Whiners -- Left and Libertarian

I have come to the conclusion that the well-spring of whining is a cosseted existence. Thus the American Left (in particular, the rich-to-ultra-rich-Left) -- which reaps the economic benefits of liberty under the rule of law -- has the luxury of denigrating capitalism, celebrating terrorism, and pushing a degenerate agenda that threatens the social cohesion which is necessary to ordered liberty.

Over on the "libertarian" side there are many (too numerous to link) who seem to equate almost any preventive effort to detect and defeat terrorists as a threat to liberty -- even as a form of "enslavement," for example. And yet . . . there has been no "chilling" of free speech (far from it), American citizens (except a couple of known enemy combatants) have not been held incommunicado, and Americans are not being rounded up and made to show their "papers."

In short, life proceeds apace, except in the fevered imaginations of libertarian purists and their brethren of the Left. Their ideal world has no room in it for the dirty, day-to-day business of preserving liberty. Liberty is something that simply must exist effortlessly, experience to the contrary. Nothing less than a world of perfect liberty will do -- in the perfect stateless world of libertarian purists, and in the perfect (and self-contradictory) state-designed world of Leftists.

What rich Leftists and libertarian purists have in common is their detachment from reality. They take for granted the degree of liberty that they enjoy because of the rule of law. Rich Leftists don't have to live in the real world. When they choose to go there they are only slumming (with bodyguards), and they can leave when they wish. Libertarian purists may encounter the real world, but its orderliness deludes them. They object to the state when it inconveniences or offends them, but they fail to remark that the state (not its absence) is what enables most of them to survive the real world.

In sum, the worldviews of rich Leftists and libertarian purists are delusions made possible by the ordered liberty in which they live. They are like rebellious adolescents who accept the largesse bestowed on them by the very parents whom they disdain, despise, and even reject.

Related:

AnalPhilosopher: Richard A. Posner on Utopianism
Moi: The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism, A Dissonant Vision