That was kind of my point, like the OP I was referring to the subset of present-day libertarians that advocate laissez-faire capitalism and who advocate this kind of crap.

It really defies belief how you can attempt to blame the policies of a Democratic supermajority in Massachusetts on libertarians.

What is happening in Massachusetts is what Democrats do. It is precisely "this kind of crap" that libertarians are opposed to. And it is libertarian opposition to "this kind of crap" that is the reason why the Democratic establishment heaps such vitriol on libertarians.

Laissez-faire capitalists will cheer along as these privatised forces morph into corporate armies until they them selves are being targeted.

The Massachusetts SWAT teams aren't "privatized" in the sense of laissez-faire capitalism; they don't operate independently of government, they don't provide a service in a free market, they are a government monopoly, and they aren't subject to civil lawsuits. Massachusetts SWAT teams are "privatized" in the way fascists and progressives "privatize" things: government subsidized and regulated monopolies exempted from market forces and liability, and even exempted from government accountability. That is exactly the kinds of abuse of power that libertarians are strongly opposed to.

Do some reading:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/20...

In a sweeping essay, Sheldon Richman explains why private property and free competition are superior to state-provided goods and services. He warns against granting “private” corporate monopolies, which are not true privatizations, but act as arms of the state. He adds that for many state activities, the best way to privatize is not to provide the service at all — as in the case of punishing victimless crimes, which no one should do. For legitimate services, he recommends a “homesteading” approach, in which stakeholders in a public service, such as a school, would receive shares in a new, independent corporation.

Here's some more on SWAT teams:

http://www.cato.org/raidmap

https://www.google.com/search?...

I cited Niemöller quite deliberately precisely because he cheered along with the Nazis until they got around to targeting him.

Yes, and my point is that Niemöller never actually changed or understood where is moral failure was: he always stayed a totalitarian at heart and always remained opposed to individual liberties. He simply shifted allegiances as it was politically expedient and to assuage his guilty conscience.

Sounds like "maffia" to me.

No, a "mafia" is when other people blackmail you into giving them you money.

If the voluntary pool becomes large enough, we call it "government".

Participation in government programs isn't voluntary, so that statement is false.

Libertarianism is one of those things that only works in small groups

Libertarianism isn't an all-encompassing ideology; it's a preference for individual liberties and private solutions.

(and then only helps that small group)

Yes: you make choices to collaborate with others, and if you make choices that work, you reap the rewards. If you make bad choices, you lose. Why does that bother you?

but fails on a nation-wide scale.

As opposed to the war on drugs, the war on obesity, the war on poverty, the stimulus, and the national educational efforts? They have all failed to deliver what they promised.

Nothing can ever reliably work "on a nation-wide scale", people and the country are too diverse and too unpredictable for that; that's the point of libertarians. What does work is to give people the freedom to find their own local and individual solutions to their own local and individual problems. That will never make everybody happy or help everybody, but it's the best we can do. You instead want to follow charlatans who promise solutions "on a nation-wide scale" but never actually deliver, and instead just end up being corrupt and destructive.

Here is what the Cato institute put out about the rise of SWAT teams:

Americans have long maintained that a man's home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

http://store.cato.org/reports/...

To demonstrate how much of a problem this is, there is even a map of incidents:

http://www.cato.org/raidmap

Reason hasn't had a commentary on it yet, but they have already posted information about the privatized SWAT teams:

http://reason.com/blog/2014/06...

I expect in a day or two, you'll see a Reason article condemning the practice strongly for what it is: crony capitalism, lack of government accountability, and government overreach.

It's ironic for you to cite Martin Niemöller in this context. Niemöller was initially a supporter of the Nazi regime, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic. His statement is truthful: he only started opposing the Nazis when they started making his life difficult, and he really only broke with Nazi ideology after having been imprisoned for years. But his apology and subsequent pacifism themselves were opportunism, and he just moved on from supporting one form of totalitarianism to another one.

In fact, it's libertarians (classical liberals) that are warning you of the dangers of what's happening in Massachusetts and the rise of paramilitary-style police, and obviously getting quite a bit of abuse for it from the political establishment.

What you call "simply a contracting issue" is at the heart of the problem with crony capitalism, as advocated and practiced by Democrats. The libertarian view is that it is impossible to avoid corruption in these kinds of government-private contract.

In different words, ultimately, it's private companies doing services for private citizens. Putting the government as a contractor in between the citizens and the businesses removes the primary way by which the widespread greed and abuses of private companies is kept in check: their customers going elsewhere when they are not satisfied.

Almost right, but you got your ideologies mixed up a little.

If they voluntarily pool their resources to protect themselves, that is libertarianism.

If they are prevented from pooling their resources and government forces them to pay for the protection through an unaccountable private corporation, that is progressivism.

As this case illustrates.

Objectivist philosophy is re-worked Nazi propaganda. Supermen my ass, more like cowards hiding behind weapons

The Massachusetts Senate is 90% Democrats, the House is 80% Democrats, and the governor is a Democrat as well. How the hell can you blame libertarians for this? The only people responsible for what is happening in Massachusetts are Democrats and progressives. What you are seeing in Massachusetts is progressivism and American "liberalism" in action.

But you are correct that close ties between industry and government you see in Massachusetts (and increasingly elsewhere) are fascist in nature; private businesses implementing government policy and being rewarded for it is at the core of fascism. It's the "solution" people come up with when they don't like capitalism but are afraid of socialism. And history shows us it's a bad solution that will spin out of control.

