What not to do when spreading libertarianism

The vast majority of the laws we have are unnecessary or even harmful. The USA has over 80'000 pages of federal regulation, and that arguably stifles small businesses, and is mostly not the reason why we are living in such a good time. The reason cars aren't randomly catching fire any more like they did in the early 20th century is because of the advancements in engineering, and those had little or nothing to do with the regulations pushed after the Ford Pinto. The reason why vaccines today don't cause anything like the Cutter Vaccine Incident in the 1950s is because today we are using RNA vaccines, which cannot cause an infection even in theory, rather than because of the government regulation. The regulation should arguably be massively reduced compared to the status quo. And the government, when trying to solve complicated societal problems, is mostly in the position of medieval physicians: politicians have some pre-scientific notions of how society works and are proposing cures based on that, and almost every cure they are proposing for complicated problems turns out to either be ineffective or counter-productive, for the same reason as medieval medicine was just as likely to harm its patients as it was to help them. The government should simply stop trying to solve complicated societal problems until social sciences advance to a lot higher point than they are now. As well, governments have in recent history killed way more people than murderers did. Hitler alone probably killed more people than all the individual murderers in the 20th century, and that's not counting all the other mass murderers in the 20th century.
What is the best way of spreading this message? I wish I knew the answer. But I have a lot of experience with it and I know what not to do:

1. Don't use laws against murder as examples of good laws.
   Ask yourself, what are we accomplishing by punishing murderers? Because that's what laws against murder do, they don't prevent murder, they punish it. The police only comes after a psychopath has already murdered somebody, and then they put that psychopath in a prison or a jail. A prison or a jail is not a place from he will return sane, it's a place from which he will return with even more psychological problems. It's obvious how laws against murder might be making things worse, and it's not at all obvious how they might be making things any better.
   Doesn't it seem way more probable to you that actually good laws are laws against the misuse of antibiotics in the egg industry, or the laws against open DNS servers?
   When trying to address the problem of violent crime, then we are in the position of medieval physicians, much more so than when we are trying to address the problem of superbacteria or open DNS servers.
2. Don't say or imply that superbacteria are a very temporary problem and that lab-grown animal products will soon solve that problem.
   Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's not remotely true. It's true that 80% of antibiotics are being used for farm animals, but that doesn't mean lab-grown animal products will soon solve that problem. Namely, most of those antibiotics are being used in the egg industry. It's hard to tell the exact percentage, but you need to take into account that 45% of all antibiotics we use today are ionophores, which are antibiotics effective in birds but not in mammals. We will not have lab-grown eggs any time soon. We struggle to even produce lab-grown muscle meat, and eggs are far more complicated than muscles. That's why I think dealing with superbacteria is a legitimate role of the government.
   We should absolutely be looking for technical solutions to such problems, to replace the political solutions. But what when the problem is serious (superbacteria is arguably a more serious problem than global warming), there is a political solution that works already, and the technological solution is very far away? In that case, government action is justified.
   This is entirely different from global warming. Global warming is a less serious problem than superbacteria, and, more importantly, it is not at all obvious what the government should do about it. Punish companies which sell cheap fossil fuels and thereby enable poor people access to energy to heat their homes? Does not sound like a good idea, does it? That is why global warming is not a good justification for government actions, while superbacteria is.
3. Don't say or imply that the Internet as we know it doesn't rely on sane government regulation to work.
   What do you think would happen if there was no law requiring the ISPs that, if they set up an unencrypted DNS server, they make it respond only to the requests from the IP addresses it is supposed to serve, rather than to all IP addresses? The answer seems obvious to me (as a computer engineer): some ISPs would set up their DNS servers improperly, and that would make it trivial for the hackers to paralyze the Internet with denial-of-service attacks. DNS servers sometimes respond with long responses to short queries, so all the hackers would need to do to paralyze the Internet in an anarchy is to spoof their IP address and make such short-but-long-response-causing DNS requests. That's called DNS reflection attack.
   And in case you think this is a very temporary problem, that Internet will soon naturally switch to DNS-over-HTTPS (and it is by no means obvious that would happen in a libertarian society -- ISPs are lobbying against DNS-over-HTTPS because DNS-over-HTTPS makes it harder for them to collect the user data for sale), I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but the Internet of the near future will be even more vulnerable to such attacks, rather than less. HTTP 3 and other QUIC-based services are not TCP-based, they are UDP-based, so there are no TCP handshakes inherent in them. They have their methods to prevent IP-spoofing attacks, but those take more processing time to implement. In an anarchy, what would force the web-hosting companies (Hostinger...) that, if they implement HTTP 3 or other QUIC-based services, they implement them properly (check whether the handshake was properly done, check that the session has not expired...)? If they are not implemented properly, the Internet is vulnerable to DNS-reflection-like attacks on steroids. I say "on steroids" because DNS can only respond with 4 UDP packets to one UDP packet, but HTTP 3 can respond with a lot longer responses.
   That's why I think making the Internet work with basic regulation is a legitimate role of the government.
4. Don't say or imply that COVID lockdowns are the main reason for the current mental health crisis.
   Sorry, that goes against the data about as much as the common saying that timely-implemented lockdowns saved millions of lives in Europe in 2020 goes against the data. Lockdowns and suicides are not correlated, just like non-pharmaceutical interventions aren't negatively correlated with COVID deaths. In fact, the country that had the highest rise in suicides in 2020, that is Japan, did not have a lockdown.
   Also, don't you think anti-vaxxers are destroying peoples' mental health? To me it seems undeniable that they do. They are saying stuff like "RNA vaccines are causing subclinical myocarditis in 3% of the people who take them (and, of course, COVID causes it even more often then). A significant percentage of population is going to die young because of heart attacks.". Even if you yourself do not believe the things they say, reading such things again and again is going to damage your mental health, don't you agree? If I wanted to cause suicides in as many people as possible, I couldn't think of a better strategy than doing what the anti-vaxxers are doing these days.
5. Don't say that methane is the most important greenhouse gas and that factory farming saved us from global warming.
   That's both an evil belief and a false belief. It's evil because it is assuming that torturing animals in factory farms is necessary or at least beneficial. And it is false because the statistics supposedly showing that our methane emissions reached their peak in the 1980s and have been decreasing ever since are simply wrong analyses of the data. They are implicitly assuming methane concentrations in the atmosphere are an IT₁-type system with respect to our methane emissions, which it is not. It is an exponential decay system. And this diagram:
   
