Someone on a Facebook discussion recently told me that Gary North of the von Mises institute, former campaign worker for Ron Paul, former writer for Ron Paul's newsletter, and regular contributer to Lew Rockwell, is not representative of Libertarianism or Austrian economics...he's an anarchist.

Huh.

So...why did he write this?

http://www.reformed.org/social/index.html?mainframe=http://www.reformed.org/social/let_2_paul_hill.html

The guy may be a stark barking loony...but he's no anarchist.

Basically, the guy I was talking to pulled the "no good scottsman" bit on me.  Not buyin' it.  Gary North's Austrian economics and Libertarian cred is solid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_North_(Christian_Reconstructionist)

 You don't get to back away from it and dismiss him as an anarchist just because he's also insane.

Just as an aside, if you follow that first link and read North's long screed about why the guy should not have killed the abortion doctor, do this thought experiment:  Think about what would happen if we somehow magically managed to address all the reasons that people choose abortion.  Think about if education and government assistance, and community support and in-utero surgery and genetic medicine made it possible for there to never be another abortion in our country...

In Gary North's morality, even if there was never another abortion in the U.S. EVER...we would still be under God's judgement for keeping it as a legal option.  However, if we made it illegal and instituted the death penalty for it, and then just neglected people who might need to have options and they sought out illegal ones, we wouldn't even have to work real hard to enforce the law, and we'd have done enough to clear ourselves of his wrath.