What's the difference between "libertarianism" and "crony capitalism" though?
Replace "libertarianism" with "whatever the hell system we've got now."
That being? That's a rhetorical question, because I don't want to be inundated with Twitter doom scrolling. I can get that by browsing Pocket on my tablet.
It's really hard for people to accept, because as I said mass media has an amplifying effect on your ordinary personal dispositions (by nature I would suspect that most people interested in esoteric subjects such as "old weapons" and "obscure airplanes" are pessimists but that is not supported by any sort of statistical evidence). However, I suggest you can start by looking out your window and telling us how many gangs you see, or how many times you need to slam the accelerator on your car to escape a carjacking at a red light, or shootout on your way to to the supermarket.
I suspect the number will be shockingly low.
For the hyper optimists the opposite would be to look at things relating to economic policy, like the deadly wedge of the US wage stagnation since the Nixon Shock/end of Bretton-Woods versus productivity growth, and the relative stagnation of even the latter for sometime now.
Things might be bad, but they're better than they ever were, and they're only going to get worse and better at the same time.
Neither real communism nor real libertarianism are likely possible, as both would require a somewhat different-from-standard human.
Libertarianism is totally possible because it has no practical ideology: It's just a vague sense of unease with the modern era and wistful nostalgia for a non-existent past.
Again, libertarianism as most people describe it is entirely a result of greybeard men born from between the 1880's to the 1930's United States remembering the time before the Dillinger gang and radio shows talked about crime from Al Capone or the Soviets' nuclear tests, with a wistful and non-existent recollection of the Wild West days of an imagined simpler time. Greybeards are, naturally as all people do in their old age, inevitably a dour and pessimistic people so they tend to be conservative leaning and remember their past without critical thinking when not prompted. All people do this, inevitably, if they live long enough to be old.
The result is eschewing the Leviathan for something closer to the Hobbesean state of nature in our current world, but the greybeards have convinced themselves that all they need to do is work together as they did in the times of barn raising and such, ignoring that barn raising was something done by specific communities of like-minded settlers who often traveled across a harsh wilderness after explicitly pooling together their money and resources to do so. A modern version would be the Unification splinter group, Rod of Iron ministries, who are a bunch of religious folks who have banded together to weather the coming <insert political or demographic or what-have-you disaster> here and emerge as warlords or something from their fortified compounds. In the meantime they're trying to not get the ATF's attention.
They also ignore the fact that barn raisings existed in a time when the United States government was so weak its legal territory able to be invaded by the Mexican Army and random banditos from across the border semi-constantly in the West, that the Native Americans were a fearful and terrifying force of military strength well into the 1880's, and that the carpetbaggers of the Antebellum South were often met with incredulous and vengeful folk of the Klan or such. These were variously fixed in the 20th century, more or less, but greybeards, in their dour rejection of the modern era, also tend to ignore the real problems of the past and its issues resonate today still.
Suffice to say whatever calls itself "libertarianism" is partly a uniquely American belief system that simply wouldn't exist in a world without people like the Dillinger gang or Al Capone, or the Manifest Destiny or Westward expansion, or the imagined threat of nuclear war or the Soviet Union, but it is neither unique nor especially universal to the human condition. It is also simply old men being mad at the world and wishing for a better time of their youth, as in the case of most libertarians of the 1940's and '50's, or the youths of their fathers or grandfathers as recited to them by the fireplace.
Communism would require a beaten-down form of Man that will follow orders no matter what, has no personal ambition or pride, is satisfied no matter how low his station or crappy his quality of life.
So man under the Leviathan? They exist, there are examples of them today. Communism, like "libertarianism", "capitalism", and "<insert religion here>" is simply a byword used for talking about something that is almost certainly not in the same zip code, much less the same neighborhood, much less a monolithic structure.
When I speak of libertarianism, I speak specifically of the belief system unique to the Western United States and its cattle baron elites, the faux-nostalgia of the Wild West and the rancher mentality, combined with the modern trappings of law and order and civilization that taxation and the Federal government provide, while eschewing the latter as unnecessary complexity or ineffectual and effete (or corrupt) burden on the supposed simple life of the rancher baron that waits if he simply grabs life by the horns and declares his own tax levies.
It's a false promise, but one that has a distinctly American allure, because it taps into the national myths of ruggedness, self-reliance, and independence that have been part and parcel of the post-Appalachian expansion since Thomas Jefferson's Presidency.
I don't know about you but it's hardly self-reliance when you require forty or fifty men of over a dozen trades to build a simple animal barn. They might be able to build a barn, of course, but such picturesque views of human cooperation for a common goal have more in common with revolutionary mindsets the world over than anything distinctly American, really. You may wish to look at some revolutionary era art of the early Soviet period or something, or not, given you ideological leanings, but they bear more than a passing resemblance to the American revolutionary mindset.
Libertarianism would require a form of man that is self-sufficient, yet entirely capable of co-operation, and ethical and uncorruptable.
Two of your four requirements are normative and morally loaded, therefore they can be discounted, unless you want to qualify what you mean by "uncorruptible" or "ethical", of course. There are ethical systems where backstabbing and cronyism are seen as virtues of a strong leader, you know. If you want to know more I recommend you watch The Godfather.
The other two are opposed ends of a spectrum that don't make a lot sense, either within themselves (why would someone who is self sufficient wish to cooperate? you only cooperate to get something, at the end of the day) or within the greater context of the other two (why is this cooperation done for the sake of ethical concern and not simply a ploy to take advantage of an overly trusting adversary you intend to stab in the back?).
I'd imagine if you had a human who was fully self-sufficient she would just end up being Horatio from Endless Space and multiply through parthenogenesis to conquer the world, because humans are an XY mammal, and XY chromosomes produce female offspring through that method of reproduction, but it is a fully self-sufficient system beyond childhood. Just eat enough to clone yourself half a dozen times and start a farm, but that's the only example my mind conjures up.
