This is, as I said, a general problem with political fiction (I had the same problem with The Cassini Division)-- probably because the people who are inclined to write political fiction tend to do so because they're True Believers of one sort or another, and they write it in a manner which makes their political faith look good and their enemies look bad (Is Jack Ryan Pope yet?). It's a problem with political theory as well-- I agree that a Libertarian society would be a wonderful place to live if real people behaved the way they need to to make a Libertarian society function, but I also think that a socialist state would be a nice place to live if real people behaved the way they need to to make a socialist state function. If men were angels, or angels governed men, life would be wonderful.

But men aren't angels, any more than cows are spheres, and, indeed, the most interesting parts of humanity are precisely those parts where we deviate from the spherical, frictionless, angelic ideal. I agree that the principles of Libertarianism are good ones, but the interesting question is what happens when those ideals collide with the real world. Politics is a fascinating subject precisely because it deals with that collision, with the question of how you preserve as much of your high ideals as possible while accounting for deviations from ideal behavior. How does Communism accomodate greed, or Libertarianism irrationality? Political theory, dealing as it does with idealized cases, is not that interesting to me, nor is political fiction about characters who are spherical and frictionless in just the right ways to make the fictional society work.

Real politics is all about compromise (a point often missed in the deification of America's Founding Fathers-- yes, they had high ideals, and grand theories about the role of government, but they were also realists, and willing to compromise to make a Republic that worked, however non-ideal its structure may have been), but compromise in Heinlein's fictional politics is too often compromise in the "Let's put aside our petty differences and all agree that Socrates is a genius" sense. While this is a form of compromise much beloved of the current occupant of the White House, it's bad politics, and bad fiction. This book, like most of Heinlein's other work (and Ayn Rand's, for that matter) compounds the annoyance of the bad politics with the smug superiority that's Libertarianism's most annoying trait-- the heroes of the revolution are noble and selfless and good, their enemies are bulies and charlatans and incompetents.

Anticipating a common objection, I know that the society in the book doesn't end up holding to the "rational anarchist" ideal set up early on-- throw-away lines at the start and end of the book indicate that they've fallen into the swamp of government and taxation (oh, the horror). I can't help thinking, though, that the more interesting story, politically, is glossed over in those few lines. (Also, I don't buy the Lunar society before the Revolution...)