For similar reasons, libertarianism is a circular argument. Libertarians speak of "property" and "contract," as if these legal ideas somehow had meaning in the absence of law. Law is what matures mere possession or occupancy into "property". It's what allows your right to your dwelling to persist even when you leave it. These rights must be recognized by the consensus of local society to exist. That consensus may be expressed more or less formally, but it necessarily includes definitions and limits. In fact, property has always been the creation of a lawmaker, and therefore some sort of a government. Much valuable wealth in civilized countries takes the form of such things as publicly traded stock and "intellectual property." Law called all of these things into being. The same holds true of contracts. The lawmaker gets to choose which agreements are enforceable by law and which are not.

The aforementioned "Non-Aggression Principle" isn't quite as clear as many libertarians make it sound. Libertarians support force to hold up a system of property, a system which required force to be created (ask any indigenous person in a European-colonised country) and requires force to be maintained. Take fraud, for example. If a man is found to have lied to his health insurance company about a pre-existing condition, the police (in libertarian parlance, "Men with Guns&quot will use force against him. Libertarians call this "retaliatory force" and frame the acts by the sick man as initiating force which makes for a nice game of mental gymnastics.[17] Note that you may not use the same rationalizations to frame racism, or sexism, or union-smashing as force, (and their solutions as retaliatory force) since those are things libertarians are apparently okay with.

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No matter how many whine about it, governmental regulation often corrects problems that an unregulated free market could not. One example is health care regulations, such as enforcing credentialing for physicians so they are not some nut in a lab coat pretending, making sure pharmaceuticals have the ingredients they say they do, and work, and are relatively safe, and ERs being required to treat people regardless of their ability to pay. Another is related to public health: how would consumers be able to determine which food vendors would be safe (and therefore, want to exchange capital with) in a festival experiencing bacterial contamination?[18] And why should businesses take on the risk of preventing epidemics?[19] Many libertarians don't have a coherent answer for what to do to correct these problems in a free market.

What, exactly, is the goal? The selling point of libertarianism is its offer of expanded individual liberties to do as you please. The offer is illusory if it in fact means that your freedom of action is hindered at every turn by bosses, owners, and other toll collectors. They all can demand money, or that you contract away your libertarian freedoms, for the privilege of stepping on their lawns. These new gatekeepers of "liberty" can still do stuff like fire you for testing positive for now-legal drugs. If maximizing individual freedom is what you're after, or even securing maximal protection for enumerated freedoms, you should realize that your boss is a bigger threat to your freedom of speech, or freedom to practice your religious faith, than the local police or your local government, don't you? Libertarianism is too selective in the freedoms it chooses to protect, and the people it protects you from.