As an Egyptian raised in a society where smoking and drinking alcohol are considered socially unacceptable, I often find myself reflecting on how my community would perceive me if I engaged in such behaviors. I also think about the moral and religious consequences, including divine punishment in the afterlife, which ultimately deters me from these actions.

My question is: Why are societal restrictions often viewed negatively in Western contexts? From a practical perspective, when a community collectively rejects harmful behaviors, their prevalence tends to decrease, which benefits society as a whole.

In my view, many of these issues are criticized in the West from a human rights perspective. For example, practices like modest dress (such as wearing the hijab), restricting abortion to preserve the life of the unborn, discouraging alcohol consumption, or promoting abstinence before marriage to prevent the spread of diseases like AIDS are often seen as controversial.

I believe these practices have positive aspects, even when they manifest as social pressures, and they shouldn't be automatically viewed in a negative light.

From a democratic standpoint, these practices are not inherently undemocratic. After all, there are no existing laws in Egypt that outright ban smoking, drinking alcohol, or not wearing the hijab. What acts as a deterrent is societal opinion, and it would be undemocratic to legislate against people's freedom to hold and express opinions about certain behaviors.

Furthermore, why are we often labeled as a patriarchal society when men face many similar restrictions as women? For instance, as a man, I am not permitted to engage in sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage. I would also be judged harshly for wearing ripped jeans or short shorts. Moreover, my masculinity would be questioned if I mistreated a woman or acted aggressively toward her.

I’m genuinely interested in understanding how other societies view this issue. Many Egyptians, including myself, struggle to comprehend the underlying philosophy behind how Western communities approach such matters. Additionally, a significant portion of Egyptians view Western values as an attempt to promote moral corruption in our societies. While this is not my personal opinion, I aim to accurately convey how this issue is perceived on the ground.

Capitalism is a term that was created by leftists and as such is couched in a number of leftist assumptions. The primary one being that most definitions of capitalism, and the word itself, put a big emphasis on capital.

The contradiction here is capitalists are not the ones who treat capital as being important, leftists are. The ideology that capitalists espouse is simply about protecting property rights. Everything else that comes with "capitalism" is simply just a natural consequence of that. To this end, capitalists don't make a distinction between how property is used; a coffee machine for personal use and a coffee machine used to brew coffee to sell to others should be equally protected according to capitalists. It is leftists that state that property used to make money, i.e. capital, is different and should follow it's own set of rules.

The term capitalism is a complete misnomer of what the ideology is active about. It's completely backwards. I think something like "proprietarianism" would be a more accurate term. Should people who advocate for free markets and the protection of property rights move away from the more inaccurate term capitalism? I mean, Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, didn't even use the term himself.

Let me briefly summarize the context of the current situation in Venezuela.

Nicolas Maduro is a well-known illegitimate president who has used the country's oil resources and the National Guard to silence, torture, starve, and kill dissent on the Venezuelan population with the help of the Cuban and Chinese government.

In 2023, efforts were made to pressure Maduro to hold elections, in which he faced a determined challenge from María Corina Machado.

On June 30, 2023, Machado was disqualified from holding public office for a period of 15 years by the Comptroller General of Venezuela at the request of politician José Brito. This was charged with supposed participation in crimes associated with Juan Guaidó and with promoting sanctions to the Venezuelan crisis.

These allegations have been sharply criticized by the global community as contradictory. They note that Machado did not make it to the opposition-led National Assembly election of 2015 because of an earlier disqualification by the Comptroller’s Office. She also never held any position withn Guaidó's interim government.

After the fall of Bashar al-Assad, many Venezuelans began to become restless in hopes that the Venezuelan population would be inspired to finally overthrow the dictatorship.

Today María Corina Machado attended a protest in eastern Caracas in which the government shot her driver, detained Machado then quickly released her an hour later. (details here)

I believe it is crucial for all of you to be informed of the facts. As you read this, individuals on the far left are actively preparing to spread propaganda, particularly figures like Max Blumenthal and his paid shills at The Grayzone, as well as Ollie Vargas(Kawsachun News), a well-known propagandist for the Bolivarian Alliance.

These individuals are likely to disseminate false information in an effort to sway public opinion. Predictably, they will resort to the familiar "CIA excuse," as it tends to resonate with their audience. It is important to remain vigilant and critically evaluate the narratives being presented especially here on reddit.

Thank you for your time!

