And, back in the day, neither women nor blacks were rights-bearing persons. So everything was cool!

Libertarianism is like an el cheapo ghost costume: a white sheet thrown over the actual ideological infrastructure of power relations that determine the real political outcomes.

That is rather my point. They were and are, in fact, rights-bearing persons, and it was monstrous of the state not to recognize it. A reasonable person might hold the same about a 12-week-old fetus.

And really, Paul, you do not understand libertarianism at all if you think our principles are mere costumes, and I frankly find the idea offensive coming from someone as intelligent and knowledgeable as you. Myriad are the articles being written in the last 5 years -- but especially the last 2 -- about libertarians dumping the GOP because it has simply gone too far with the things that we always disliked about it. At this point, the Democrats are, for ever-increasing numbers of us, the better choice, and it has to do with many of us really and truly being principled people.

I am tempted to advise you to peform an anatomically improbable act on yourself, because that is a truly slimy, low level of insult I had thought you were above.

There's no gotcha there - newborns just look human, but aren't really. The fact that it would be very problematic to allow infanticide doesn't change the principle involved.

I see. Well Jojo, that establishes my point about your argument about as well as anything I could have said.

I can only add that libertarianism is extremely seductive for the 12/13-year old mind-

Actually, it is not. Randism is very popular among teenagers of both genders, because her novels are facile, composed of cardboard characters who do not correspond to real life.

Only the most precocious teenager has read Hayek and the papers put out by, say, the Cato Institute. What is simple about libertarianism is only its principles, which reduce to: leave adults the fuck alone unless they are directly harming others. Peaceful trade is better than war. A compelling case must overcome a rebuttable presumption against the idea that the federal government should be legislating in an area.

But those positions alone leave huge room for messy, even dare I say it, nuanced thinking. (What, after all constitutes "direct" harm?)

It is you, Paul, who has a 13-year-old notion of what libertarianism is. Libertarianism does not resolve all issues, which is among the reasons Ayn Rand despised it and demanded adherence to an all-encompassing life philosophy in which only atheists were welcome. I hold to a political theory of limited state power, not a religion (and am actually an atheist but have no quarrel with religionists per se); but it is an intellecutally dynamic theory that generates a great deal of discussion and debate among its adherents, and not remotely at the junior high level.

They didn't give Hayek the Nobel because he was as kewl as The Hardy Boys.

The QWERTY keyboard as an example of "path dependence" has been well and truly debunked by the fellows who wrote Typing Errors: The standard typewriter keyboard is Exhibit A in the hottest new case against markets. But the evidence has been cooked.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html

Thank you for that. The authors reference their "Fable of the Keys" piece in the Reason article; I wasn't aware that it was available online. (It was published in The Journal of Law and Economics.)

It's just a catch all rubric for reactionaries, radicals and extremists.

Rockwellites are anti-statist and pro-secession loons, and that's a view you will find among libertarians at Cato.

You are thoroughly ignorant about libertarians. Glenn has repeatedly cited Cato. Cato is not Lew Rockwell.

Let me ask you this: Would you condemn Glenn if he held a book event with Cato?

I think you may have misunderstood LWM. I think he's saying that the Catonians disapprove of Rockwell also.

In which case I do sincerely apologize. I'm just sort of set to reflexively defend against pooping on 'tarians here -- and not without reason -- but maybe I should have kept my powder dry in this instance.

I've been down this path many times before with a number of the same individuals, and they are never going to ease up on the lobbing insults (albeit often elegantly worded ones) at libertarians and mischaracterizations of what it is that most of us believe, and our motives for believing it.

That all said, I glean that you are a defender of Lew Rockwell. So please answer me this: how in the name of holy reason can Lew host all those articles by Gary North? North is about as much a libertarian as Stalin was. He literally is a fascist, of the "clerical fascist" species. A total Christian Reconstructionist, who, if he had his way, would see the author of this blog stoned to death as per Leviticus.

So why does Lew associate with North at all?

As for the abomination that is the war on (people who use some) drugs, Glenn opposes that. Moreover, he has written critically of the prescription drug system, which is part of the apparatus upholding the statist and evil drug "war."