God and Man

Well, we've lost another Rand acolyte. I can't say it upsets me.

The obit starts by ascribing to Boaz, "reasonable, radical libertarianism", an oxymoron if ever there were one.

"You learn the essence of libertarianism in kindergarten," he wrote in "Libertarianism: A Primer," a 1997 book that was updated and rereleased in 2015 as "The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom." "Don't hit other people, don't take their stuff, and keep your promises."

Not too surprsingly, he actually favored the ultra version of Social Darwinism of those who're convinced that they are the uber menschen, and deserve to keep whatever they can steal and can waste The Commons without penalty.

Summing up his holistic view of individual liberty, Mr. Boaz told The Times in 1984, "I don't think it's any of the government's business to protect people from themselves, whether it's seatbelts, cyclamates or marijuana."

If so, then the law should be: if you get hurt by using/abusing any of these, or if your use of these hurts others, then in the former case you get only the remediation you can pay for from you own pocket, and in the latter case you pay to fix those you've hurt. If you can't you go directly to jail. In sum: there are externalities for most every act that humans do, and the libertarian should absolutely support forcing the individual to pay for their externalities. They don't.

Most of the bad things people do are bad largely because such behaviors impose costs on innocent others. Too bad libertarians don't care about those costs.