Why the HELL are you NOT a Libertarian?

Originally posted by tothetenthpower
Cause Libertarianism is just a nice way to say Anarchy.

Which kind of doesn't work in a real world sense.

Cause you are assuming that everybody doesn't want at some point to infringe on people's rights.

The fact is that some people just wanna see the world burn.

Now I am of "Libertarian" values, I support most of the agenda, but a full out Libertarian culture is like a Utopia, nice to think about, impossible to implement.

~Keeper

The most remarkable historical example of a society of libertarian law and courts, however, has been neglected by historians until very recently. And this was also a society where not only the courts and the law were largely libertarian, but where they operated within a purely state-less and libertarian society. This was ancient IrelandÑan Ireland which persisted in this libertarian path for roughly a thousand years until its brutal conquest by England in the seventeenth century. And, in contrast to many similarly functioning primitive tribes (such as the Ibos in West Africa, and many European tribes), preconquest Ireland was not in any sense a "primitive" society: it was a highly complex society that was, for centuries, the most advanced, most scholarly, and most civilized in all of Western Europe.

For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has written:

'There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justiceÉ. There was no trace of State-administered justice.'

How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath. All 'freemen' who owned land, all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become members of a tuath. Each tuath's members formed an annual assembly which decided all common policies,

In the first place, the law itself was based on a body of ancient and immemorial custom, passed down as oral and then written tradition through a class of professional jurists called the brehons. The brehons were in no sense public, or governmental, officials; they were simply selected by parties to disputes on the basis of their reputations for wisdom, knowledge of the customary law, and the integrity of their decisions.

But what of the elected 'king'? Did he constitute a form of State ruler? Chiefly, the king functioned as a religious high priest, presiding over the worship rites of the tuath, which functioned as a voluntary religious, as well as a social and political, organization. As in pagan, pre-Christian, priesthoods, the kingly function was hereditary, this practice carrying over to Christian times. The king was elected by the tuath from within a royal kin-group (the derbfine), which carried the hereditary priestly function. Politically, however, the king had strictly limited functions: he was the military leader of the tuath, and he presided over the tuath assemblies. But he could only conduct war or peace negotiations as agent of the assemblies; and he was in no sense sovereign and had no rights of administering justice over tuath members. He could not legislate, and when he himself was party to a lawsuit, he had to submit his case to an independent judicial arbiter.

Originally posted by tothetenthpower
reply to post by Neo_Serf

 

I agree they aren't 100% the same, but the basic core is the same.

No laws, nobody to tell you what to do, just somebody to tell you what NOT to do.

Again, kind of a paradox.

~Keeper