This is just the end of it: What it accomplishes, though -- and in this your own tactics have always been spot-on -- is to draw out of people what, beyond the constraints of rational discourse, is actually driving them. The elitism and contempt for lower orders, the desire to restrict power to the members of their own class which is typical of almost all conservatives, and of many libertarians, is often well-hidden. Give 'em a poke -- even an unfair one -- and it all spills out. They really can't help themselves.

So if LWM tells utter lies about me -- which you know are falsehoods -- that's all fine in service of the higher value of exposing my purported villainies. I decided to believe your explanation of the "'cockroach" remark. I don't any longer. "Giving unfair pokes" is just dandy with you. Truth is secondary, if it factors at all.

(Answering two posts). I said releases should exclude liability, if a person wants to buy laetrile. Not that courts always uphold those terms. And you cannot just make a "victim" of everyone who makes stupid choices; some of the sellers really believe they are offering valuable services. Free people shoudld have the right to sell and buy laetrile (or fortune telling services, provided these are sold with informed consent.)

As for this: Wow. So the great emancipation was to make housework easy enough so that women could do both the housework and hold down an outside job (when they were finally allowed to do so; you do know that women didn't have the temperament and constitution to be lawyers? ... the court said so in the late 1800s, but I guess that was before Hoovers' time) without frazzling completely. With "liberation" like that, who needs slavery, eh?

It is a simple fact of history that running a household has in most times and places been extremely labor-intensive. In almost all cultures, it fell to the women (who got pregnant and popped out lotsa babies, many dying doing so) to undertake that labor, while the male member of the household went into the world to earn the bread.

It is further a fact that with the vast increase in labor-saving devices and services, non-wealthy women have seen their time for other things grow exponentially. (Disposable diapers alone are an invention I would thank a deity for, if I thought there was one. Smelly diaper pails and keeping the damn things laundered are a real pain.)

Notions that women only belong at home, and not in, say, the legal profession, were informed by these division of labor factors that increasingly became less relevant. Even had there been no prohibition on their doing so, neither of my great-grandmothers could possibly have taken the time to master the law.

Mona said: If the proper releases are executed, then the seller should be immune from liability. This is not correct. If fraudulent inducements were used to get someone to sign the releases, they should not be immune (despite any contractual language to the contrary).

Obviously fraud in the inducement is still fraud. I said a proper release, by which I mean one, continuing with the laetrile example, in which the buyer has been fully informed that the AMA, FDA etc. see no efficacy in the "treatment."

That's not the same thing as luring someone to invest in a pyramid scheme by describing it as the greatest, sure-thing investment on the planet. The scammers doing that are fully aware that they are just robbing people.

FWIW, I notice all the libertarian-leaners here, the ones that seem to put so much emphasis on the "free market" to intelligently sort things out, have not addressed my "efficiency" concerns WRT dealing with each scam on an individual basis (in court, no less, where the admission price starts at $10K or so just to get in the door), nor the fact that the victims of scams, by their very nature, are many a times the ones least able and the ones with the least resources and ability to do anything about it....

I just do not get what you think it is necessary for the "libertarians" to say about this? Virtually all States' Attorneys General have consumer fraud divisions, take complaints, and investigate. I favor that; my issue is what ought to be included as illegal "fraud."

I don't think homeopaths, fortune tellers etc should be included, provided they make sufficient disclosure so that the consumer can said to have given truly informed consent.

Of course I realize the history in which women were considered the chattel of their husbands. The cure for that was suffrage. But in the main, the early feminists fighting for that were either unmarried and childless, or like Elizabeth Cady Stanton who had 8 children, were married to reasonably wealthy men so that they had help in the home and time for activism.

Once a critical mass of females is freed up to do something other than domestic drudgery, you are gonna hear from them. And yes, a feminist group from my youth was called "Bread and Roses," so I know what it means.

Glenn starts talking and I'm off air and tried everything suggested and I'm still off air. Has to be a conspiracy. Will there be anyway to get a transcript or re-run of this? I'm really pissed!

Happened to me and a bunch of folks. I missed all but Glenn's first few sentences of his opening remarks. Then, reading down in the running comments setion where many folks were freaking over the same thing I saw the problem was the need to "empty one's server cache" or some such.

So, I logged off the site, and then logged in again to the live-stream, and back it came. But I missed virtually all of Glenn's opening statement.