Hm. I'm a libertarian in silicon valley - and while I'm not opposed to making money, I don't care that much about it (I've made a net of 9k this year, I run a nonprofit that seeks to develop open-source anticancer drugs). And my experience is that libertarians very much care about right and wrong, it's just they take a slightly more absolutist perspective about what makes something right or wrong, resulting in misunderstandings when what others percieve to be a method to "right a wrong" abuts against libertarian principle "primitives" and those others can't concieve of any other way to achieve that desired end.
To be fair, there are libertarians (notoriously PT, although i think he's been lightening up a bit) who do sometimes act as if they see making money as the only right.
I'm starting to think that Thiel is mislabeled as libertarian. I mean, he's a delegate for Trump, no? What libertarian could possibly support Trump? I'm starting to think Thiel is one of those people who falls into a category that doesn't really have a good name, but has a vague resemblance to "libertarian" and so people call him a libertarian. At the very least, I am doubtful that he's a principled libertarian who subscribes to the NAP.
He's fairly closely aligned with the neoreactionary / dark enlightenment movement which does have some elements of libertarianism but is more focused on the rejection of democracy, taxes, and anything approaching egalitarianism.
He wrote an essay for Cato a few years ago that spells out his views fairly specifically:
There are some stark quotes, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" or "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
In that sense, his support for Trump makes more sense.
Those are the parts of that essay that people always quote -- which is odd, since they're just statistical observations about what the electorate will support. The real meat of the essay is what Thiel proposes we do about it: not some political project to seize power or disenfranchise people who disagree, but a few ideas for how to sidestep politics with technology that will make freedom easier.
In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.
He then goes on to talk about the internet, space colonization, and seasteading. I'm not really seeing the neoreactionary angle here. Am I missing something?
The controversy of the quotes isn't around the statistical truth of what they say, it's that they reject the "democratist" assertion of a monotonically causal chain of more voting -> more democracy -> better. For "democratists", freedom lost to democratic decisions pretty much by definition isn't really lost.
Ancient and not-so-ancient democracies have predicated the right to vote on such things as military service, land ownership, not being on welfare and other things. The idea is that voters should have a substantial stake in the republic (not saying that either predicate is a good, much less perfect, proxy for such a stake), not merely inhabiting it. Returning to that, rejecting "democratism" is the reactionary part.
Heck man, I'm a "democratist" -- in the sense that I hold democracy to be a sacred value. But I don't beleive in that causal chain; and I probably don't beleive in the less sloppy alterntives you might think of given time.
Also freedom-first thinkers like Thiel (and me for that matter) can just say: sure I believe in democracy -- and the most effective way to get it is almost alway to let people rule themselves.
You can argue that that is playing with definitions -- but every republic since Athens that was worth a damn found ways to give individuals their space to do stuff that other people didn't like.
It's of importance to anyone with a political ideology they think stands no chance of being voted in on a large scale. Again, I'm not seeing more than a superficial resemblance.
The part where he says giving half the population the right to vote made impossible his perverse fantasy? Substitute "blacks" or "Jews" in that statement if his fascist leanings need to be made more clear.
I think Thiel supports trump because he wants trump to blow everything up. He says women voting was bad for his political block (libertarians). He thinks we shouldn't have got enforcing things like safety - instead just sue people who wronged you. just like he did to gawker.
I think that supporting Trump on alt-right grounds while once claiming to support the "NAP" style of "freedom" is a textbook example of being so sharp you cut yourself. One doesn't obtain freedom from state intervention of any kind by putting an egotistical fascist strongman into power.
Perhaps he has changed his views over time. Many libertarians have realized that NAP is self destructive and foolish and have moved away from libertarianism.
I meant that thiel has over time gone from an ayn-rand style objectivist libertarian to a squishier on "voluntary collectivism" principled stance that aligns with the nap more than less
To be fair, there are libertarians (notoriously PT, although i think he's been lightening up a bit) who do sometimes act as if they see making money as the only right.