Why are libertarians such idiots?
I got into a discussion on Twitter (if you can call a couple of tweets a discussion) with this (apparent) libertarian type who insisted that businesses will not discriminate because it's bad for business. The conversation really started with a discussion of Arizona's law (or bill, if it hasn't been signed yet) that would allow discrimination against gays for "religious" reasons. Now, I realize sexual orientation is not one of the protected classes on the federal level or in most states (though I think it should be). I pointed out to this libertarian that it was perfectly acceptable to discriminate against African Americans or other ethnic groups at one time too.
Now, if I recall history correctly, discrimination was actually a feature, not a bug. Businesses that did not discriminate were few and far between at one time. Jackie Robinson could not even stay in the same hotel as his teammates. His argument was that the team should not have patronized those hotels. They could have found another that would. I seriously doubt that would have been true in the 1950's or that the Brooklyn Dodgers would have had the guts as an organization to make that stand. This guy I was arguing with was clearly ignorant of history, as are most libertarians and conservatives.
Yes, times have changed for the better, in that many people would protest businesses that discriminated against gays in the manner that the Arizona would allow. So there has been considerable progress even without having in enacted in federal law. But I don't think you can rely on businesses to do the right thing because it's best for the bottom line. I don't think that has ever been true. And I don't think it's true even now, with all the progress that has been made. The Civil Rights Act was necessary to enforce equal protection and equal access to public accommodations. And it still is.
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They would call us effeminate, gay etc., if they thought it would work for them, but our feminist and LGBT friends have put the fear of God into them about that sort of thing. So we get these invented substitutes like "emoprog".
That is the basic argument being made, if you care about people, you are being emotional, like that was a bad thing.
Obviously, I'm some sort of right-winger. 
"We must have a lot of libertarians on DU then ..."
"If you put a libertarian in a room alone, there will be an argument, 
I like this cartoon:
. . . and not much of a goal due to selective interpretation of their own tenets:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Libertarianism
Libertarian business structures greatly resemble government hierarchies, even military hierarchies in the case of Taylorism. It seems contradictory to opine that citizens do not need rulers while maintaining that workers need managers; libertarians claim this is fine because joining a business is voluntary, although some critics of libertarianism would point out that changing jobs is not always possible, and that this argument would only be applicable if there actually were an abundance of businesses without such hierarchies who are hiring,[13] and that resigning is not an option because (especially when there is no welfare state) it may result in them being unable to afford food, water, housing, etc. In other words, this type of "freedom" means "the freedom to choose one's own masters or to starve under a bridge."
(snip)
For similar reasons, libertarianism is a circular argument. Libertarians speak of "property" and "contract," as if these legal ideas somehow had meaning in the absence of law. In fact, property has always been the creation of a lawmaker, and therefore some sort of a government. Much valuable wealth in civilized countries takes the form of such things as publicly traded stock and "intellectual property," all of which were obviously called into being by law. The same holds true of contracts; the lawmaker gets to choose which agreements are enforceable by law and which are not.
Libertarians like to ignore certain periods of history such as the Gilded Age, where libertarian ideas were widespread and in effect ("No, it was crony capitalism!"
or recast them as a golden age. This can lead to lots of lulz; like thinking Abraham Lincoln was the spawn of Satan.
The aforementioned "Non-Aggression Principle" isn't quite as clear as many libertarians make it sound. Libertarians support force to hold up a system of property, a system which required force to be created (ask any indigenous person) and requires force to be maintained. Take fraud, for example. If a man is found to have lied to his health insurance company about a pre-existing condition, the police (in libertarian parlance, "Men with Guns"
will use force against him. Libertarians call this "retaliatory force" and frame the acts by the sick man as initiating force which makes for a nice game of mental gymnastics.[19] Note that you may not use the same rationalizations to frame racism, or sexism, or union-smashing as force, (and their solutions as retaliatory force) since those are things libertarians are apparently okay with.
What, exactly, is the goal? If maximizing individual freedom is what you're after, or even securing maximal protection for enumerated freedoms, you do realize that your boss is a bigger threat to your freedom of speech, or freedom to practice your religious faith, than the local police or your local government, don't you? Libertarianism is too selective in the freedoms it chooses to protect.
You are reading this page using something originally created by the big, bad gummint. And not only was ARPANET (the predecessor for the Internet) developed by and for the US military, but the first non-DOD Internet services were in two colleges, including the public UCLA. The HTTP and WWW protocols that make the Internet work? Yeah, that was developed by workers at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), which is almost entirely funded by various governments. HTML, the language that most websites are scripted in (including this one) was also developed by CERN researchers.
