In a recent piece that got lots of replay from the online liberal commentariat, Michael Lind (“The Question Libertarians Just Can’t Answer,” Salon, June 4) posed what he considered an unanswerable question to libertarians: “Why are there no libertarian countries?… If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it?”

If anything, Lind’s argument proves too much. He’d be answered by an equally profound silence if he challenged advocates of social and economic justice to name one country without economic exploitation by a privileged class. Every country in the world has an interventionist state. Every country in the world has class exploitation. Every country in history with a state, since states first arose, has also had classes and economic exploitation. The correlation is one hundred percent.

This fact is key to understanding why Lind’s framing of the question is so naive. Lind writes as though the adoption of this or that form of polity by “countries” was simply a matter of peoples collectively deciding on the best way of life for everyone involved. “We” tried that other thing and it didn’t work, then “we” tried this and it worked better.

But that’s not how it happens. Since their first appearance, states have without exception been the mechanism through which a ruling class — kings, priests, landlords, capitalists, state bureaucrats — extracts a surplus from the rest of society. ...