Cerebrotonic Cato May Extol the Ancient Disciplines

When last we encountered Roger "B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies & Director, Center for Constitutional Studies" Pilon of the CATO institute, he was perserverating over the Congrefs' failure to exempt an entire industry from criminal and civil liability for all past and future law-breaking, because terrorism. The CATO Institute: one more reason to renounce libertarianism, i.e. the company you keep. Of course, CATO has long been home to a great gaggle of Beltway hacks with a few classically liberal iconoclasts hiding in the corners, and perhaps it's not quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip up, and yet Pilon is CATO's ranking man on Constitutional questions, though he does not appear to have ever encountered the Constitution.

Anyway, here is Pilon dampening his underoos over the President's failure to fight at the landside terminal, fight in the security lines, fight on the light-rail to airside, fight in the concourse, fight on the jetway, etc. etc. up unto Never Surrender! All this because some guy set his pants on fire! So, to summarize. The Totally Coherent Libertarian Position™ is that society should not only disassemble and destroy all its systems of public provision because FICA represents an unforgiveably grievous violation of individual liberty, but also dismantle the system of adversarial justice in its entirety because a presumed guilty party should not be allowed an attorney based on the miniscule possibility that some African is gonna make his panties go ka-boom. How does that reconcile? On the one hand, libertarianism advocates a free society in which there is necessarily economic inequality but considers it an unforgiveable sin to use tax revenue to give the inevitable lower orders some semblance of human comfort and safety; on the other hand, it advocates a society where the slightest risk of physical harm to air travelers is cause for the suspension of the Constitutional Order and the declaration of martial law. Yuh. Okay. That's really a robust and well-conceived philosophy of liberty you've got there.

It's unfair to tarnish all self-professed libertarians with Roger Pilon. Certainly there are plenty of nineteen-year-old gutter-punk "anarchists" with whom I would not wish to be associated, at least, uh, intellectually, although admittedly, assuming a preparatory bath, I do find something . . . tempting in the whippet-thin, gristly, and dredlocked. And yet . . . the embarrassingly rebellious adolescents who constitute the rump end of anarchy are just kids, whereas the most embarrassingly stupid, inconsistent, popmpous, and authoritarian clowns that libertarian thought has produced seem inevitably to end up running the think tanks. Well, institutions produce idiocy; it's a natural law. And yet, since to some degree libertarianism promotes itself as a strategy for governing a representative democracy, as, in other words, a viable (if as-yet unpopular) political philosophy for overseeing the institutions of the republic, doesn't it stand to reason that one consider the extant institutions of libertarianism, how they are peopled, and who is running the show?