What if Tiger lived in Libertarian Land?

Tiger Woods (AP Photo/Rob Carr)

The Tiger Woods auto accident story serves as an excellent example of the difference between today's nosy, intrusive, celebrity-worshipping, gossip-obsessed society and tomorrow's libertarian society.

The story, for those who don't hang on every syllable of every report of every titillating pop icon incident, is that pro golf's greatest rock star drove his car into a fire hydrant, hit a tree, ripped up a neighbor's yard and caused himself bodily injury at two o'clock of a Friday morning.

Everyone wants to know the story behind the story.

Some people, such as Tim Sullivan, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune Sunday night, think we are "entitled to an explanation."

His basis for this entitlement is, "Once a 911 call gets placed, and the police respond, and the taxpayers are footing the bill, famous people pretty much forfeit the “mind your own business” defense.

This is an argument that has legs in a society where government at every level has forcibly inserted its rights-taking rules-making privacy-breaking tax-raking tentacles into virtually every aspect of human existence; everybody is everybody else's business.

So how would the Tiger tale play out in Libertarian Land?

Everyone would still want to know the story behind the story. And many a fame-following reporter would attempt to get it.

But nobody would be entitled to it.

For starters the accident happened on private property, since Tiger almost certainly would be living in a private community.

The streets and the fire hydrant would be the property of the private community. How he was driving (drunk, sober, distracted?) would be an issue for he and his private community to resolve.

He, or his insurance, would be required to pay for repairing or replacing the hydrant and compensating the neighbor for damages to yard and tree.

As for Tiger's bodily injuries, it's his body, not society's, and therefore the business only of himself and his medical providers.

The police who responded would not be today's "law enforcement" robots, blindly imposing whatever rules, legal or not, Constitutional or not, that the political classes concocted. Remember when police lived by the "protect and serve" motto? Libertaria's "police" would be privately financed, chartered to serve their employers, the citizens, by protecting their rights.

And the 911 call? And the accident/medical responders? Privately funded also, likely through community membership dues or insurance companies or nationwide NGOs created for the specific purpose of providing such services to everyone, everywhere, all the time.

After all, when people are not having nearly half their incomes stolen through every form and fashion of taxes, fees, fines, penalties, levies, duties, tariffs and inflation it's not that difficult for caring people and public institutions to pool their resources to create the kinds of services that are heavy on efficacy rather than top-heavy with bureaucrats.

Unfortunately, all of this is incomprehensible to people who can't, or doggedly won't, think outside the coercive government box. Forcing people to obey is so much easier for the groupthink socialist mentality than thinking creatively to solve issues without violating people's freedoms.

But in a libertarian world, while everybody may care about everybody else, they're not "entitled" to poke their proboscis into everybody else's affairs.