The possible thug you mentioned was an anarchist not a libertarian, and apparently not even an anarcho-capitalist (I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but they are probably the closest group of anarchists to my thoughts).
His viewpoints may be further from mine that yours are from mine. Egoist individual anarchism as described in your post is a very different beast than libertarianism. I suppose we both want/wanted less government (with less in his case meaning none), but not only is guilt by political association a weak argument, there is no significant political association here. If Stalin wanted medical care to be handled by the government, and didn't want for profit insurance companies, would that mean I could reasonably argue against "Single Payer" based on Stalin's crimes against humanity? Of course not.
Even if he was a libertarian and a thug, pointing him out would be a pretty weak argument against libertarianism. You can find thugs with all different sorts of political viewpoints. But thugs are not prone to be libertarians. To the extent that thugs are political, and have a coherent political philosophy, they tend to want to tell other people what to do, which is sort of an anti-libertarian idea.
They will justify stepping all over people in promoting their self interests and use words and phrases from Libertarian philosophy to justify their nefarious inner inclinations.
People who are bent on nefarious purposes, will use whatever justification they find handy. They might use "the government shouldn't tell me what to do", or they might use millions of other justifications, including some of the type that are commonly used by social democrat/liberal/progressive political activists, or other groups in the mainstream of political debate in the US or other wealth democracies. |
