Now there is a lot of concern about police abuses, and some progressives are warning us that Cop Block and other such sites are libertarian fronts. They have a point. Cop Block plugs libertarian books, and perhaps our best one-man open source police review board, Radley Balko, is an open and notorious libertarian.
Which is not terribly surprising. Just as Communists, motivated by a desire to minimize suffering, noticed that segregation was awful, so a group defined by distrust of the State is going to notice that some of the guys given guns and clubs to enforce the law are going to misuse them.
I am a recovering libertarian. I know there is such a thing as economic force, as well as the nasty old State, I know we can't solve the coordination problem and the tragedy of the commons without a State. But I also remember the good parts of libertarianism--the wariness of police power and the distrust of the war on some drugs and the war on some Asians--and I'm willing to make common cause with the "extreme right wing" libertarians about them.
