[ExI] Is there a potential libertarianism / democracy tension?

[Amon Zero]

On 26 September 2011 03:54, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/9/25 Dennis May <dennislmay at yahoo.com>:
> > Adrian Tymes wrote:
> >> Public funding is not literally taken at the point of a gun, ..."
> >
> > Refuse to pay and you will see the guns which were always
> > present.
>
> If one or a few do.  My point is that this is only possible because
> most do not.  If most refused to, there would not be enough guns.
> The government is well aware of this.
>


Sorry to ask a tangential and probably quite naiive question, but it has
been on my mind and is relevant here. I've given it a new thread name, since
it's not about QM or paradigm shifts.

The exchange above seems to point to a potential tension between democracy
and libertarianism. What I mean is that the libertarian political impulse is
to minimise or eliminate government and tax, but what if it turns out that,
in the end, that's not really what people turn out to want. That the reason
they continue to pay tax is not because they fear the guns, but because it
seems not unreasonable to pay some tax. Sure, a lot of people don't like
paying tax (or too much of it), or like seeing it mis-spent event less, but
I wonder what the "average libertarian" (if there is such a creature), but
the vast majority don't talk about taxation as if they've been robbed at
gunpoint, in my personal experience.

So, say that a libertarian party of some sort came to be running a major
country (not to name names), government was radically pruned accordingly,
but then the voters reacted in a strongly negative way. Are there any
indications how libertarians would be likely to react?

The reason I ask is because libertarianism seems, on the one hand, to be
quite a mild, democracy-abiding mainstream-ish point of view, and so I'd
expect no more desire to subvert democracy than you'd get from the major
parties. On the other hand, however, libertarianism is sort of a
"meta"-political movement in that libertarians hope to radically restructure
the system itself, and that kind of revolutionary sentiment - ironically -
doesn't tend to like being told that it's time is up.

- A
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