See, I think differently about regulation. I think that alternatives to punishment and fines for non-compliance ought to be explored first, rather than being looked upon as a go-to. The crime-and-punishment perspective, on regulation, is really worrying and toxic, from my point-of-view.
It is bad enough that the government has to exhaust a lot of its popularity on taxation enforcement. I agree that taxation is necessary, but when you pressure or force people into doing something they might not always want to do, then that tends to turn the tide of public sentiment against you a little bit, and frankly, I like it when my guys win. I just also think that the tax burden of the poorest voters has untapped potential for exercising the power of tax-relief to promote popularity among the voters, and I honestly think that people that are super-wealthy really won't die of not being trillionaires. I have never heard of that being a cause of anyone's death, anyway. The thing is, we need to both acknowledge the necessity of taxation to keep up with our budget and the total political cost of taxation. We can't just ignore that cost. It is a cost that can be understood and quantified.
Also, you know, there are alternative means of presenting social obligations to the people, such as giving them the ability to direct more of their particular tax dollars to specific things. It would actually be an interesting experiment if we had part of the tax bill that you still had to pay, but you could have some kind of choice about what programs you really wanted to support with your money. I think that a lot of taxpayers might actually take being obligated to pay a tax better if they could actually direct the money into things that directly benefited themselves and people and causes that they cared a flying rat's ass about. It's nice that a lot of voters want to support the arts and a lot of voters want to support homes for the homeless and a lot of voters want to support clean energy, but it would be interesting to see what they did when they were asked to put their money where their mouth is. In the balance, everything WOULD get the funding it needed because everyone really has different valences and ideals, which is really how democracy goes around anyway. I think that there might actually be some Nordic countries that have tried this on a small scale, so don't mock it before asking if there might be a precedent.
Also, I think that transparency really helps people better accept their responsibilities. It helps people to know why everything is being done. It helps people to understand in detail the reasons why certain things are necessary. If money is needed for FEMA and other disaster relief expenses, then people are going to want to see what that money is doing. We live in the digital age. Why can't we coordinate a means of showing everyone a count of how efficiently their tax dollars are supporting their stated purpose and how much of their tax dollars are paying for administrative bullshit. At least if the government were to quantify how well everything was being spent, our political leaders could argue with each other about who can make the government more meaningfully efficient, rather than who can dupe the people into thinking that a tax-cut constitutes a free lunch.
But when you use force and take away people's options and choices when you really don't have to, that scares people. They feel a loss of control that is really seriously upsetting, and that tends to lead to political leaders that are just trying to take responsibility being seen as bullies. I think that political leaders that call for new regulations and tax-increases and other obligations really ought to get serious about weighing political costs instead of blaming the voters for being voters. It's true that you have no choice except to give a dog his shots, but you do have the option of weighing how much the dog resents you for poking him in the but with needles, in a rational way, against how much fun stuff you did together the same day at the dog park. You don't just avoid vet visits just because they are an unpleasant responsibility, but you weigh the cost of fulfilling necessary obligations in a rational way.
At heart, I have generally lefty views, but I also have a realistic view of human psychology. I think that it might be a pipe dream to imagine a world where we don't have any social obligations at all, but I still see imposing such obligations as something that needs to be expensed. I think that ignoring that expense is irresponsible and politically reckless. I am tired of seeing political leaders I otherwise agree with lose because they won't get serious about finding ways to mitigate the political cost of putting more burdens onto people that inevitably must resent being burdened.
But the difference between myself and a libertarian is that libertarians are not looking at liberty in a rational or socially conscious sort of way. They have adopted a sort of child-like perspective where any sense at all in which they are asked to take responsibility is looked upon with anger and disdain. They even sneer at being asked to honor transgender people's pronouns as if it were somehow an IMPOSSIBLE burden on them to just be respectful.
And I don't even try to force people regarding my pronouns. I just exercise my own liberty to state clearly and firmly how I prefer to be called. I don't see it as an affront or a reason for anger if someone misgenders me, but I do see it as an opening for me to assert my identity as a woman in an unmistakable way. If people were uncertain BEFORE someone made a mistake and misgendered, they could not possibly be uncertain AFTER I was misgendered and I politely but firmly called out a correction. I don't see it as a type of morality policing. I just also know that misgendering is sometimes used as a means of harassment and intimidation, especially against transgender people that are trying their best to stealth it and never really wanted to be controversial in any context (unlike me, a person that is too tall and broad-shouldered to ever stealth it in any context, although my mother and my sister are also broad-shouldered for women in spite of having florid giganticomastia), and it is not really taken seriously enough. The point is, there are a lot of ultra-transphobic libertarians that don't really care about liberty, but they only want the "liberty" to harass and intimidate transgender people in a way that obstructs and negates transgender people's liberty.
