libertarian idealism

I have often and frequently said that the biggest disagreement that I have with anarchists is that I think they are too idealistic that people can be counted on to not have a "government" designed to play the objective" and neutral "referee".  Too many times, due to the nature of the human condition, people cannot be counted on to maintain rational, reasonable and responsible conduct.

We are creatures of to many hard to control inputs.  Biological chemicals course through us, affecting our thinking.  Emotions too easily override rational behavior.  Hormonal imbalances can impair our reasoning.

It's not that I think that people in general are too stupid or incapable of the level and degree of self control necessary to have a society without government, just that there are too many ways that people find themselves not in full control of themselves and to accommodate for that, we need to have a body that can take action to deal with the person or groups of people who would intentionally or unintentionally violate the safety and well being of everyone else.

Having said that, I also believe that just being libertarian requires a certain amount of idealism as well.  For the "everyday" libertarian, we have basic expectations we place first on ourselves and secondly those around us.   These expectations are ideal in nature.

We minimally expect people to support themselves to the best of their abilities and not just expect society to do it for us on default.

We expect people to respect property rights.  The old saying that if it doesn't belong to you, you keep your hands off it.  Ask before you "borrow", don't steal from others.  We shouldn't have to nail or chain everything down or lock it up for fear of it being stolen.  An ideal for sure, but not an unreasonable one.

We also generally hold the ideal of making the effort to be our best.  We believe in setting the "bar" pretty high as a goal to reach and always work, train, practice, etc... to reach the goal.  Once the goal is achieved, we raise the bar again.  

Ideals are the bar, the goals we set to be better than we are.  To be the best we can be.  Will we always reach or achieve those goals and ideals?  Because of the human condition I mentioned earlier, the answer is definitely not.  However, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't make the effort.  It is always worth the effort to strive to be our best.

I doubt anyone will argue that ideals are of little to no value or not worth having and making the effort to achieve.  We should hold to our ideals.  It is our ideals that make us who and what we are as a person.

However, we need to be reasonable and realistic about our ideals and the practicality of them.  It's great to set a high bar, but if it's physically not humanly possible to reach that bar, then the ideal is impractical.  Essentially by setting the bar too high or having ideals that simply cannot be realized, we set ourselves up for failure from the beginning.

To me, the primary difference between libertarians and anarchists is that anarchists set the bar too high.  Both of us value idealism, personal responsibility and individual liberty.