Strategic resource storage and strategic industry development was a big part of making me start questioning libertarianism. I then learned a bit about common power dynamics and met a lot of people who felt trapped in bad situations getting screwed around with, and the break was made for me.
I'm still sympathetic to the cause, and think libertarians are really fantastic people who believe immensely in human potential. I also know the counterarguments -- at what cost?, etc, etc -- but I'm glad the USA built industry that wouldn't necessarily be economical on the timeframes that standard capital investments generally look for.
There's two kinds of Libertarians - the ones who actually think all government interference is bad, and those who think that governments simply have a tendency to go too far, so fighting government interference will probably push them back to a more reasonable position. The first kind are louder.
I can't help think that we started without governments and ended up with them. In fact it seems like governments beat every other known alternative power structure.
In other words even if we removed all nation states and started from scratch we would most likely end up with some sort of government.
The reasons for this are manifold, but especially the democratic state have some inherent perceptual integrity since it allows for "resetting".
But of course as always these are not objective metrics at all. But the problem with libertarians isn't their view but rather the idea it itself.
We started in many ways in a libertarian world. Evolution took us to the states and technology will maybe take us through the state and to something completely different but carried on from the current system.
Some extreme Libertarians think governments have an extremely limited place - protecting personel and property rights, for example. Others are outright anarchists.
Though there's a number of different kinds of anarchists, who really don't agree with each other - the "Anarchism" page on wikipedia is both "part of a series on Libertarianism", and "part of a series on Libertarian Socialism".
So when I said "there's two types", I was lying a bit.
In my experience far too many avowed libertarians are simply dilettantes. They do not fully appreciate the seriousness of the courses of action they advocate. To the degree that in many cases the ultimate outcome of their ideas would be despotism, not libertarian utopia, and are ultimately just as clueless and dangerous as folks advocating marxism. Which, I think, substantially undermines the whole movement.
I'm still sympathetic to the cause, and think libertarians are really fantastic people who believe immensely in human potential. I also know the counterarguments -- at what cost?, etc, etc -- but I'm glad the USA built industry that wouldn't necessarily be economical on the timeframes that standard capital investments generally look for.