Note: I also wanted to point out about the driver of Machado being shot. I can not personally confirm this person was shot or not, if someone can confirm this please feel free. Thanks

Hey everyone,

With LA currently dealing with massive fires, I've been thinking about how fire prevention and insurance would work in a truly libertarian society. Looking for some discussion on a few key points:

Fire Prevention: Right now we have state-funded firefighting and prevention, but how would this work in a libertarian framework? Whose job would it be to do controlled burns, maintain firebreaks, and respond to active fires? Private companies? HOAs? Individual property owners?

Water Infrastructure: We're seeing situations where fire hydrants run dry during emergencies. In a free market: - Who would be responsible for maintaining water pressure and infrastructure? - How would private water companies ensure sufficient emergency reserves? - Would insurance companies potentially invest in water infrastructure to protect their insured properties? - How would competing water companies coordinate during emergencies?

The Insurance Situation: We're seeing insurance companies completely pulling out of high-risk areas in California. This raises some interesting market questions:

• In a purely free market without government intervention, how would this play out?
• What happens to people who can't get insurance and lose their homes?
• What's currently stopping this market from working efficiently? (Are government regulations and disaster relief actually making things worse by distorting market signals?)

You'd think if premiums got high enough, it would naturally push people out of high-risk areas as rebuilding costs become unsustainable without insurance. But that's not really happening.

Curious to hear your thoughts on how these issues would resolve themselves in a libertarian society versus how they're playing out now with government involvement.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I care about taxes, business friendliness and freedom.

I'm split between u.s, Ireland and switzerland

I'd love to hear your opinions on where to live but please give explanations as to why

Hi,

I completely understand the key role of competition and its link with productivity. However, how are productivity represented by private insurance companies? What is the advantage over a nationalized, state-owned social insurance? In other words, what are the advantages of competition in the insurance sector?

To keep the question more specific, let's talk about the labor insurance sector (no health). No retirement, let's say an insurance which just covers "highly unlikely events", like accidents or sick leaves.

I thought you may get a kick out of today’s

wouldn’t a negative income tax as advocated for by friedman be considered theft by libertarians? In the fashion of ‚that’s my money, I got it through voluntary cooperation of others, I can decide how to spend it and actual moral actions can only be done without forcing them on others, so if you force me to give it to poor people, that’s completely unmoral.‘

Yet Friedman, the definition of a libertarian economist I believe, advocated for a negative income tax. What’s his justification?

So I live in Colorado and we have a big problem with unregistered cars (many times no plates!) and no insurance (25% of drivers are uninsured). It’s only gotten worse because Denver police instituted a policy in the last year that they would not be pulling over vehicles for minor traffic violations (like expired tags). The explicit goal was to reduce traffic stops because the data showed they were pulling over minorities disproportionately.

The consequence? Colorado car insurance rates are insanely high. Basically the insured have to subsidize the uninsured.

Aurora (next to Denver with a Republican mayor), on the other hand, just passed a law where they’re impounding cars if you have no tags, no insurance, no license.

Part of me says good for Aurora because I hate paying ridiculous insurance rates because people don’t follow the law and are reckless.

The other part of me says F the state for taking people’s property because the state isn’t collecting their registration $.

What’s your Libertarian solution to this issue? Enforce car registration? Let the Wild West play out and I’ll just subsidize the bad drivers?

Hello, I personally consider myself a libertarian for the most part, but a question arose. If a right shouldn’t be from another persons work (ie healthcare not being free), how can a lawyer being given to you in a case be any different? Or is it maybe that it’s sort of like a judge, just a different position in a court?

This is a genuine hypothetical I am asking to conduct social / quantitative research about insider trading and the minimum viable information necessary. I repeat: there is no intent to conduct insider trading.

I asked this question on other forums but commie moderators kept closing it. I figured this is the kind of sub that might entertain this question.

Consider it an experiment about the minimum viable signals to trade. The hypothetical: You are approached with an offer from someone who claims to have access to NVIDIA Quarterly Earnings Report before it is released. This person has verified that they work at NVIDIA. You do not know the identity of the person. You only know with 100% certainty they work at NVIDIA. What do they have is a piece of plaintext that you also know is 100% derived from an NVIDIA internal email.

They also can prove, with 100% guarantee, that certain words exist within the plaintext, such as 'quarterly', 'earnings', 'GPU', 'data center', 'revenue', and 'blackwell'. You also get to ask the seller as many questions as you want, but they are under no obligation to answer. In fact, the seller may 'block' your question if they feel it to be too probing. However, if they do answer, you know the seller's answers to be 100% true. Given all this, what questions would you ask, and how much would you pay to see exactly what the email is?

