You have addressed nothing.
I'm sorry, but we don't seem to be reading the same thread.
All you have are things you suppose and things you conjecture. You haven't provided one iota of proof.
You need proof that it's easier to overthrow a weak government whose people have little contact with it or interest in its survival? Frankly, I started this thread as an opportunity for Libertarians to explain how their approach to governance would not create such a situation. Some Libertarians have responded constructively, albeit unconvincingly. You, however, have not: You insist that I prove straightforward logic and common sense to be correct, like insisting I demonstrate that 2 + 2 = 4. I've been debating long enough to know where this leads: Nothing I can possibly say will be sufficient. I am not interested in games. If you feel my analysis lacks perspective, you are welcome to provide it, and I've invited you to do so many times now. You have declined the invitation, and instead just deny, deny, deny. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.
But you have NEVER addressed libertarian philosophy.
Indeed, I only address libertarian reality.
There is nothing else in this world that has improved the livelihood of so many people than a more open market.
This is too broad a statement to meaningfully address. "More open" than what? Furthermore, markets are just tools - used or configured improperly, they are harmful: Political corruption, monopolism, gangsterism, and pollution are all consequences of the market. Political liberty and human rights, however, are not - the concepts arose in areas of early civilization where wealth was hardly overflowing.
it is the actions of millions of people facilitating mutual aid, out of self interest.
Again, you are speaking definitively about highly circumstantial processes. The circumstances under which self-interest compromises collective interest far outnumber those where it facilitates mutual aid - the laws of every society on Earth recognize this as an easily-demonstrable fact. Markets have to be configured for their outcomes to serve the general prosperity, and even then they are not a panacea: Just one particular process with its own advantages and disadvantages.
But that isn't true, no self respecting libertarian would argue that, it's hyperbole.
Then your standards of "self-respect" are very exclusive, because I run into that argument all the time among self-described libertarians. They make categorical statements to the effect that higher taxes mean less revenue and lower taxes mean more revenue - ipso facto, that zero taxation would yield maximum revenue. There is no specific analysis involved in their position, they simply hold it as an article of faith that whatever the current tax rate is, reducing it would yield a superior economic result. Supply-side economics is more religion than science.
Libertarianism is a smaller, logically and rationally implemented government.
But notice how you stipulate "smaller" separately from "logically and rationally implemented government." The part about reducing its size does not come from any specific analysis about systemic requirements, it is pure ideology - an end in itself. Whatever follows from that end, libertarians would deem it a good thing by definition. That is not "logical" or "rational" by any stretch of the imagination. That is substituting the Law of the Jungle for human morality.
Cato documents, practically, all the stances they take with fact based evidence.
The last report of theirs I read was about two years ago, and the "fact-based evidence" it cited was essentially what I mention above - the categorical, absolute position that taxes should not be increased, and should be decreased. I will gladly examine any Cato report you're aware of that advocates raising a tax. Surely a legitimate think tank would have found
some occasion in all the years of its existence to support increasing
some tax
somewhere?
Libertarians laugh at the idea that they consider the free market a "godhead"
Right, it's just an "invisible hand" that must not be desecrated by impure forces (i.e., government), and if respected and sacrificed to will deliver bounty and prosperity to its deserving adherents and righteous punishment to the non-believers. But it's not a deity. :lol:
but there are those who certainly consider it a near-supernatural devil.
And those people would be a serious concern if this were 1950, but today's concerns all revolve around the unchecked concentration of private wealth and corporate power over American politics.
The free market is the most voluntarily cooperative system ever devised by man.
Here we encounter one of the central fallacies of libertarianism - that markets are voluntary. It starts from this premise, and then derives the idea that poor people
choose to be poor, and those who accumulate wealth have ipso facto earned it. Most people are not voluntary participants in market transactions - they pay the profit-maximizing price set by the seller, and accept the profit-maximizing salary their employer chooses to give them. They have near zero individual leverage. Only collectively do they achieve any degree of leverage, but that usually requires some level of legal protection and facilitation.
Perhaps you can name a Fascist regime under which the government was limited.
No one is claiming Fascist government is limited, and nor am I saying that the problem with libertarianism is that it imposes limits per se: Simply that its bizarre Freudian obsession with size yields a weak government, a population with minimal knowledge of or contact with that government, minimal public loyalty or interest in defending it (since it does so little for them), and minimal resistance to elite usurpers who would already dominate people's lives as employers and controllers of resources.