“We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing. At the same time we must ensure that the state is punished when it acts against the common good. Human welfare …is guaranteed
only by mutual scrutiny and regulation…..Unless taxpayers’ money and public services are available to repair the destruction it causes, libertarianism destroys people’s savings, wrecks their lives and trashes their environment. It is the belief system of the free-rider, who is perpetually subsidized by responsible citizens. As biologists we know what this means. Self-serving as governments might be, the true social parasites are those who demand their dissolution.
(George Monbiot in The Guardian Weekly, November 2nd, 2007 )
Epicureanism cannot be a variant of libertarianism. Epicureanism at its best is benign. People who link it with libertarianism are simply seeking a respectable cloak for an unseemly selfishness.
It is scary how many people consider themselves libertarians. It would be interesting to know what proportion of them are practicing Christians, for the ability of human beings to live with glaring contradictions of opinion within the one mind is quite astonishing. If you know anything about the teachings of Jesus ( what he actually said as opposed to the spin the church puts on them) you couldn’t possibly be either a Christian or an Epicurean. What else you could be I will keep to myself.
I read somewhere that Ayn Rand was influenced by Epicureanism. This is perhaps because of his early philosophical materialism, which also inspired Karl Marx to write his dissertation on his notion of the atom.
But it’s hard to link her philosophical (so-called “objectivist”) doctrine, which is presented in its entirely in her opus ‘The Virtue of Selfishness’ with Epicureanism. Rand was narcissistic, and so where all the heroes in her novels. Epicurus said the most important ingredient for happiness are friendships and that a true friend will even die for his friend. Granted, autarchy is a notion that exists in both philosophies, but there simply is no parallel.