Good takedown of libertarianism

Retardo at elementropy has a good rant on libertarians, and I really couldn't agree more.

My Hate Is Pure
Sweet Jesus, I hate libertarians. They brag on their principles (when they mean, actually, their dogma), but at root they are the worst kind of misanthropes.

They are social darwinists of the worst sort. In capitalism, hucksterism is the basis by which the survival of the fittest is decided, so libertarians then term that culturally-determined criterion "nature", then feel a special glee in pointing out that the poor are "nature's" refuse.

Inferior is sorted from superior, poor from rich; and anything which would counter this "natural" process is anti-darwinist (and therefore anti-science). Hence liberals and socialists seek to meddle with "nature's" processes, which is a moral crime of great magnitude.(emphasis mine)

High Priestess of this belief was the novelist Ayn Rand. Philosophically (no, Rand doesn't qualify), some put the blame on Nietzsche but actually the person most responsible for codifying social darwinism as a philosophy was Herbert Spencer. Charles Darwin himself is utterly blameless for those who've bastardised his theories. And for what it's worth, I think it's very appropriate that Anton LaVey chose Rand to plagiarise for his Satanic Bible.

Politically, social darwinism was for a good period the reigning ideology of the Anglosphere; it was called laissez-faire. Modern libertarians, the only current political party shameless enough to openly advocate hard social darwinism, are descended (in America) from the Republican Party pre-Theodore Roosevelt and from (in Britain) the Liberal Party of the Victorian Era. Of course, history and reform killed these entities stone dead; the antidotes coming in the form of Progressivism in America and the Labour Party in Britain. Thus by definition, libertarians are atavistic and reactionary: they seek to restore something history (or, if I were trying to be cute, nature) thought deserving of extinction.

But libertarianism does have utility; it is a vessel for sociopathy and perverse ego-reinforcement. There is no more ridiculous phrase to a libertarian than "the brotherhood of men". Humans are individuals (hence Rand's fiction's emphases) born to do battle with other humans, via capitalism, to see who'll prevail. Great psychological dividends come with financial success; rich people are just better than poor. And the very poor? Well, self-evidently, they don't deserve to breathe. What a waste of resources! "Nature" should take its course.

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Government, politics, and economic infrastructure are all artifical constructs. The libertarian argument against "meddling" in these is basically, "don't interfere with our meddling." Hypocrits.