Libertarians want to reduce state interference in private affairs, including private businesses. The kind of crony-capitalism and delegation of state power to private businesses ("privatization", government "outsourcing") you increasingly see in the US, advocated by Democrats and Republicans alike, represents core abuses of government power that libertarians oppose. It has nothing to do with free markets or capitalism, it just misuses the language of free markets and capitalism.

Take off your political blinders. Whether you like libertarianism or not, libertarians are not a significant political force in the US. Anything that happens in Massachusetts is the Democrats fault, and what happens in the rest of the country is a joint project of Democrats and Republicans.

If they are "private corporations", then they are subject to discovery and private lawsuits, recovery of damages, and all that good stuff. That's assuming, of course, that private corporations can even do this stuff.

(Also remember that this blatant abuse of power comes from the heart of American liberalism, Massachusetts.)

Aren't all youth cultures in the US part of the society as a whole? Doesn't one culture affect another? To me these things are all related, - all connected.

Which culture I and my kids are part of is a free choice I make; it's probably the most fundamental choice I can make in a free society. Society has no right to interfere in that.

And also I can't think of any parent who doesn't want their child to achieve academically.

Quite right. So what you're saying amounts to saying that white society should go in and change the way black parents raise their kids because you believe that white society can do a better job at it than black parents. Your attempts at couching interfering in parental rights as helping the weak and helpless has a long tradition in racist and totalitarian thinking.

You can't simply say that the problem is for the parents and kids of minority communities to fix, - although it's a very convenient solution to suggest for those outside of those communities.

It's you who is trying to pick the easy answer: "let's impose what the majority/experts believe is the right thing and then everything will work out". Even if it weren't racist and totalitarian, it just doesn't work; decades of spiraling education costs and flat test scores tell you that education experts have no idea how to implement successful education policies.

Have you ever considered that our whole approach to developing software has been largely created by white men? Perhaps that's part of the reason so few outside that group do it.

Asians are disproportionately represented among software developers, or do you consider them "white" now as well? And even the "white men" come from all over Europe and the US, and they include many gay men too. They are all part of the "white men" group according to you because... why?

Your premise is wrong too, since there is a huge range of approaches to software development, languages, and tools, and companies differ radically from each other, from complete anarchy to Soviet-style top-down approaches. The idea that someone can't find a range of companies that matches their style and preferences is ludicrous.

They do so because they don't understand the language and the culture enough.

Yes, another expression of your racism: you think that people's race determines their language and culture.

You're completely missing the point. Facebook says (I'm paraphrasing) "we need to be racially diverse in order to be able to develop software for our racially diverse user community". That means that they are saying that people of one race can't develop software for people of another race. That's racist.

What you are getting at, namely the fact that African Americans and Latinos are statistically underrepresented in high tech, is obvious. But when you're saying that "inequalities in our society are deeply ingrained", that's misleading. The problem isn't with our "society" or inequalities, it is with a particular youth subculture that rejects academic achievement and (for historical reasons) is particularly common among some minorities (but by no means limited to them). You illustrate that yourself: "many of his old friends didn't want to hang around him, - accusing him of acting 'too white' and selling out". That's not a problem society has the power to address, it's only something parents and kids can change.

If employee populations should be representative of customers, would Facebook be better off if they made the education and salary of their employees representative of their users? If paid their engineers $50k a year and hired mostly non-STEM majors? Would your hospital deliver better health care if its medical staff was representative of its patients in terms of education and salary? Would teachers teach better if they were representative of the student population? The whole point of an economy and division of labor is that businesses and their customers are not representative of each other.

Of course, as far as race is concerned, it is just irrelevant. I mean, who but a racist would seriously believe that you have to be (fill in some race) in order to write web software for (same race)?

With STEM degrees, you usually go on to at least a Master, if not a Ph.D. A college degree in most STEM fields isn't worth much by itself.

Assuming "lifetime earnings" has the obvious meaning (the actual article is paywalled), the small advantage STEM degrees have in this study is probably more than made up for the loss of a decade of investment and compound interest; it's even worse if you have taken on debt while getting your degree.

Other studies also concluded that both college and advanced degrees are probably largely break-even financially overall.

If the employees of Walmart want to donate to a political issue, or group together to buy an advertisement, go for it. If the owners of Walmart want to donate to a political issue, go for it.

Citizens United has nothing to do with Walmart. The "corporations" that Citizens United was about was not-for-profit corporations, specifically created for the purpose of citizen participation. You know, everything from the Sierra Club and the ACLU to Citizens United.

But just like we limit direct campaign contributions, there is no reason we couldn't limit individual political spending.

There's no reason why we couldn't transform ourselves into a fascist dictatorship either; that doesn't make it a good idea.

It's because there is a massive power imbalance between the employer and employee. Generally speaking, the employee needs a job more than the employer needs the employee.

If the employer doesn't get the employees he needs with the skill he needs to get the job done, he goes out of business and gets no money, often very quickly.

As an employee, you have lots of choices and options: you can work for many different employers, you can choose to live off your savings, you can change fields, and you can even go on welfare. All of that gives you a lot of power to negotiate.

Of course, if you don't have any savings, aren't flexible, and don't have a good resume, your options are very limited and you may have to take the first job that's offered to you. But that's like saying that when you max out your credit cards, there is a power imbalance between you and the bank. True, there is, but why should anybody care?