The analogy of eggs and omelets is a convenient one, but it doesn’t hold well. An omelet cannot exist without breaking eggs, but social order and cohesion, the aim of collectivist ideology, can exist while preserving human freedom. That’s part of the allure of the free market, no?

There is a better analogy I think: take the individual to be the cell, and the society to be an entire organism, such as a human. Each cell acts independently (they can survive just fine outside of the body) and shares in its DNA a common moral code. Their actions on a large scale are coordinated by the brain, but this does not cause them to become cancerous or to violate their individual codes of morality. This arrangement allows the moral code to perpetuate itself in a complex environment.

Ailments may be caused by foreign entities attempting to subvert the whole, or by individual cells pursuing a perverse moral code that causes them to abandon the collective and become an organism unto themselves.

Its true that we can’t obey two masters who give opposing orders. That’s why we each have the choice of which master we obey. Our base impulses, our higher moral values, and our peers are all competing masters, each with a unique punishment to dole out for disobedience, each with a reward to give for obedience. We are most happy whenever our masters are in agreement on what must be done.

Why is this important? The body will fight to protect the health of the individuals that compose it. The rights which libertarians recognize are protected not by blind faith in the virtue of one’s fellows, but by the enforcement of those rights by a third party, whose use of force is justified by the crimes it prevents and ends, and whose virtue is assured by the collective moral code acting as a check on its power.

It has often been argued by anarchists that government cannot be controlled by the will of the society as a whole in any meaningful way. If that is true, then the third party we rely upon to enforce our rights will always turn against its purpose. However, libertarians are not anarchists. We believe that governments can be controlled by the action of the citizenry, and that our rights can be thus protected by the justified use of force, and not abused by it.

This is a compromise, alienating those with narrower views of human freedom as well as those with broader views. The will of the society as a whole trumps the individual not because the individual is meant to be persecuted, but because proportional representation demands that each individual have an equal voice.

In other words, we must accept a consensus on ethics. Perhaps it isn’t fair that we be forced act in accordance with that consensus, but the alternative of allowing each person to act with absolute impunity is untenable. Liberty should not be sacrificed at the alter of freedom.

Actually, in his analogy, the state would be the body, and individuals acting away from the state would be cancerous…our bodies exist cohesively as one being merely because the beings that make it up cannot defect without something causing it to defect other than its own volition. That does not hold up as true in the human to human realm. Our volition allow us to choose whether or not to go with a plan. Thus, a superstructure ordering humans around is doomed to fail. Humans act on their own accord.