The freedom to do “damn well as you please” is a fairly rational one and I support it. I myself, Khannea Suntzu, are no stranger to the desire to bloody well do as I please, and be left to my own devices. The problem however with the fundamentalist “Libertarian” ethic is that society operates in a context of inescapable interconnection. We live in a ruthless natural tyranny were all things in the human sphere are interconnected.
That is precisely why I would label myself a Libertarian only in a progressively more transhumanist world. The less transhuman the world is, the more I am a statist socialist, in the same way I favor life rafts and life preservers in progressively more sea-like conditions. However as soon as I am out of the immersive “sea” of interdependency I favour libertarian ideals. The way (for me at least) to escape the dolor of our current interdependent age is to improve the individual and collective state of the human animal using transhuman technologies – in particular increasing the individual intelligence and discipline of humans.
That is why I am saying that in the current age of NON-abundance we can’t afford full blown libertarian ideals. It isn’t just a moral question, it also mostly a matter of rationality – society quickly comes to unravel in a climate of human inadequacy. Look at how the poor take over the world, and look at the consequences of endemic poverty. Society grinds to a halt, all measures taken by politicians fail on their systemic unaffordability or sheer counterintuitive ignorance and “nothing seems to work” except an endless cavalcade of austerity and potlatch.
That is why I favour a basic income. A basic income is a surgical tool ending the libertarian debate. Libertarian freedom is just fine and dandy, but it won’t work in a world where an big electoral slice is systemically left marginalized. Either the losers in the game of chairs will end up voting in whatever they need to get by, or they will quickly resort to the equivalent of “project mayhem” and vandalize society in to a bloody pulp. Simply because they are left with nothing left to lose.