The Ultimate Putdown for Libertarian Ideologues

This is the relevant quote that you need to hit libertarians with:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

John Rogers is the author of the above devastating putdown. And here's his own carefully crafted profile of himself from his blog:

John Rogers started doing stand-up in 1988, got his Physics degree in 1990, began writing television in 1995, writing movies in 1999, writing comics in 2005 and writing for RPG's in 2007. He plainly needs to focus.

Sounds like a truly interesting character. Oh... and I bet he sleeps with a copy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings under his pillow every night!

My problem with libertarians is that they live in fantasy world.

• Ayn Rand argued for self sufficiency and spewed poisonous verbiage about social programs, but when she became sick with cancer, she maximized her use of every social program available to her to cover her costs. But she carefully kept this "character flaw" hidden from her followers.


• Friedrich von Hayek was induced to come back to the US and join a right wing think tank where his job would be to rant about FDR's entitlement progams and to do everything possible to destroy that "socialist" program. But before he would agree to come back he had to make sure that he would qualify for Medicare. Of course he never advertised this inconsistency between the social philsophy he espoused and his own personal standards of looking after No. 1 at the expense of those he could fleece.

These "individualists" are only too eager to convince you to take on the heroic pose and rage against the world, but they were cowards who took advantage of every penny of entitlement money they could get. They were utter hypocrites.

What really, really drives me crazy is that they espouse a "social philosophy" which is a pure fantasy. They deny any social relationships and declare that the only "glue" holding a society together are freely entered "contracts". But how many families negotiate a contract with their newborn? Nobody lives in the fantasy world of absolute independent self-made "individualist" that these crazies espouse.