Is Michael Gerson really using an online fantasy as an argument against libertarianism? Why yes he is.

There’s no such thing as spontaneous order, and the game Second Life proves it. There are “no lasting consequences to human actions” in the game, Gerson writes, which is part of what supposedly makes it a libertarian utopia. But if there are no consequences then there are no feedback loops, either, so it’s not surprising that there would be no emergent order.