It is Sooooo Hard to be a Libertarian

Published in The New Yorker 4/19/2010 © David Sipress.

Libertarians are a funny bunch. Sometimes they are useful for their fanaticism, sometimes they are politically dangerous in their fanaticism, sometimes they are simply hypocrites. I've noted these tendencies here before.

Libertarians are not the only hypocrites, of course. But they seem adept at acting upon that particular vice. The classic example is Robert Nozick invoking the rent control laws in Cambridge to prevent a landlord from raising his rent. The story is more complicated - as in many law suits there is no "good guy" - but it is delicious.

Now there is this reminder of how Ayn Rand*, libertarian propagandist par excellence, having denied research establishing a tobacco-cancer link smoked like a fiend (actually like a non-autonomous addict, but that is another matter!) and turned to social security and medicare when she, predictably enough, got cancer late in life. The blatant moochery of it all! I'll bet she patronized the U.S. Postal Service too.

In any case, I came across the cartoon I've lifted here a while ago and have been waiting for the appropriate point to incorporate it into a post. This seems like a good time. I'm sure this is the local volunteer fire department anyway.
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* I do recognize the difference between Nozick who was a formidable thinker and Rand who was an intellectual charlatan. Unfortunately, they share the libertarian propensity to hypocrisy.

Photography Not Terrorism: Thank the Lord for Libertarians

The NY Civil Liberties Union is pressing a legal challenge to U.S. Government regulations that led to the arrest of photographer Antonio Musumeci outside Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse in Manhattan. You can find reports here and here. You can find street level images of the Courthouse and its surroundings by simply using Google maps; this is a point I've made here before. Musumeci is a libertarian (as is the fellow he was photographing on the day they were arrested) accounting, no doubt, for his willingness to seek legal redress.