Competition is stiff for the title of “stupidest argument against libertarianism,” but Michael Gerson may just have grabbed the brass ring. In The Washington Post, he writes:

But Second Life is more consequential than its moral failures. It is, in fact, a large-scale experiment in libertarianism. Its residents can do and be anything they wish.

How interesting. How else is Second Life like a libertarian society, Michael?

There are no binding forms of community, no responsibilities that aren’t freely chosen and no lasting consequences of human actions. In Second Life, there is no human nature at all, just human choices.

Did I miss a meeting? I seem to recall that libertarians were heartless brutes precisely because we expected people to face the consequences of their actions. People in online games also like to do things like shoot, pummel, or disembowl each other when there are “no consequences” for those actions. And generally, we regard this as perfectly OK precisely because there are no consequences. As for the claim that “there is no human nature” in Second Life, I frankly have no idea what Gerson imagines he means by this. I’d have thought his column was making a point about what happens when a society consists of nothing but human nature.

Still, a couple additional points. First, whether or not Michael Gerson likes it, if Second Life really is an “experiment in libertarianism,” maybe it’s just as significant that hundreds of thousands of people are paying to participate. Second, a better analogy might be, not one online community, but the Internet as a whole. And here, in fact, we do see an enormous amount of the spontaneous order Gerson professes not to find on SL. We find reputation effects and the power of site owners to exclude unwanted visitors performing many of the same functions we expect government rules to serve in the physical world. So, really, this argument fails in just about every possible way.