In today’s Washington Post, former Bush speechwriter and policy adviser Michael Gerson sees the online role-playing game Second Life as a “large-scale experiment in libertarianism.” And since the world of Second Life apparently features its share of weirdness — violent, sexual, and otherwise — Gerson concludes that the libertarian concept of spontaneous order is a fantasy. Because of what he saw in a fantasy game. 

I know, I can’t follow the logic either, but remember that Gerson runs with a crowd that thinks “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” so he may not be all that clear on the distinction between what’s real and what’s make-believe.  

I don’t know much about Second Life, and what I hear about it makes me feel crotchety and unhip beyond my years. But however bizarre the game is, it seems that nobody actually gets hurt. In that respect at least, it’s superior to the large-scale experiment in “compassionate conservatism” that Gerson helped conduct for the last several years. That experiment has left us with an exploding federal budget, a metastasizing welfare state, and a vast humanitarian disaster in Iraq. It’s little wonder some people prefer virtual reality to the real thing.