Sheldon Richman on The Straw Men Opponents of Libertarians Build Instead of Critiquing Libertarian Ideas
Maybe, writes Sheldon Richman, he's being unreasonable, but he thinks it behooves a critic to understand what he's criticizing. Tackling straw men is much easier than dealing with challenging arguments, but that's no excuse for the shoddy work we find in John Edward Terrell's New York Times post, "Evolution and the American Myth of the Individual." In his confused attempt to criticize libertarians (and Tea Party folks, whom I'll ignore here), Terrell gets one thing right when he says, "The thought that it is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous fabrication". Indeed it is. Unfortunately for Terrell's case, writes Richman, it's his own treacherous fabrication.