The trouble with libertarians is that they claim to an aversion to collective actions, but would not actual want to live in a state that is not organized in a collectivist fashion.

Simply put, your statement is false.

Libertarians are opposed to collectivism, to command and control economies, wholesale wealth redistribution, and to coercing individual choices that directly* harm, if anyone, only the person making the choice.

We are not anarchists, and endorse some collective action to secure all the rights we enjoys as individuals. Which is to say, we pool our resources to police against homicide to vouchsafe the right not to be murdered, a right with which we are all vested. We are not all vested, however, with a right to be "protected" from making a poor choice, or a choice different from one you would make, about what drugs to take. And so that is not an individual right you or I can, morally, act in concern to secure.

*What constitutes direct harm is itself a lengthy debate, and I avoid it here since this is already rather OT vis-a-vis Glenn's post.

Paul, I am not a "social contract" libertarian, and many if not most of us are not. I'm a Hayekian, through and through, disagreeing hims seriously on really only one major issue. Hope you had fun battling my non-devotion to Locke's social contract theory.

And Paul, I have an inalienable right -- or if you prefer, a profound liberty interest -- in deciding what goes into my own goddam body, unless it would make me directly dangerous to others, such as the overuse of antibiotics can.

What do you say when the doctor tells you there is a public health interest involved [in my avoiding addiction] and your failure to acknowledge it means you are neither informed nor competent to make the decision?

Your whole post exemplifies why any lover of liberty simply has to be scared shitless of Democratic/progressive attempts to "fix" health care. You are already making yourself a stakeholder in the most intimate decisions a person can make, such as what drugs they wish to take. The public purse is also affected by unprotected sex, and unplanned pregnancy. Failure to exercise. Fast food. Alcohol. Cigarettes. "Unnecessary" driving.

The more the State involves itself in the financial aspects of people's choices, the more it empowers people like you to exercise ever more control over even the most private decisions.

I think anal sex should be criminalized, as you surely must also believe. That activity does add to the costs of medically treating the gay community. And once the next authoritarian movement including social conservatives is in power, you can bet that will be an arrow in their anti-gay quiver if we by then have a federal, single-payer health care system.

To claim that libertarians aren't "anarchists" makes this point still clearer. Libertarians believe in collective states that coercively enforce rules that they value, but not in collective states that coercively enforce rules they do not value. But there is no philosophical or moral difference between a libertarian state that enforces "property rights" and a libertarian state that enforces "rights to health care."

We believe in protecting individual rights that inhere in everyone. Everyone has a right not to be murdered. Or to have their property stolen. Libertarians have no problem with public courts that enforce and uphold those rights for everyone, since everyone has them.

By contrast, no one (save for chidren in my care and the like) has a right to my not smoking dope. Or cigarettes, or consuming alcohol on my own property. Or taking Xanax even if my doctor thinks it unwise.

You would have a right to kill me if I were trying to kill you. And you can transfer that right to stop my killing you to the pool of everyone else with that right. But you have no right to storm my door to grab that Xanax out of my hand in indignation that I lack a permission slip from my doctor, and so that is not a "right" you morally may pool with others to enforce.

The goal is to balance the needs of the collective with individual freedom.

The "collective" is nothing more than a bunch of discrete individuals. Discrete individuals should not be "sin taxed" for their cigarettes (except possibly to the extent such taxes are levied and limited solely to defraying public medical costs in smokers).

If the discrete individuals in the collective have not the right, neither does the so-called collective.

Look, many of you here are shrieking derisively as if I and libertarians think "markets" are some sort of panacea, our version of Jesus. We don't think of them that way. They are very useful and conducive to human progress, and they are an aspect of liberty. But advocating markets is not to claim they create utopia, or that those participating in markets should be free to, say, dump toxins in our waterways. Or even that everything markets offer people are good -- the world would be a better place if alcohol did not exist.

Many of you hold quite the cartoon versions of libertarians.