I voted FF and stand by that, but I guess one pet peeve I have is that Vosem never explains how eliminating the social safety net will help poor people or why tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the lower classes. It's impossible to have a reasoned debate about that if we are only arguing from our own predispositions without any attempt at persuasion.
Sure: the argument is that the state, or any centralized entity, is a very poor manager of resources and very poor at creating innovations, because it is not subject to competition from any other entity, and we should instead want resources decentralized among many very wealthy people who can pursue independent agendas, because they will be likelier to compete in ways that result in real public gain. Most improvements to living standards under industrialism have not come from activism, but have instead come from technological improvements, resulting in cheaper food and more widely available medication. Tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the lower classes because the state will have fewer resources to prevent wealthy people from making investments which are much likelier to benefit the poor than state activity. I think human history very strongly bears this out.
Social safety nets are bad because they inevitably grow in size and take resources away from places where they could actually benefit people; public services in Europe have to ration healthcare much more than they do in the US, and the strain of supporting much greater public spending results in a population which is meaningfully less wealthy than it is in the US, with people subsisting on 2/3 of the income. I think this is disastrous and it is a scandal that the British population is not in the streets rioting and tearing the NHS down with their bare hands.
I appreciate your detailed answer and I wanted to square in on this. You seem to place a lot of faith in technological advancements. I'm curious how far your libertarian philosophy goes with regard to transhumanism. What do you think of Zoltan Istvan and his goal of empowering free enterprise in the name of obtaining immortality? Does your faith in technology extend to what some might consider fanaticism with respect to transhumanism?
