In a comment on this, one Dr Troy Camplin says:
I would go so far as to claim that socialism goes completely against human nature, or physis (to use the Greek term). Humans are social animals, it's true, but we are social mammals, which means we have fluid, highly intricate hierarchies. Social insects, on the other hand, have precisely what socialists want: a flat hierarchy, with everyone as worker bees, and one (usually them) as the queen bee.
What is socialist about this? Isn't this the sort of structure that is the current fashion with Management Consultants - or have I missed a trend somewhere? Anyway - I thought the ASI line was that socialism was inherently bureaucratic and overly hierarchical? So who made the mistake of letting this guy comment?
It's strange isn't it though, how all these rabid anti-socialists can define socialism as it suits them, but tend to get a bit snarky if it happens the other way?
To a degree they have a point, since libertarianism probably isn't a consistent ideology, more a view of the world - or more particularly of the role of authority and power in the world. There certainly seem to be as many views and versions of it as there were Trotskyist splinter groups on the left in the 1960s!. Against that the views expressed at Samizdata for instance seem to hold pretty close to a consistent line - although the pamphlets of the Libertarian Alliance show a much greater variety of opinion. ( The latest one comes from Kevin Carson whose site (Mutualist.org) to which I have already linked.
What does it all add up to? How do I know - just thinking aloud!