In a long and sometimes incorrect assessment of libertarianism, a blogger ( Zompist.com) makes two very thoughtful and accurate points:

“The more important point, however, is that the capitalist is the über-villain for communists, and a glorious hero for libertarians; that property is “theft” for the communists, and a “natural right” for libertarians. These dovetail a little too closely for coincidence. It’s natural enough, when a basic element of society is attacked as an evil, for its defenders to counter-attack by elevating it into a principle.

As we should have learned from the history of communism and fascism, however, contradiction is no guarantee of truth; it can lead one into an opposite error instead. And many who rejected communism nonetheless remained zealots. People who leave one ideological extreme usually end up at the other, either quickly (David Horowitz) or slowly (Mario Vargas Llosa). If you’re the sort of person who likes absolutes, you want them even if all your other convictions change.”

(Lila:  It’s interesting to me that both Rothbard and Hoppe began on the left, seeking meaning in the structural totalities of Marxism.  That explains the feeling one gets when reading both that they retain some of the world-view of the ideology they first embraced).

And this:

“It’s hard to read libertarians without concluding that they’ve never been out of the country– perhaps never out of the suburbs. They don’t know what Latin American rule by the elite looks like; they don’t know any way of running an industrial economy but that of the US; they don’t know what an actually oppressive government looks like; they’ve never experienced a depression; they’ve never lived in a slum or experienced racial discrimination. At the same time, they have a very American sense of entitlement: a gut feeling that they’ve earned the prosperity they were born into, that they owe the community nothing, that they deserve to have whatever they want, that no one should stand in their way.

In short, they’re spoiled, and they’ve evolved a philosophy that they should be spoiled.”