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On March 31, The New Yorker published an item in its humor vertical, Shouts & Murmurs, titled "L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department." At least 31,000 people liked it.

I can laugh along with parodies of libertarian ideology. But shouldn't a reductio ad absurdum start with a belief that the target of the satire actually holds?Tom O'Donnellproceeds as if libertarians object to the state enforcing property rightsthat is to say, one of the very few state actions that virtually all libertarians find legitimate!If America'ssheriffs were all summarily replaced by Libertarian Partyofficials selected at random, I'm sure some ridiculous things would happen. Just not any of the particular things that were described.

That isn't to say that there weren't parts of the article that made me laugh.It got me thinking too.If the non-libertarian approach to policing* was the target instead, would you need hyperbole or reductio ad absurdum? Or could you just write down what actually happens under the officials elected by non-libertarians?It is, of course, hard to make it funny when all the horrific examples are true.

* * *

I was just finishing up my shift by having sex with a prostitute when I got a call about an opportunity for overtime. A no-knock raid was going down across town.

"You're trying to have your salary spike this year to game the pension system, right?" my buddy told me. "Well, we're raiding a house where an informant says there's marijuana, and it's going to be awesomewe've got a $283,ooo military-grade armored SWAT truckandthe kind offlash grenades that literally scared that one guy to death."

"Don't start without me," I told him. "I just have to stop by this pawn shop. It's run by some friends of mine from ATF. They paid this mentally disabled teenager $150 dollars to get a neck tattoo of a giant squid smoking a joint. Those guys are hilarious."

But when I got to the shop the guys weren't in any mood to joke aroundsomething about having lost their gunsagain. That meant I had extra time to get to the raid. En route, I headed through a black and Latino neighborhood, and who did I see on the street? A teenage male who made what I would describe as a furtive movement.

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N.L.P.D.: Non-Libertarian Police Department