I agree wholeheartedly, but I confess that I'm a bit disappointed that no one took me up on my challenge to actuarial tables, which of course do exist. When we start discussing whether or not we want to accept them as scientific population and mortality studies have bequeathed them to us, or adjust them in the public interest, then suddenly we are liberals, not libertarians.

What is in the public interest, and what is not, is a perfectly legitimate subject for political argument, and defining what is in the public interest is a perfectly legitimate function of the political process. You can't get there from here, though, if you decide at the outset that such arguments are illegitimate, or withhold from voters the information necessary to make informed decisions.

"Mr. Hume has long been apologetic to Republican interests, at one point playing tennis on White House courts as a guest of both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush while an 'impartial' Washington reporter for ABC News."

http://www.counterbias.com/news004.html

Except, of course, the market didn't decide to invade Iraq; the government did. The market didn't decide to make irresponsible public budgeting decisions; the government did. See a pattern? - kdwmson

No, actually the market did decide to invade Iraq. Cheney and his "friends" had that country sliced and diced before Bush even knew where all the bathrooms in the White House were located.

And the market did decide on the Pharma Bill. And the market did run through gazillions of dollars after Katrina. And the market did help push hundreds of billions of dollars through one end of the Iraq money machine and suck it right back out at the other end. It goes on and on and on. The market loves the Cheney's, Rumsfeld's, Wolfowitz's, Rice's and Tenet's of the world. It rewards them handsomely.

I'm a firm believer in free markets. I just don't see very many. I do see a lot or corporatism and fascism though. Corporate capitalism doesn't need free choice or democracy to prosper. Corporate capitalism is doing great in China, is it not? Corporate capitalism (i.e., the "market") may in fact turn out to be just the thing communist totalitarianism needed to succeed. Free markets are like communism in a way. They're great on paper, but once you put people in power, those people all seem to want the same thing. Everything. And for the same period of time. Forever.

Okay, I'll bite. Actuarial tables and risk/benefit analysis is useless unless you are aware of all the risks and all the benefits. But in the case that you are, then informing someone of the probabilities in the table is completely informing them of what they need to know to make a competent, informed decision.

Not everything is reduced to such tables, nor can every decision be framed in terms of an exhaustive list of risks, their concommitant benefits, and a simple choice. If it were, we could let computers running Bayesian analysis make all our decisions for us. There are bodies of knowledge that don't reduce that way, and you may have to rely on an expert to make a decision (and that's all long before we get to Godel). Should you have as much choice as possible? Sure. Should the expert be someone you can vet in some fashion? Sure. Should accumulated expertise be encoded in laws, guidelines, protocols, and in some cases, the permanent vesting of decision making authority to a trained group of experts? Sure.

This is not to say that eternal vigilance isn't needed to protect freedoms, nor that secrecy and privilege are good. It isn't even to say that drug laws or medical systems (or journalistic procedures) shouldn't be debated and discussed. But it has been over 100 years since scientists and experts have even been able to know all of their own fields in many subjects. It is unreasonable to devise a system that relies on individuals to make decisions requiring expertise based solely on informing them in the moment. They need to be protected from excessive decision making, from conflict of interest, from bad decisions, and all the other things experts can do, but do you really want to try to be expert on everything that affects you in a 6 billion person highly technological world, and "oh, well!" if you get it wrong?

I'm a firm believer in free markets.

This turn of phrase is the problem. Would you say that you're a "believer" in a Euclidean analysis of distance? Of course not - Euclidean geometry is just a tool which is sometimes the right tool, and sometimes not.

Market analyses of social behavior is sometimes useful. Regulating some domains so that they behave like a market is sometimes useful. But "believing in" markets? Don't believe in them anymore than you "believe in" Riemann spaces!

sufficient risks and sufficient benefits. I got carried away.

The goal is to balance the needs of the collective with individual freedom.

The "collective" is nothing more than a bunch of discrete individuals. Discrete individuals should not be "sin taxed" for their cigarettes (except possibly to the extent such taxes are levied and limited solely to defraying public medical costs in smokers).

If the discrete individuals in the collective have not the right, neither does the so-called collective.

Look, many of you here are shrieking derisively as if I and libertarians think "markets" are some sort of panacea, our version of Jesus. We don't think of them that way. They are very useful and conducive to human progress, and they are an aspect of liberty. But advocating markets is not to claim they create utopia, or that those participating in markets should be free to, say, dump toxins in our waterways. Or even that everything markets offer people are good -- the world would be a better place if alcohol did not exist.

Many of you hold quite the cartoon versions of libertarians.

"Brit's" comments are made in debate? That's hilarious. Yes, like when Godzilla and Kong debate the finer points of destruction...such a "balanced" variety of interesting points of view in those Fox "debates".

FYI: Olberman only makes his comments in a "special comments" format where it is clear he is offering his opinion, and his opinion does not show bias towards a political ideology, it shows a clear bias towards the application of honesty and justified outrage, though he does display a bias against corruption, tyranny, hypocrisy, and stupidity.

As someone mentioned earlier, the fact that believing in evolution is, for one milisecond, understood as a political view is absolute proof that we are lost, at the ragged fringe of a flat earth.