And when you're googling, please be sure to read this: http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html It's one of the best quick

And when you're googling, please be sure to read this: http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html It's one of the best quick critiques of libertarianism I've seen. None of these ideas are new, they've been hashed out for years, and libertarianism has never really caught on because most people have an intuitive sense that mere property rights and enforcement of contracts are vastly insufficient to make a society anyone wants to live in--a sense that is reinforced whenever they think more deeply about what the arrangement of that world would mean for their lives. (For example, take away tools for society-building such as public goods, e.g. roads, buses, libraries, health care, and replace it all with private equivalents, because now your main tool for running society is transactions. You're asking people to imagine a world in which they have to pay for everything, constantly, item by item. Like Joe Chip and his nickel-a-use door in that Phil Dick novel. People get what that would mean for their lives and they don't want that. Libertarianism gets more use as a joke in satire than in real world policy.)