Actually, most of the “more vocal libertarians” would probably disagree with your conclusion about their opinion regarding “community interests.” More accurately, community interests are nothing but the interests of a group of individuals in a community. That means that libertarians generally fail to see how community rights trump the rights of the individuals who make up the community. How does a group of people evolve more rights than each of the individuals?
If I suspect my neighbor is doing something in her home that I don’t approve of, do I have a right to go over there and stop her? If I get together with a few more of my like-minded neighbors (who become a community) do our greater numbers suddenly invoke us with the new “right” to stop her from doing whatever it was I disapproved of?
How many people does it take to make up a community that has an interest in the practices of the individuals among us? At what number are we allowed to initiate force?
That’s the real difference between the nanny-staters of the right and left, and the libertarians. Both neo-conservatives and lefties believe in some type of mob-rule. That is to say, they both agree that there is a number where a group of individuals becomes a community that gains new rights—rights that exist for “the community” but not for the inividual. Libertarians generally don’t accept that groups have any rights that aren’t derived from the individuals in the group.
They hate to admit it, but the differences between the nanny-staters of the right and left are only a question of which derived community rights trump which inherent individual rights.
For one thing, because communities tend to both pre-date and outlive individuals. For another, because anything I do affects the people who live around me, and there are more of them than there are of me.
Simple example: a man alone is perfectly free to dump his sewage in the river, safe in the knowledge that he affects nobody else. Now put a group of people along the river ... the untrammeled right to dump sewage in the river is properly denied to all -- even the guy who lives furthest down the stream. Community interests trump individual interests in this case.
That’s the real difference between the nanny-staters of the right and left, and the libertarians. Both neo-conservatives and lefties believe in some type of mob-rule.
This is another example of the difference between conservatives and libertarians. It's almost inevitable that libertarians resort to name-calling as a substitute for rational argument, and they usually do so early on.
Libertarians generally don’t accept that groups have any rights that aren’t derived from the individuals in the group.
Which is another way of saying, "there's no such thing as 'community interest.'" Thanks for clearing that up.