Commentary from the liberterrain…
Some North Texas libertarians may have noticed this (intentionally provocative?) headline posted on the Nolan Chart website:
Why Libertarianism Can Never Succeed
Unfortunately, the premise of the teaser line below the headline is so far off-target that few knowledgeable libertarians will have any incentive to actually read the article itself:
As long as there are wolves in the forest, the sheep need a sheep dog
This simplistic metaphor is easily translated by novice libertarians: the forest is the world, the wolves are the bad people, the sheep are the good people, and the sheepdog is government.
For the truly developmentally disadvantaged, this means that libertarianism - the idea that people should be free to do as they choose as long as they don't harm others through initiation of force, intimidation or fraud - can never succeed because the bad people will harm the good people unless the good people are protected by selfless, benevolent, indispensable government.
What the author, Bill Schmalfeldt, seems not to know is that throughout the history of humanity a people's own government has done infinitely more harm to them than all those people from whom they're supposedly being protected.
In Schmalfeldt's metaphorical words, the sheepdogs kill and eat more of the sheep than the wolves do.
Sources vary, but in the twentieth century alone Herr Hitler's government sheepdogs killed around 12 million of its own citizens, Joe Stalin's government murdered some 23 million civilians, and the government of Chairman Mao massacred 78 million or so of its country's population.
That's just barely the beginning of the genocide list. And It doesn't even include the monsterously huge number of people killed by governments when they force their own citizens into uniforms and turn them into raw meat on the world's battlefields.
In short, it should be obvious that it's always a bad idea to turn over your protection to people more powerful than you are.
Now that we know all this, it's important to rewrite Schmalfeldt's headline and teaser:
Libertarianism Can Succeed
…because…
As long as there are wolves in the forest and sheepdogs in the fields, the sheep who don't want to be sheep need Glock, Colt, Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Winchester, Savage, and maybe even Texas' very own Bond Arms double-barreled derringer, made just down the road in Granbury.
A well-armed sheep is neither a wolf nor a sheepdog.
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