And as a zoo, I find that a lot of people only care about freedom of speech in the sense of giving themselves the right to harass, intimidate, defame, and threaten me over that aspect of my identity. Even the government is not actually threatening me over stating my identity and my views on current statutes. That level of repression is all being done by vigilante cyber-terrorists. When "freedom of speech" only means "freedom to repress other people's freedoms," that is not freedom of speech, but that is vigilante authoritarianism. It's ochlocracy. It's mobile vulgus, and rule by mobile vulgus does not really lead to people being more free.
It doesn't make you libertarian if you only want to have liberty for the sake of negating other people's liberty.
It doesn't make you libertarian if the only liberty you care about is the liberty to deny people the right to choose their publicly expressed gender identity. A transgender person's right to choose their identity and how they wish to be perceived is a PART of their liberty. Freedom of speech is something I generally support, but a part of a transgender person's freedom of speech is the right to be known as the gender they want to identify as.
And while some sexual identities might be controversial because it is genuinely complicated to identify and protect the rights of all stakeholders, we can never really succeed at understanding or attempting to address those complications if most of us that try to have open and honest discussions about the subject are becoming victims of cyber-terrorism, doxxing, swotting, report-brigading, and vigilante deplatforming. Because people that have legitimate concerns are also too cautious to risk their safety or reputations, the only people that seem to get attention, on these subjects, are people that are too impulsive to observe any type of commitment to rational behavior at all, which leads to sensationalist reporting and the development of a seriously distorted public image. Therefore, it's not "freedom of speech" to defame and terrorize people that have controversial views, but that actually constitutes vigilante authoritarianism. If all stakeholders could be identified and discussed in a rational, level-headed sort of way, then we might eventually reach the same sort of compromise that was eventually reached in Germany, but as things currently stand, vigilante authoritarianism has taken the place of lawful government in a seriously harmful way.
My problem with people that call themselves libertarians is that they don't pay attention to the problem of vigilante authoritarianism, and they don't pay attention to liberties that don't happen to apply to them in their selfishly narrow-minded world, such as freedom of gender identity. They don't care about anything except themselves.
That is why I call myself a moderate anarchist. What is an anarchist? An anarchist cares about all levels of freedom, not just from the government but from corporate monarchists and vigilante authoritarian thugs. Also, I identify myself as "moderate." Yes, moderate because I think that compromises do eventually have to be reached with people that feel comforted by rigid boundaries, and I realize that my own sloppy-but-effective intuitive style of thinking is not really everyone else's cup-of-tea. I can still have a more anarchist perspective on life and realize that I also am obligated to try to coexist and compromise with people that have a psychological or practical need for a more clearly defined way of life.
And I refuse to ever call myself a libertarian because libertarians only see force if the government is doing it. The problem is that they have such a narrow-perspective that they would take away the authority of the government to protect them from a corporate monarchy that would put them literally into chains and an authoritarian mob that would beat them to death with clubs if they stepped out of line or looked or acted too different. As long as "libertarian" only refers to one kind of liberty, it doesn't describe me.
"Libertarian" has become a code-word for "corporate monarchist" and "totalitarian ochlocrat." Fuck them.
Join the anarchists, people. We actually do ask the government to exercise moderation, and occasionally, we outright defy the government. However, we are also against corporate monarchism and totalitarian ochlocracy, and right now, those are bigger problems than anything the government is doing. The government is too disorganized to even get my mail to me on time. The government is not currently the biggest threat to my liberty, although I am always wary of government overreach into my personal life. Right now, we are living under a toxic corporate monarchy, on one hand, and on the other, we are edging our way into a dangerous future of totalitarian ochlocracy, where violent demagogues can suppress a religion they disagree with by calling for rampage shootings against people that practice it.
When you only want to check one type of authoritarianism while ignoring others, you end up with a serious shit show, and it just doesn't work. If you recognize and feel concerned about all types of authoritarianism, then call yourself an anarchist because I think that only anarchists genuinely care about liberty, in an unstructured and intuitive way, rather than just bitching about taxation and insisting on the dumb idea that gold-backed currency is still realistic in the 2020's.