The way I stated my question presupposes there is nothing reasonable about the libertarian argument. That should not have been how I framed it!!
Let me try to re-state why I tend to get confused about this topic.
I tend to believe that no ideology is ever going to be the be-all-end-all answer to everything.
I had this epiphany moment some years ago in college, when we were being taught "Godel's Incompleteness Theorem" (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems) in one of our 2XX math/cs classes. These theorem(s), way simplified, basically state that all axiomatic logical systems are "incomplete". If you stretch the meanings wayyyyyy more beyond any reasonable stand a mathematician would take - it is possible to argue this applies to all "ideologies" as long as they are based on some axioms (e.g. "individual liberty is sacrosanct"), rely on some rules of inferences, and prescribe some real-world stuff based on these.
Indeed, this seem to be borne out in real world. The more "literal"/"extremist"/"fundamentalist" followers a specific ideology/religion/world-view has - the more undesirable real world outcomes it causes.
This is not specific to ANY one ideology, but ALL of them!! It seems to be inherent in anything that has any axioms built in!! Libertarianism has absolutely not been the worst offender on this historically. Certain centralized religions, communism, colonialism ("white man's burden") etc. could all perhaps vie for the top spot if negative impact on humanity is measured by body count.
But in the here and now, libertarians seem to be the biggest threat since it seems to be spawning the most number of such ideologues compared to other competing ideologies at this moment. Examples are aplenty in this thread itself.
To me, my negative perception of an "ideology" is firstly in proportion to the # of zombies it produces, and only secondarily by any critical reading of its content. On this scale, in present day and age, libertarianism wins hands down as one of the worst in the now and here.
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I find it difficult to believe anyone who takes the basic premises of libertarianism too seriously as soon as some level of detail is spelled out beyond just "individual liberty" - since empirical evidence seems to counter them very easily. I am not very familiar with the more nuanced versions of soft-libertarianism (more future reading material for me).
However, there tends to be way too many otherwise reasonable people who are still influenced by the simplistic-easily-falsifiable-extremist versions of libertarianism, and we had a few posts in this thread itself from posters who express opinions like the following:
1. My ideology trumps general welfare in importance.
2. Government provides less value than corporations (despite living in a first world country)
etc. etc.