Libertarians don’t solve problems. They re-brand them as non-problems, or as faux problems they can…

Libertarians don’t solve problems. They re-brand them as non-problems, or as faux problems they can manipulate in strategic ways. They can’t solve collective problems, because they don’t believe the collective is even a thing. Quick thread, using UK boat arrivals. /1 #auspol https://t.co/ZwK4s8mCBW

Anybody who watches the news outside their own country will see what the UK government is doing right now with boat arrivals is a complete carbon copy of what the Australian government has been doing for years. They don’t even deny it. /2

Re-branding a problem of international displacement of millions of people as a problem of ‘people smugglers’. This plays right into the standard libertarian ‘law and order’ playbook. The business model of people smugglers is millions of displaced people (the actual problem). /3

This re-branding then excuses pretty much anything, to shut down the ‘crime’ of smuggling. Essentially, turning the flow of people around i.e. no refugees. But it won’t look like that, it’ll look like ‘stopping evil people smugglers’. /4

Libertarians are masters at this sort of reframing. By far their most impressive reframing is that of our whole society, as an ‘Economy’. Vast numbers of social problems are completely ignored, or pseudo-managed by reframing them as tweaks to statistical economic indicators. /5

And of course in the pandemic, the libertarians have been framing the whole time. ‘Just like the flu’, ‘live with the virus’, ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, etc. Not actually fixing anything, but framing inaction as action. They don’t fix collective things, because…/6

…they don’t believe in them. ‘There is no such thing as society’, as their Empress Maggie T said. Instead they constantly create collective mythologies, spin and framings, to deflect attention. Literally misdirection, as magicians do. /end