Klein's "The People's Romance"

Daniel Klein has a very interesting paper describing one of the fundamental issues which libertarians have to address. In his insightful manner, he examines the notions of "common purpose" and "shared experience" which statists use to justify their attempts to coordinate everyone's thoughts and behavior into a single, unified collective whole. In The People's Romance: Why People Love Government (As Much as They Do), he presents the idea of collective behavior as a collective good within an historical context, and also seeks to explain why it occurs and why it's such a difficult concept for libertarians to overcome.

He argues that this sense of mutuality expressed in a "coordination of sentiment" is in contradistinction to the spontaneous order essential to a libertarian society, as well as the notions of private property, and even self-ownership. I think that he has come up with an excellent explanatory tool in our understandings of what issues libertarian need to address.

Tip of the hat to Douglas Wagoner on Atlantis II for bringing it to my attention.

Just a thought.
Just Ken
CLASSical Liberalism