In his daily screed, OpinionJournal’s “Best of the Web Today,” neocon reactionary James Taranto (emphasis on “rant”) attacks the Mises Institute and libertarianism. Writes the ranter:

“As regular readers of this column know, we especially enjoy making fun of libertarians. Of course, some people who call themselves “libertarians” are just normal folks who don’t fit the “conservative” or “liberal” label because they’re on one side on economic issues and the other on social ones. But a true libertarian ideologue is marvelously kooky: relentlessly logical in the service of utter insanity, sort of a cross between Mr. Spock and John Hinckley.”

“Consider this essay by Tim Kern, on the Web site of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, about the Transportation Security Administration. He begins with the assumption that the TSA’s security measures cost every air traveler an hour on average (emphasis his):”

Now, here is a guy who insists on calling the conflagration in Iraq “the liberation of Iraq.” In other words, he insists using the same language that communists used when they had overtaken a country, i.e. the “liberation” of China in 1949. (I used to hear this a good bit in my liberal arts classes when I was in college 35 years ago.)

While I do enjoy watching TaRANTo give the global warming crowd a hard time — and his “Zero-Tolerance Watch” is pretty good — for the most part, the guy is an authoritarian, someone who defends many of the excesses of the state, such as the Bush Administration’s policies on monitoring citizen telephone calls (without any due process). I doubt seriously that TaRANTo has any idea at all of what we mean by individual rights.

So, while I fall into TaRANTo’s “kook” category, I can say that I would rather be a kook than someone who worships the authoritarian state.