The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto on libertarians:

It seems to us Bernstein has an incomplete picture of libertarians. He probably thinks of them as cute little nerds who have basically sound (if somewhat extreme) ideas about economics along with various eccentric enthusiasms: private toll roads, pornography, drugs, head-freezing. This is the libertarian world of Reason magazine. (Disclosure: This columnist was an intern for Reason nearly two decades ago.)

But libertarianism is an ideology. Ideology can lead to fanaticism, and fanaticism to hatred.

Gee. What a reasoned, well-supported attack on libertarian thought. Devastating, James.

Taranto goes on to bash Anti-War.com and the Independent Institute, as if (agree with them or not) either were the be-all, end-all of libertarianism. This is SOP for the smug, elite right. I suppose it’s easier for them marginalize and caricature libertarianism than it is to actually engage us in debate.

I’ll only address the drug war (though I’ve pointed out in the past that while Taranto and company are still chasing fantasies overseas, it’s those crazy-ass libertarians who called the Iraq war correctly, pretty much from the beginning). It’s of course Taranto and his fellow drug warriors who’ve exhibited “eccentric enthusiasm.” We libertarians simply point out that after hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of imprisoned nonviolent offenders, decades of violent crime directly resulting from the illicit drug trade, and inestimable damage to the Constitution, nothing has changed. Drugs are still widely available. So perhaps it’s time the government just left people the hell alone.

Doesn’t seem all that crazy to me.

In fact “insanity,” as Albert Einstein once defined it, “is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.”

(Via Jim Henley.)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 9:15 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.