[fastpat]

Anyone reading the exchange between myself and usmellgas2, gasboy, will recognize this sort of challenge in the following post to lewrockwell.blog this very day.

I'm a Moonbat
Posted by Anthony Gregory at 01:48 PM

Kevin at Liberty Papers doesn't like my article on radical and moderate libertarianism.

After calling for a fair tax, he asks, "If we got rid of police and courts, what’s to stop me and my gang of 50 from killing the author, raping his wife, enslaving his children, and stealing his property?"

Well, what's to stop that from happening now -- aside from my not having a wife or children? Certainly not the government police and courts. If he and 50 people were determined to kill someone, they most probably could. The question is, is this more likely, and are the victims of crime better off, in a government legal system or a free market one? I believe in the market, not socialism, and so I would think the market solution would work much better. At any rate, it's funny that any libertarians think government is the way to prevent massive gang violence and thuggery, when the most massive gangs of violent thugs — the ones that have been most known to kill, rape, enslave and steal everything from people – are governments.

What's to stop the government from killing or falsly imprisoning you? The libertarian law-enforcement socialist answer is, bizarrely, the government.

Author, Thomas Woods adds:

Better a Moonbat than a Bore

Anthony, I know nothing about "Kevin" or that site, but his casual "Nevermind the whole Free Rider Problem" comment is absurd coming from a supposedly libertarian site. There is a gigantic literature within libertarianism on the bogus nature of the "free rider" problem, but this fellow either knows nothing about it or doesn't even think it's worth mentioning. Instead, he just raises this totally conventional, statist bogeyman as if the very mention of "free riding" refuted our position at once. Such a critique of your article is all the vindication you need, if you ask me.

If anyone needs the libertarian literature mentioned by Dr. Woods, be sure to ask.