Libertarianism and free speech on reddit.

One of the major draws to libertarianism is the free speech aspect. Every other party silences people to a degree, however historically libertarian and ancap subreddits were bastions of free speech. The fundamental idea is that stupid ideas should be shot down by the community.

If a commie says, but why shouldnt wealth be redistributed to the poor? They need to eat! That is an idea that needs to be engaged with and shot down. Not with force, but with solid rebuttals. If you want to see gatekeeping in action, go to the democrats or the socialist or the communist forums. They will silence you so quick over little things. For example, dems will ban you for suggesting to vote against joe biden in the democratic primaries. (talk about a cult in action) Communists will ban you for trolling if you say china will fail due to its overreliance on its real estate sector and bad demographics.

Also, personal story time. A long long time ago on a different reddit account, I posted that biden should be voted against in favor of bernie on the democrats subreddit in a comment thread. I was banned by a moderator for that. And that is what pushed me away from the democrat party. I found mutualism, and then drifted over to being an ancap, and by the time that the election rolled around, i didnt vote for joe biden. That was because of a democrat mod who thought he was shutting down someone and doing a good job for their sub. He lost a real life voter that election, and probably next election too. Think about that.

Now, what can be done about moderation? Temp bans. Trolls and disruptive types should be banned. However, final banhammers need to be for repeat serious violations, and not for one off comments.

Second, as a community, community outreach should be happening, and dedicated daily threads to just chat and bs in should be at the top of the page.

Third on the topic of community outreach, one of the major accusations leveled against libertarians is that we never get anything done. I would love to be able to do targeted community outreach missions. Basic things like giving out food to homeless people, setting homeless up with their first bitcoin wallet, and teaching them how the system works, and maybe giving them a few dollars of bitcoin, maybe even some job matching initiatives.

There are alot of problems in america today, and lots of american politics is about bitching and moaning until the government is elected and then letting the government fix it. We the people don’t need the government. As libertarians we should be putting the government to shame, and putting the government out of business.

There is a revolution happening in AI, and at the same time, there is a revolution in money and finance with bitcoin and with tokenized gold. We should be working hand in hand with other communities to create an economy that is anathema to the fed. We should be working towards making systems that endrun the patent system so hard, and distribute the power to resist so widely that the entire patent and accreditation monopoly collapses.

We could be winning elections left and right. We should be taking the presidency in 2024, theres more than enough disaffected republican and democrat voters to pull it off. However, the last thing we need is disaffected democrats or republicans being pushed back to their respective parties by censorship from the libertarian party of all places.