Thiel is not a libertarian, he is a feudalist. He wants to be lord of the manor and governments have a habit of getting in his way when he wants to make you his serf.

in some ways big 'L' libertarians are petty feudalists.

Yep. After several years of pointing out that feudalism was the natural outcome of his political sympathies, I finally convinced a friend that he wasn't a libertarian a while back.

I say this as someone who is very sympathetic in principle to a lot of libertarian thought. In practice, that's just not how humans work.

There is a way to salvage the term (and preserve its distinctive meaning from "liberal" etc). Most libertarians already speak of minimal government, as opposed to no government - ancaps are a vocal but small minority. So the question simply becomes, what exactly constitutes "minimal". And that is very much a subjective assessment.

I posit that there is a broader category, which is distinct from what people usually mean when they speak of or self-identify as libertarians, that adheres to the same principle. Basically, the idea is that government is always, by its very nature ("all power comes from the barrel of a gun"), an intrusion on some liberties - and so any extension of government requires a solid justification and thorough vetting. However, some freedoms and liberties have to be intruded upon in order to maintain others. Again, most bona fide libertarians would agree - say, the freedom to violently coerce other people is clearly not the one that you want.

But once you get into this mode of thinking, and ditch ideological stereotypes, there are many other limitations that appear perfectly reasonable. More importantly, you realize that whether some limitation is justifiable or not depends on your [inherently subjective] assessment of what is good and what isn't - but that is orthogonal to the minimal government principle. In other words, there are many different kinds of libertarians, who all agree on that basic principle, but disagree on what outcome they desire (and hence on how much government is "just enough").

So you can be a libertarian, but still consider public welfare programs to be a good way to spend money, because the alternative would be worse, in terms of overall individual liberties.

> So you can be a libertarian, but still consider public welfare programs to be a good way to spend money, because the alternative would be worse, in terms of overall individual liberties.

True, but all too often, I've heard otherwise reasonable people seriously argue for the repeal of the 13th Amendment (the abolishment of slavery) in the name of Freedom(tm) because, "You can't truly be free unless you can sell yourself into slavery."

Of course, we have seen this society, and even today can easily extrapolate what would be its effect due to proliferation of legal usury in the form of payday loans. But hey, we've got a Dark Enlightenment to usher in, for FREEDOM(tm).

In best Orwellian doublespeak he is selling his police state tools as a way to preserve liberty: “I defined the problem as needing to reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.”

A classic case of opportunism wrapped in the "someone had to do it" excuse.

> one of the most insidious powers that the U.S. government has over its people.

This greatly oversells what Palantir does for the federal government.

Never underestimate incentive bias.

I worry about the same things he does and I also lean towards his approach (although I'm not as involved as he is). Think of it like this, if you're worried a certain technological development will change life in ways you do not think are beneficial, isn't the best defense against that to develop that technology yourself before others do, so you not only know exactly what it effectively is capable of as well as being able to shape the way it develops from a technological, legal and narrative perspective?