Tim Worstall, Bryan Caplan and Tyler Cowen have been wondering why people hate libertarians.

I'm not sure many do: if you want to see hate, just look at the abuse dished out to even the most innocuous feminists. But let's grant the supposition. I'd add four reasons to those offered by Tyler, Bryan and Tim.

The first lies in what Bryan called the libertarian penumbra. Some libertarians associate themselves with people who have very rum views: IQ-obsessives, climate change deniers and borderline racists. Libertarianism thus gets discredited by association. As a Marxist, I know this feeling.

Secondly, some libertarians look like shills for the rich. They don't try hard enough to point out that many inequalities actually emerge from state intervention.

Thirdly, some self-described libertarians are simple hypocrites. The most egregious examples of this are Ukippers who are hostile to the nanny-state and yet want to deny people the right to work where they want. But the hypocrisy isn't confined to them. Some so-called libertarians (rightly) attacked New Labour for creating hundreds of new criminal offences but haven't been so noisy when the Tories continued this trend. Sure, true libertarians aren't guilty of this - but there are enough pseudo-libertarians to give the idea a bad name.

But there's something else. Opponents of libertarianism sometimes fail to see that freedom leads not to anarchy and chaos but to spontaneous order. Demands for immigration control, for example, are often demands for government control in itself, because people don't see how uncontrolled processes can be welfare-enhancing. They fail to see how, in John Kay's words, our goals can sometimes be better achieved obliquely.

This habit is rooted in some common cognitive biases: the illusion of knowledge and overconfidence causes us to exaggerate the benefits of state control whilst the salience heuristic leads us to see the benefits of restricting freedom more than the costs. As Hayek said:

When we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. (Law Legislation and Liberty Vol I, p57.)

But here's the problem. Sometimes, a benign spontaneous order doesn't occur. Emergent processes can sometimes produce inequality and exploitation: much depends upon initial conditions and institutional frameworks. If libertarians' critics overstate this, they themselves understate it.

All this might sound rather abstract, but it's not. It bears directly upon the question of how public services should be organized. Opponents of the part-privatization of the NHS see it as leading to profiteering, supporters as to more efficient service. Underpinning this disagreement are different attitues towards spontaneous order. Which is correct, though, depends on empirical matters such as market design, bidding processes and contract specifications. But then, when facts get ignored, tempers get heated.