This has been the Republican mantra ever since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.
It's what Trump tried to do to our public health agencies when he first came into office and shut down Obama's pandemic response operations in both the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security. As a result, almost a million Americans have died of Covid and millions more are disabled for life.
When George W. Bush put a Republican-donor horse show judge in charge of FEMA's disaster response, his libertarian attitude pretty much guaranteed thousands of people would die in Hurricane Katrina: "Heckuva job, Brownie."
The Bush administration also defunded food safety enforcement and the predictable result was an increase in food-borne sickness and death.
At the behest of fossil-fuel billionaire libertarians, Republicans have fought any regulation of the fossil fuel industry for 40 years; the result is climate wilding that's devastating our country from California to Texas to the Midwest to Miami Beach.
Mitch McConnell and Republicans in the US House and Senate argue that giving a $2 trillion tax cut to billionaires was an appropriate thing for government to do (even though it jacked up the national debt), but Build Back Better to help out average Americans is, they say, a crime against our republic.
Americans, increasingly, are figuring out the damage this failed 40-year-long experiment has done to our nation, which is why people are leaving the Republican Party in droves.
There is, however, one group that is still quite enamored of libertarianism: rightwing billionaires and the corporations that made them rich. And quite a few of them have spent the past decades shoveling cash into the Republican Party, with no sign of a letup to this day.
They set up think tanks and fund hundreds of college professors nationwide to preach their libertarian ideology, and often dominate internet searches because of their thousands of organizations and "news" sites.
They create phony grassroots organizations and get deluded middle-class white people to show up with signs like, "Keep Your Damn Government Hands Off My Medicare!"
They set up organizations nationwide and in every state to bring Republican legislators together with lobbyists to craft libertarian "corporate friendly" legislation that consistently enriches the top 1% and screws average Americans.
They proclaim the wonders of "small government" and "fiscal responsibility," code words for gutting the protective functions traditionally performed by government and replacing them with "charity" and corporate sponsorships.
And Republican politicians live in fear today of doing anything that might cause government to actually help the American people, because those same libertarian billionaires and corporations who fund their campaigns are more than happy to destroy them politically when they stray.
Despite all the obvious disasters and widespread public opposition, they're still intent on America being their grand experiment to prove that at leastone country can operate along libertarian lines.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s when Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand were first pitching this ideology (then called neoliberalism and objectivism) as a way to bring "freedom" to America, they were broadly ridiculed and ignored.
But the libertarian foundations and billionaires got into the act in the 1970s, along with the rightwing media organizations they were then building, putting Ronald Reagan into office and shaping his policies, sending America into a libertarian slide.
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