocent lives.

Given the corporation or the state, I take the corporation every time.

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yeah but freeing ross was a key campaign promise made by trump to sway libertarian voters
> Nothing about Donald Trump is Libertarian.

so what? Coalition-building is common in the rest of the democratic world. This is, in my view, a similar thing.

However both Libertarians and Trump are transactional.
I don't judge anyone too hard when they're willing to bend a bit to get someone out of jail after the key has been thrown away. I didn't vote Trump but I will admit the possibility of Ross being released made me pause when I marked my ballot, even his mom's image flashed in my mind and I felt guilty for not helping.
Of all the issues in this country that really has impact on millions of people, I am baffled when I hear people only caring about 1 person and not care about the common good of society and the hundreds of millions of people in the US who live in it. Fascinating and depressing.