The Trial of Tyrion Lannister and Bashing Libertarians
Spoilers from last night's episode of Game of Thrones, "The Laws of Gods and Men," follow.
In the episode, Tyrion Lannister is finally put on trial for allegedly poisoning his nephew King Joffrey, who died gruesomely toward the beginning of the season. Throughout the show, Tyrion, a dwarf, has pretty consistently been critical of Joffrey, the teenaged head of state in Westeros and a total psychopath. Game of Thrones is full of loathsome characters but Joffrey takes the pigeon pie. He's violently sadistic in his personal life and takes a similar approach to domestic policy, literally starving the poor while fuelling a rebellion his family is trying to quash. It's a good thing he's dead. People watching the show clapped when he died. The guests at the wedding he died at, of course, acted horrified. Joffrey's mother immediately blamed her brother Tyrion, a preposterous notion. We'll leave the Sansa Stark stuff alone because the point's about Tyrion.
As Tyrion's trial unfolded in last night's episode, the highly improbable idea that he poisoned Joffrey was nevertheless advanced by a series of more damaging witness testimony, half-truths mixed with white lies and outright falsehoods that all supported the idea that Tyrion killed Joffrey. When Tyrion's finally had enough of the betrayal of people he knew to know the truth about his innocence, he says what a lot of people watching at home were probably waiting for him to say: "I didn't kill the King, but I wish that I had."
The people in the world of Game of Thrones are, naturally, shocked that Tyrion would say such a thing. The lords of Westeros who matter have decided Tyrion would get the blame for Joffrey's death, because it worked out for all of them, and a sadistic psychopath was taken out of the picture. Tyrion made it easy to pin an obvious crime on him by being the only one to be candid about Joffrey's sociopathic behavior. And so it feels, sometimes, with the attacks on libertarianism, where good faith efforts to improve public policy outcomes by limiting the deleterious effects of government are skewered as some diabolical ploy to loot and pillage the people through corporatism, exactly that which libertarian policy solutions try to prevent.