Such a self-sufficient clonal organism would either end up rapidly individuating due to minute genetic/environmental differences or be basically indistinguishable. Hard to say.
Without developing social technologies to restrain the state of nature, though, humans tend to resemble shrimp in general disposition.
Since humans are on the whole neither of these, reality falls in between.
A true but ultimately vapid statement, because it says nothing more than the obvious. Reality is always between ideological extremes which is why people invented politics: to discuss specific policy choices and matters of facts and concerns of public good in order to better redistribute resources. Again, without specification of actual issues or policy concerns, something most "libertarians" are loathe to do outside of broad strokes, it's meaningless to discuss such things so. This is, in a word, "ideological thinking" and a form of cognitive miserliness.
As I said, libertarianism typically never raises specific arguments, just a vague feeling of wrongness, because it's a bunch of old men from 1950 or so who were disillusioned with US society because they are old men. American society is still sufficiently open that you can debate specific regulatory policies at local and state or federal levels without being thrown in jail for wrongthink, so it's hardly what libertarians seem to imagine it to be.
When it does raise specific arguments, it tends to be nationalist or xenophobic in nature, such as Nick Land, although most libertarian Americans are hesitant to call themselves "hyper racists" or live in Shanghai (a sign of the Leviathan's reach, truly). That could be a result of libertarian's historic roots, or simply a sign of the times, though. Since libertarianism's most common strand is a rejection of the modern, rejection of internationalism and globalization and a return to a xenophobic nationalism is perfectly in line with it, but it would not be a specific facet of it. In a more nationalist world I imagine libertarians would be internationalist financiers or something. They certainly were in the time of Ricardo and Smith, at least.
But one of these extremes is better than the other.
I would argue otherwise, namely that "communism" and "libertarianism" hold no real weight in a discussion about Silicon Valley billionaires' failed attempts at seasteading and how Lloyd's would not exist in a world without government intervention to back the bona fides of the royal family's pet insurance firm, but you can believe what you want about the matter and I won't really do anything to stop you besides ask you to point specifically to regulatory issues you have with the U.S. Code or something, but that would be asking a lot. I don't have particular issues with the U.S. Code or anything beyond "why bad rich man not get jail", so in that sense we may be able to find common ground, but I'm just an alcoholic Leninist guy on the Internet.
I think it's pretty obvious there's no real incentive for anyone to be honest in a society where the only thing you have to go by is someone's word, which is why the Leviathan was invented in the first place: to obviate the need for the the intervention of the King and his closest confidants in the running of the country and enforce that the King's agents are everywhere, that the corporation of peasants, police, and powerful tax men that makes up the Leviathan can enforce its will upon you through sheer cultural inundation without any physical force of arms being applied to the local village that refuses to pay taxes (because it simply will not refuse), and that people can trust people at their word who have adopted a culture of honesty over a culture of duplicity.
Of course duplicity reigns in societies without practical methods of ensuring integrity. Why would I not lie to you if I can get away with it? One of the most practical methods is to build a Leviathan: I won't lie to you because there is a real threat of punishment, or better yet, because I have been inundated with a moral and political belief system since childhood that enforces honesty and integrity over duplicity and nefariousness.
Libertarianism is an attempt to critique the Leviathan in the same way that a Sovereign Citizen or Reichsbuerger attempts to critique speeding laws by going on a long winded spiel in court about the Boston Tea Party or Weimar Republic Constitution. But at the end of the day this is about you doing 45 in a residential zone.
You can critique the merits of speeding in a residential zone but it would be hard to overturn society's view that high speed travel in a short road where children might be playing (or old men getting the mail might be walking) is bad. But it's much easier to pass if you simply create a seed of cynical doubt in a society by never stating anything specific, just insinuating that bad things are happening without evidence beyond what people discover on the top headlines of the "bad things happening paper". One is going to get you more votes among the American public, which is what it all ultimately boils down to in the present.
But again I digress.
tl;dr There are plenty of real criticisms with the modern world, but people who genuinely believe in libertarianism aren't super keen on them because it's really boring to talk about.
People who actually think about the issues while steeped in libertarian schools of thought, but don't have any specific knowledge about the subject matter (national laws or tax codes or what-have-you) tend to turn into NRx "hyper racist" types like Nick Land or Curtis Yarvin, i.e. folks who at least have identified a specific problem (globalization) but will have about as much success changing it as die-hard Marxists did bringing about the proletarian revolution for similar reasons (people don't want to do things that will make them poorer).
Meanwhile people with actual knowledge about the subject matters in question tend to view it (dissatisfaction with the real world political outcomes versus your own internal ideal) as an inevitable background with which you have to work inside or around rather than try to change altogether, and will ask you to cite specific laws and why they are bad and charge you a lot of money to do it. Mostly because they have more important things to do, like figure out how to talk Joe out of his 3rd DUI conviction when they can't find the actual driver of the car because Joe was so out of it he woke up halfway in the trunk after the car wreck, or something like that.
I guess the reason it's popular nowadays is because people in America get all their news about things that don't affect them, like who the president is or how many random and unrelated killings happened in Chicago last weekend, but they can't even name their own city councilmen or where their mayor lives or even how their local city government works. So, things that affect you in real life, rather than things you read on the Internet news sites and whatnot that everyone watches at work on break, have been inordinately hit in a negative manner by the digital revolution.
But that's probably more due to the fact that news outlets are people too and there are only so many hours and so much money to be made in a local newsroom. Very easy for a rich carpetbagger to come in and buy your newsroom to produce articles on who you should vote for next election cycle because it works in the nearby eight counties so it will work there too. Not exactly unique to the Internet (or even television).