Libertarianism would be a perfect political ideology but for one flaw: it just doesn’t work. The problem is that it's not based on reality. It is a construct advanced in works of philosophy and fiction, e.g., Utopia, Thomas Moore (1516); Island, Aldous Huxley (1962). It simply fails to take human nature into account. In W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence, a roman à clef based loosely on the life of the artist Paul Gauguin, the narrator asks the principal character Charles Strickland about his views on Kant’s categorical imperative: "Act so that every one of your actions is capable of being made into a universal rule." To which Strickland replies, "I never heard it before, but it's rotten nonsense."