   This diagram is almost exactly what we would expect if our methane emissions were constant. Here is what our methane emissions might have been, based on a computer simulation:
   
   No discernable trend, right? And this commonly-cited statistic that grass-fed cows emit around 3 times as much methane per a litre of milk as grain-fed cows is probably wildly wrong for two reasons:
   • Cows emit methane when digesting starch, not only when digesting cellulose. They emit less methane when digesting starch, but far from none.
   • Methanotrophic bacteria on pastures capture a fair amount of methane from grass-fed cows before it goes up into the atmosphere.
   You can read more about that problem on my blog-post about factory farming counter-apologetics.
6. Don't claim that the reason socialism doesn't work is the Economic Calculation Problem.
   Or, if you are going to claim that, make sure you have an explanation as to how it could work informatically. Economic Calculation Problem is essentially saying "In socialism, which algorithm might a government use to approximate the optimal prices of goods and services in a centralized manner?", the implication being "There cannot be such an algorithm.". But isn't that the equivalent of saying: "Optimal prices of goods and serivices can only be approximated by an algorithm which can be implemented in a multi-threaded way, but it cannot be implemented in a single-threaded way."? Doesn't that seem to contradict much of informatics?
7. Don't claim that democracy is the primary reason governments solve problems.
   That seems to be very disconnected from the reality. Governments appear to excell at solving problems a common person doesn't understand well, not the problems people understand and are willing to vote for them getting solved. For example, just about any government around the world has laws against the misuse of antibiotics in the egg industry, even though an average person has little or no understanding of the problem of superbacteria (Hardly anybody realizes most antibiotics are being used in the egg industry.). And just about every government around the world has laws against open DNS servers, even though an average person doesn't understand how the Internet works well enough to understand why those laws are necessary. As a side note, engineers seem to somehow realize that. Almost no engineer is afraid of the widespread deployment of HTTP 3 and other QUIC-based services because improperly implemented QUIC servers (which do not check whether the handshake has been done properly or whether the session has expired) can be used by hackers to implement DNS-reflection-like attacks on steroids. Every engineer seems to understand that governments will make sure that doesn't happen.

A good deal of those can be refuted with "Let's think about how good we are having it these days.". We are living in a world in which almost everybody eats eggs, but we are not having pandemics of superbacteria every now and then. Why? Sane government regulation, of course. We are living in a world with countless ISPs with their own DNS servers, yet the Internet isn't paralyzed by denial-of-service attacks made possible by some ISPs incorrectly setting up their DNS servers. Why? Sane government regulation, of course. As much as it is important to improve the world by removing nonsensible or even harmful laws, it is also important not to lose what we have.
And it's not at all obvious how libertarianism should be implemented. The fact is that we have tens of thousands of pages of regulation, the vast majority of them being unnecessary or downright harmful, but an average person isn't capable of telling which ones are necessary. Most of the people are operating under the assumption that the Hobbesian nonsense about "bellum omnium contra omnes", that government has some huge positive effect on violent crime, is true. That's why they think the laws against murder are necessary, even if a little bit of thinking makes it seem at least probable that they are unnecessary. On the other hand, an average person has little or no understanding of global problems such as superbacteria, to understand, for example, why laws against the misuse of antibiotics in the egg industry are necessary. And an average person doesn't understand how the Internet works well enough to understand why laws against open DNS servers and laws against improperly configured QUIC servers (not checking whether the handshake has been done properly or whether the session has expired) are necessary. Anarcho-capitalism provides some way of enforcing the laws against murder (with private security companies), but it doesn't appear to provide a way of enforcing what seem to me to actually be good laws, such as laws against the misuse of antibiotics in the egg industry. That's why anarcho-capitalism is a wrong answer. Congress voting on each legislation as to whether it is necessary? Well, that's slightly better than anarcho-capitalism, but I am not sure that would work as, like I've said, an average person has a wildly mistaken notion on which laws are necessary, and politicians cannot be expected to be a lot better. Arming the civilians so that the government is afraid to push nonsensible laws? Well, I suppose that works somewhat, but even that can turn incredibly counter-productive: if more people had been armed during the Four Pests Campaign, chances are, more birds would be killed, and the Great Chinese Famine would have thereby been even worse (because the invasion of locusts would be worse). The world is complicated, and any simplistic solution is unlikely to work.