You know, due to the mention of Orwell in another thread it made me refresh myself on him a bit.... and really it came with a really good quote from Orsen wells somehow.

"I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone." He continued however and argued that "it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly."

Yep, this is a large misunderstanding of Libertarianism. I've been a registered Libertarian for 13 years now. While I'm all for small(ish) government, I also see the need for regulation more than hardcore Libertarians.

Basically, I believe in states' rights and regulation. The government should not control industries outright but they should have a moderate hand in saying what they can and cannot do to the public. Why? Because a complete lack of regulation (this is really where hardcore Libertarianism falls apart) boils down to a "might makes right" society. We've saw the side effects of this in 2008. The government started deregulating loaning institutions in the 90s, those institutions started handing out money willy-nilly for short-term profit, and then they completely blew up the economy as it all came crashing back in on them. Then we saw peoples' homes foreclosed and we bailed out the sons of bitches who did it.

People need to show personal responsibility but you cannot expect the same from business. They have other priorities in mind and often, those priorities are directly in conflict with the public good. That's where regulation comes in. The government isn't particularly good at regulation but they're the only choice we have that has any interest in preserving a decent society for all.

Pretty much, this.

The ability to live free usually requires a mediator. Someone that can codify, ratify and enforce contract, weights and measurements, and extract compensation from the violation of said contracts.

Most libertarians fit somewhere in the middle area of the philosophy - that government can and should exist, but its impact on society and freedom must be at a minimum (likely around the 5-15% of GDP level as a very broad-reaching metric).

And like you said, every political ideology has its extremists, and anarchy is where the logical conclusion of libertarianism meets its extremity.

I don't think its accurate to pin the entire 2008 collapse on the deregulation of markets.

The other side of the issue is that prior to de-regulation, the government massively incentivized the loaning process to subsidize the loan process. Therefore, when de-regulation occurred, the banks were able to run freely towards derivatives and sub-prime loans, knowing that the government not only backed, but funded the procedures.

A libertarian would argue that such de-regulation was needed, but that the government should not of incentivized the process through various acts such as the Community Reinvestment Act, the Interstate Commerce Act of 1994, and Clinton's Executive Order that forced banks to add specific questions on the loan application process to ensure that they couldn't discriminate against risky minorities.

Exactly, so I'm not sure that tree would be any libertarian arguments against anarchy.  Mabey this is a trick question from a philosophy class, and he doesn't have a lot of answers

I call myself a Libertarian, but only because it's easier than saying "well, if you get an encyclopedia, look up the term 'minarchy', and that's more what I am than just straight Libertarian".  It's just easier that way.

But I think "minarchist" is a technically more correct term for most people who use the umbrella word 'Libertarian' to describe themselves or others.

There were a slew of problems that caused the 2008 collapse but it's pretty hard to deny that deregulation was one of them. The incentives shouldn't have been applied, I agree with that, but the banks were still the ones loaning out money the economy could not support. And there was much more to it than banks being forced to loan to "risky minorities". It's painfully obvious that several loaning institutions saw the writing on the wall and were handing out loans willy-nilly, only to immediately sell them to someone else and push the burden to another company. Predatory lending was rampant throughout the first part of the 21st century.

As I said earlier, business goals are often not in line with the public good. By their very nature, they are incredibly self-serving. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing (it's how business thrives and grows), but it's something that needs to be acknowledged and tempered. I'd love for business to temper its own ambitions and regulate itself for the long-term good of the economy but we all know that's never going to happen. So what are we left with? Regulation. It's certainly not a perfect system but without government "interference" telling business what to do, we slowly move toward a "might makes right" society because no community activist group, no worker union, nothing can stand against the power of unbridled corporate money and the power that goes along with it. To balance the power of conglomerate business, there needs to be an entity to watch out for the public welfare. The only institution capable of doing that is the government.

It's a shame that it's near impossible to get an indepth book on Freiberg School of Ecnoomics in English.

Maybe in the US that's what Libertarianism stands for but that's not it's original meaning.

Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman two of the key philosophers of Libertarian Social Darwinism. Libertarians ideal world is where the individual lives on a self suffiicient island.