Why do libertarians have such a good name?

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Perhaps because a lot of folks like the idea of being completely self-reliant and free from societies rules?

His "legalise murder" post was actually pretty good. For anyone who doesn't want to read it all, he suggested legalising murder one day a year, providing people with sufficient notice that a claim had been lodged to murder them and giving them the option of permanently leaving the country or fighting back or paying compensation. He reasoned that people would avoid applying to murder someone because they would find themselves the recipient of applications the following year, and similarly people would avoid doing harms that would motivate a murder application.

On topic, I found his criticisms of the ideology to be strong, if not flawless. In particular, he challenged the idea that markets are never tyrannical, which is one of my big gripes with libertarianism; he also pointed out that you need to define who gets protection (do animals? The unborn? The environment?) and then enforce those rules.

Unfortunately everyone being completely self reliant, isn't really realistic...I think the number of people that could actually get by being entirely self reliant are very few and far between. Seems like from what I know of libertarians their ideology really does not address that reality.

Libertarianism is by no means a unified movement. As many of its advocates proudly stress, it comprises a taxonomy of bickering branches–minarchists, objectivists, paleo- and neolibertarians, agorists, et various al.–just like a real social theory. Claiming a lineage with post-Enlightenment classical liberalism, as well as in some cases with the resoundingly portentous blatherings of Ayn Rand, all of its variants are characterized, to differing degrees, by fervent, even cultish, faith in what is quaintly termed the “free” market, and extreme antipathy to that vaguely conceived bogeyman, “the state,” with its regulatory and fiscal powers.

Above all, they recast their most banal avarice–the disinclination to pay tax–as a principled blow for political freedom. ...

[The Atlantis Project] is a libertarian dream. Hexagonal neighborhoods of square apartments bob sedately by tiny coiffed parks and tastefully featureless marinas, an Orange County of the soul. It is the ultimate gated community, designed not by the very rich and certainly not by the very powerful, but by the middlingly so. As a utopia, the Atlantis Project is pitiful. Beyond the single one-trick fact of its watery location, it is tragically non-ambitious, crippled with class anxiety, nostalgic not for mythic glory but for the anonymous sanctimony of an invented 1950s. This is no ruling class vision: it is the plaintive daydream of a petty bourgeoisie, whose sulky solution to perceived social problems is to run away–set sail into a tax-free sunset.

None of this is surprising. Libertarianism is not a ruling-class theory. It may be indulged, certainly, for the useful ideas it can throw up, and its prophets have at times influenced dominant ideologies–witness the cack-handed depredations of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile after Allende’s bloody overthrow. But untempered by the realpolitik of Reaganism and Thatcherism, the anti-statism of “pure” libertarianism is worse than useless to the ruling class.

Big capital will support tax-lowering measures, of course, but it does not need to piss and moan about taxes with the tedious relentlessness of the libertarian. Big capital, with its ranks of accountant-Houdinis, just gets on with not paying it. And why hate a state that pays so well? Big capital is big, after all, not only because of the generous contracts its state obligingly hands it, but because of the gun-ships with which its state opens up markets for it.

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

It doesn't really have that much to do with being self reliant actually. It has more to do with private liberty and being able to live according to your own conscious as long as you are not hurting some one or some thing else in the process. This idea seems more sound when you realize what a complete f**k up job our mostly pointless and wasteful government is doing.

Having to pay taxes so that the contractors in Afghanistan can charge the U.S. taxpayer 48,000$ for each hammer they use is getting to the point of absurdity. I dont really see any justification for anther person or the government to be telling anyone how to live.

I'd agree the government is doing a sh** job, however if it wasn't for programs like SSI I'd have nothing to live on....and thats funded by taxes, I hate when I find out about wasteful spending of tax money that could have been used on the infrastructure or social safety network. What would the libertarian solution be for disabled and poor people who currently need government assistance? I admit I don't know a ton about libertarian ideology, but as far as I can tell it just doesn't seem to quite address that issue...hence why I ask.

I'd agree the government is doing a sh** job, however if it wasn't for programs like SSI I'd have nothing to live on....and thats funded by taxes, I hate when I find out about wasteful spending of tax money that could have been used on the infrastructure or social safety network. What would the libertarian solution be for disabled and poor people who currently need government assistance? I admit I don't know a ton about libertarian ideology, but as far as I can tell it just doesn't seem to quite address that issue...hence why I ask.