I am using ‘libertarian’ loosely, applying it to any economic political thinking that believes everyone thrives if everyone is on his own. Mitt Romney is not a libertarian because he recommended any unemployed person just get a loan from ‘their folks’ of ten thousand dollars and start ‘a little business.’ That is mollycoddling. Put the kid out at 18 and let her thrive.
Why don’t most people cotton to this idea once they see it in action? Simply put, normal people don’t do that to their kids nor do they care to live in a society where helping another person is tantamount to declaring them dead.
All of this falls back on the still kicking philosophy called Social Darwinism, the spurious extension of Darwin’s device of natural selection to include human societies as opposed to animals (including humans) living in the wild. Societies exist precisely to buffer the effects of a ‘state of nature.’ So many philosophies have gone awry positing the lone individual (always male) in a state of nature.
We don’t live that way. Humans started off living in groups and remain that way. Even libertarians often group together for mutual support (weaklings!!) e.g. the Libertarian Party.
Sometimes I wish the Republicans would take charge of the country for an extended period say 10 years. When the smoke cleared from the rubble left from the economy, the military, courts, infrastructure, only the gun manufacturers would be left. In other words: Somalia and certain regions of Nigeria and Arkansas.
The reason is simple: when losing the economic competition means losing everything, including family, house, job, health care, and any means of retrieving any of these OTHER THAN THE BULLET, you get the bullet. In other words, a terrain many times worse than the desolate terrain of a Mafia controlled section of a country. Think Russia, Southern Italy, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Syria, the eastern Congo, and others (some of these have stabilized perhaps but the underlying destructive forces are still lying there, cf. Russia as I write in late June of 2023).
Given half a chance, normal people, i.e. congenital thugs aside, will band together. That is the beginning of society since it will initially be based on family, extended family, clan, band, tribe, etc. The social safety-net can be entangling e.g. family demands, but at least you stay alive longer.
BUT….. it might be fun to just start all over again like that.