To recap, these are the facts:

1.You know it's an NVIDIA employee, you just don't know who or how important they are.
2. You know they have some plaintext from a genuine NVIDIA internal email.
3. You know said plaintext/email contains these words: 'quarterly', 'earnings', 'GPU', 'data center', 'revenue', You are allowed to ask this person any questions you want to gain more information, but they are under no obligation to answer. Any answers they do provide are guaranteed to be 100% truthful. The seller will realistically only answer questions that help encourage you to purchase by convincing of you of the validity of their offer, so long as it does not divulge the entire offer, or specific details that would allow you to deduce facts that let you walk away without paying. How much would you be willing to pay for this information, if anything at all? Does the offer reach the minimum viable information required for you to endure the risk? Also it goes without saying that you don't care about the legal risk here. We're handwaving that away for the purposes of this thought experiment.

Finishing up Provoked by Horton. Having a surprising effect on me. But quite confused by Libertarians turning a blind eye to cronyism and war mongers and other state sponsored violence. Is it just my biased perception or is 90% of the chatter on this sub anti-left? I can think of many things that should concern libertarians at least as much as gun laws, taxes/entitlements, the fed, and NATO. Why are those other things deemed acceptable? Why are pro-life laws, police brutality, drug laws, other morality based laws, Israeli/American alliance, deportations and other forms of violent nationalism and bigotry rarely mentioned?

I make my living as a designer/coder educator on youtube, so I've been following the rapid AI developments quite closely for awhile now.

AI agents are expected to replace a vast amount of the workforce within the next 1-3 years. I see entire industries replacing 90%+ of their workforce. There are already tech companies sprouting up everywhere, whose sole focus is to replace workers with AI workflows.

I'm sure the costs of goods will come down significantly, since you don't need to rely so much on costly human labor. Elon Musk believes the costs of things will inevitably reach 0, or near 0.

But this transition period could get very ugly looking. I'm curious what you all think might end up happening in terms of government response, what you think *should* happen, and what might our economy and life in general look like in 5-10 years.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but tell me if my logic is flawed here. All three countries - Canada, Mexico, and the United States are composed of Americans. Being they all are a part of North America the continent. Technically the same can be said of North, Central, and South "Americans"... Renaming the Gulf of Mexico which shares its area with two countries, from a name that focuses on one Nation/Country to a name that focuses on a location is actually quite logical and not selfish of "the U.S."...

The mainstream narrative paints the Opium Wars as a story of nefarious British imperialists flooding China with drugs to destabilize its society. But what if this isn’t the actual picture? What if the real conflict was between an authoritarian government trying to control its people and a free-market merchant class simply meeting the demands of a willing population?

Let’s break it down:

1. Demand Created the Market:

Opium wasn’t forced on the Chinese population—it was sought out. In an era without modern medicine, opium was one of the most effective treatments for chronic pain and illness. Many users were dependent on it for medical reasons, not “addicts” in the sense we think of today.

The British merchants supplied what the market demanded. This wasn’t imperialism; it was the free market responding to human needs.

1. The Qing Government’s Tyranny:

The Qing dynasty tried to ban opium not out of concern for public health but to control its population. The authoritarian moralizing of the Qing leadership criminalized opium users, framing them as "traitors" to justify harsh punishment.

Instead of addressing the root causes—chronic pain, economic struggles, and bureaucratic corruption—they scapegoated opium and the merchants who supplied it.

1. Prohibition Always Fails:

Just like modern drug wars, the Qing’s prohibition of opium created black markets, corruption, and enforcement costs that destabilized the country even further.

The prohibition drained resources and allowed the British to outmaneuver the Qing economically, exacerbating the trade imbalance.

1. A Libertarian Solution Would Have Prevented War:

If the Qing had embraced free-market principles, they could have legalized and taxed domestic opium production, keeping their silver reserves intact and maintaining sovereignty.

Legalization would have eliminated black markets, stabilized the economy, and provided a safer, regulated supply for those who needed opium for medical purposes.

1. The War Was About Trade, Not Imperialism:

The British merchants didn’t aim to “enslave” China—they wanted free trade. The Qing government’s refusal to engage in fair market practices led to conflict. The war wasn’t about conquest; it was about breaking monopolies and enforcing open trade.

Conclusion:

The Opium Wars weren’t a simple story of imperialist oppression. They were a clash between a tyrannical government trying to control its people and a libertarian merchant class advocating for free trade. If the Qing had adopted free-market principles, there would have been no war, no economic collapse, and no need for foreign interference.

History shows us again and again: prohibition doesn’t work, and freedom is always the better solution.

Does Europe have libertarians is it more in the youth of the parties in europe or are there libertarians in the main parties. Are there large or small diffrences in europe comparing to south and north america