Sheldon Richman on The Straw Men Opponents of Libertarians Build Instead of Critiquing Libertarian Ideas

Maybe,
writes Sheldon Richman, he’s being unreasonable, but he thinks it
behooves a critic to understand what he’s criticizing. Tackling
straw men is much easier than dealing with challenging arguments,
but that’s no excuse for the shoddy work we find in John Edward
Terrell’s New York Times post, “Evolution and the American Myth of
the Individual.” In his confused attempt to criticize libertarians
(and Tea Party folks, whom I’ll ignore here), Terrell gets one
thing right when he says, “The thought that it is both rational and
natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own
preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous
fabrication”. Indeed it is. Unfortunately for Terrell’s case,
writes Richman, it’s his own treacherous fabrication.

View this article.