There’s become something of a cottage industry recently of blogs listing “questions libertarians can’t answer” or “knockdown arguments” against libertarianism (see Salon, The New York Times, Psychology Today, Bloomberg, et al). Having read an impressive fraction of these articles, I’ve concluded that most of their authors do not have a clue what libertarianism actually is. The only way you can honestly believe there are no answers to these questions is if you’ve never spoken to a nonbeliever before. Nonbelievers in political power are now facing the same kind of defiant ignorance. I conclude this not because I want to dismiss all critics of libertarianism–to the contrary, I want to engage with them–but the kind of lazy “gotcha” questions preferred by liberal bloggers tend to be logically malformed, based on false premises, or have answers that are readily available to anyone who bothered to research them (or even just Google it). Moreover, such questions do not seem to be asked in good faith. They assume libertarians are fools, who have not bothered to think about the most basic philosophical or practical implications of their ideas (“Oh. My. God. You’re right! Who would build the roads?! Why didn’t we think of that before?”), or that we’re knaves, who know our philosophy is fundamentally flawed but have deliberately chosen to ignore it.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 21:44:08 +0000
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