In Kevin Smith’s Clerks, the lead characters discuss the morality of the assault of the unfinished second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. One character, arguing that independent contractors were unjustly killed in the attack, equates the Rebel Alliance to “left-wing militants.” But if the Anchorhead sequence is taken as canonical (there’s disagreement among fans on this point), it’s hard to cast the Alliance as a leftist movement in any conventional sense. The Rebellion, in fact, is a radically libertarian undertaking. Thirty years after Star Wars captured the world’s imagination, it’s past time that the Rebels’ fight for economic liberty was celebrated in those terms. ~John Tabin

Just so we’re all clear on this: it is good for libertarianism to be associated with the fictional violent attacks of insurgents against an empire (Tabin seems to be suggesting that the Galactic Empire invited these attacks), but it is bad for libertarianism to actually have a real presidential candidate espousing relatively mild criticisms of the neo-imperial policies of our own government.  In other words, libertarian principles are fine for fantasy universes, but undesirable in the real world.  I might even agree with this assessment of the value of libertarianism in certain cases, but it is an awfully strange thing for an avowed libertarian to say.