Bio
I am a Texan living in Chicago. In other words...a stranger in a strange land.
I'm a prosecutor, so my day-to-day is pretty well encapsulated in this line from the movie Magnolia: "Sometimes people need a little help. Sometimes people need to be forgiven. And sometimes they need to go to jail. And that's a very tricky thing on my part...making that call."
UPDATE: I'm back in Texas now. Me and everybody else.
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Re: What is the Libertarian Response to This Quotation?
You know a thread has gotten off the rails when the posts start to look like optical illusions.
My final word: I think Chesterton, in his usual brusque and incisive way, has gotten to the core of the Conservative/Libertarian divide here: How does the individual right to live life as you see fit interact with the concurrent individual right to join together with others and make rules governing our communities?
In my experience, libertarians tend to answer this question with normative language (e.g., laws are fine, but you ought not pass certain kinds of laws -- intrusive laws, "moral" laws, arbitrary laws, etc.).
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to rely more on procedural safeguards -- i.e. federalism, or the principle of subsidiarity. People will pass intrusive laws (and sometimes we favor intrusive laws), but that's fine as long as we intrude on the lives of as few people as possible and allow dissidents to try to change the law or to leave.
There is, of course, a ton of overlap between those two ideas. But that's my explanation of how we're different, and how we're the same. For what it's worth.