This is the Orthodox libertarian response to COVID-19. “I pay for my health insurance. Everybody else should pay for their health insurance. Someone else’s being sick can’t affect me in any way. Why should their sickness be my problem?” That argument becomes ridiculous during a pandemic, which is why Biden’s stimulus program has a 70% approval rate. A prominent Libertarian (I think it was Lew Rockwell) said that pandemics were actually caused by too much government. He said that if all sidewalks and roads were private owned, then the private owners could ban plague-infested people from traveling, and then everyone would either get vaccines or die. He actually said this when there was a real possibility of the deadly Ebola virus escaping.

As you pointed out, you have to be totally clueless about privilege in order to accept Libertarianism. I was once told by a Libertarian that although the differences in opportunities were real, they weren’t that important. Everyone has choices, it’s just that everybody has slightly different choices. Right. So the Smiths get to choose whether to be doctors or lawyers, and the Valdezes get to choose whether to pick lettuce or grapes. No inequity there.

I have read a lot of Ayn Rand and other Libertarian writers, and I was ambivalently sympathetic to Libertarianism for many years. Like every philosophical position, it has some truth to it, and some errors. But we are living in a time when the errors of Libertarianism are especially dangerous. This is because it requires us to do the exact opposite of what needs to be done to combat the growing market failures causing Income Inequity and global warming.

I gave this lecture on Libertarianism at Sonoma State a few years ago. It argues that most forms of Libertarianism are logically incoherent, despite the fact that so many Libertarians keep praising logic. I taught logic for 20 years, and most Libertarians have no idea what the word actually means. There are however forms of “Left Libertarianism” which correct these incoherencies, and which I think could be useful in designing social programs for the future.

https://www.academia.edu/5393180/A_Critique_of_Libertarianism