I will often describe my politics as libertarian, but that’s just to avoid having to talk about it with people who can’t think beyond the Left-Right paradigm. For the most part, I hate libertarians. The good ones are mostly nuts. The bad one, which are most of them, suffer from the same defect as Progressives. They just refuse to accept the human condition and instead imagine a world in which humans act in ways no one has ever witnessed.

Libertarians, like liberals, tend to confine their thinking to the hot house where conditions are optimal. Unlike liberals who get to experiment on real people, libertarians have to confine themselves to thought experiments. That probably explains the obsession with legalizing weed. If you spend all of your time imagining a utopian society, drugs are a good way to break up the monotony, or at least get you pas the reality of the present.

Any political philosophy that does not start with the understanding that some portion of society is irrational, no matter how you define rational, is not getting very far. Well, it’s not going to work if you try to implement it. That’s why utopian schemes always end in a blood bath. It sounds good on paper, but the people never cooperate, so the solution is to get better people, which means getting rid of the bad people.

This is obvious when you go to the grocery store. My habit is to go on Sunday morning to pick up my provisions for the week. At 8:00 AM on Sunday the crowd is tiny and it is a quick in and out for me. Today I was a little late, showing up at 9:00 AM. We were expecting a snow storm. It is Christmastime. The parking lot was 80% full and the store was packed with people. Specifically it was packed with mothers toting children.

There were old people staggering around for no earthly reason. Then there were the families, who decide a trip to the store is a good time to share their family experience with the world. What should have been a 30 minute trip to the store took over an hour. It would have been longer, but I did not need anything from the deli so I avoided that line. I also got a little lucky when I hit the register lanes. A fresh one opened as I arrived.

Now, what does this have to to do with libertarianism? Libertarians start from the premise that, left to their own devices, people will self-organize. Yet, left to their own devices, people cannot figure out it is a bad idea to bring your kids to the grocery store. They cannot figure out that a little snow is not the end of civilization, requiring them to load up with groceries. They cannot navigate the self-checkout in an orderly fashion.

There’s no way in hell these people last a week in a world without rules and custodians to make sure they follow the rules. If they found themselves in such a world, their singular focus would be on finding people willing to setup a custodial state and make sure they are safe and protected. They may not be a majority, but they are a large enough minority to make libertarianism impossible. It is at odds with nature and the human condition.