Dear amazing iPhone,
Please stop dropping my pointless VOIP calls without adequate warning, just because you lose all wifi for a few dozen seconds. It’s really quite a bit irritating when I’m using my Facetime or the Viber that I so often find myself talking into a shiny void without any blaring audible alerts to this fact just because an entirely completely foreseeable network glitch has not been foreseen by your various free apps which all seem to think the logical response is to just silently drop the active connection.

now i understand the drawing. caricature always relies on the context, and i’m well out of it =)

sorry for (probably) overreacting: i live in a country where unti-libertarianism (read: socialism) was taken to the limits, and it shows even after 20 years of efferts to return to some status quo.

re the inheriting from the past, I am not talking about preserving everything that was done before, rather acknowledging what worked and not taking it for granted. Affordable (state subsidised) education, healthcare, health and safety laws, minimum wage, 40-hour week etc have all contributed in the West to vastly improve living standards in the last century, and yet these things are derided by a libertarian philosophy.

The libertarianism I am critical of is that which holds Ayn Rand as its hero. She saw altruism as a moral failing, not a virtue. This libertarianism *is* extreme to the point of absurdity. Her ideas heavily influenced Alan Greenspan in the US who presided over a persistent reduction in government regulation on banks and financial institutions, assuming that the market would be self-regulating if the state would just step out of the way. Instead we got runaway plunder and the biggest loss of wealth and jobs since the great depression, and the people responsible go unpunished.

This libertarianism is what the American Tea Party want, it’s what Rand Paul wants, it’s what a whole bunch of rich white guys want. They hate paying tax because they think the state is stealing from them. They seem unable to look around and appreciate just how much infrastructure is required to keep a society functioning.

either you haven’t made an effort to see the analogy — or i have totally misunderstood your message… or possibly both =)

ok, let’s see: «everything that the average [free market capitalist style] libertarian takes for granted was built or inherited from a society which could not have existed were everyone to adopt libertarian principals».

the society that we inherit from — did it in turn inherit from someone? and that from someone else? from the very dark ages when the rules of co-existance were totally different, and slaves were just seen as manufacturing tools?

so, are we to glance back and «show respect» every time we insist on excercising our rights and freedoms?

> I think you might be confusing liberalism with libertarianism.

although the word «libertarianism» is not in the minimum vocabulary here where i live (mainly because it is difficult to pronounce in my native language, haha), i have had actually checked the wiki before commenting. so nope, i haven’t confused the two:

«Libertarianism is a term describing philosophies which emphasize freedom, individual liberty, voluntary association and respect of property rights. Based on these, libertarians advocate a society with small or no government power».

i believe the key part is about limiting the power of state — not the «why support losers?!» stuff. please get me right: i don’t support this kind of self-confident arrogance but… just dont’t call it libertarianism, because it’s not!

…i live in a country where one has to pay twice for everything you’ve probably come to expect from a modern civilised state. for example, one pays taxes to support free-of-charge medical care — and then one has to pay again for any kind of service, ’cause if you rely on what the state provides you’re probably doomed =( the same goes for pensions and other social payments: one pays his toll to the state pension fund monthly for 50 years… just to later be thrown below poverty level?!

face it: a state can be exteremly inefficient. in fact, unlike businesses, a state has no motive to be effective! and at the same time it both has power and motives to controll citizens as much as possible. state must be controlled by society, — and libertarianism is just one way to implementing this control: limit the power of state to those areas where it’s absolutely nessesary.

of course this philosophy is not idial — but then what is?! of course if excercised to the limit, beyond the point of absurdity — it becomes absurd.

but it’s not so dumb and it’s not just selfish arrogance as you try to show with this simple picture.