DISQUS

Since all of the "yes" options involve initiation of force, this poll is really only useful to determine how many people who self-identify as libertarians really aren't.

Harming innocent people.

As an American--and one who actually remembers what that was once supposed to mean--I completely disagree with that "one people, one nation, one president" crap. It's deeply offensive and disgustingly anti-American, and should really have been left to die a well-deserved and long overdue death in 1945.

That said, even if I did agree with it, I would still completely support what Mr. al-Zeidi did. The man is a hero, just as much as "Tank Man" in Tiananmen Square.

Libertarianism is defined thusly:

"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."

Note that there's nothing in there against using force _after_ someone else has initiated it, to defend yourself or others.

You speak of arbitrary but systemic social exclusion. To use an example from my home state, to a libertarian it is wrong to hold a gun to person's head (which is what a law is really about) and say "You must not marry these two men." It is _also_ wrong to hold a gun to a person's head and say "You must marry these two men." It is _not_ wrong to kill the person holding the gun in either of those two hypotheticals.

Todd Seaver seems to be making the mistake of thinking that feminism inherently requires initiating force, and is therefore incompatible with libertarianism, but this is not necessarily true--it depends entirely on what, exactly, the feminists are doing. Certainly there's nothing unlibertarian about denouncing unacceptable but voluntary social outcomes. It _is_ unlibertarian to forcibly prevent someone from making an unacceptable choice.

It looks like he's cringing away from the statue in that picture.

"...I’ve been talking with companies who have millions in monthly revenues who can’t get credit or funding to expand and they are seeing customers disappearing from the marketplace at the same time..."

Okay, is it just me, or does anyone else see something wrong with that statement?

Good for McCain, but it doesn't change anything in my view. I've actually considered a civil war in my lifetime to be very likely since the 1990s. And that's being optimistic! The other possibilities that I can see are the country turning into Soviet Union v2.0/Fourth Reich (which is certainly the current direction) or a total collapse into a post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" scenario.

Another note on "over-qualification" and "unqualified": within the last few years I've noticed a strong tendency for job listings to have incredibly stringent requirements that basically amount to "unless you've already spent at least five years working for us doing this job we want to hire you for, don't bother." I look at the listings that the company I work for now puts up, and can immediately see that even the person who previously had that job wouldn't be qualified to be his own replacement.

Of course if you know the person you'd actually be working for and can bypass HR, or if the company is too small to have an HR department, great! However, I've been working for the same company for so long that by now pretty much everyone I knew at other companies now works with me. That leaves me in a position where I don't have a chance at getting a job that reflects my experience, because the HR drone reading the resume will see that I have (to pick a random example) five years of CM experience using Perforce when they require five years of CM experience using Subversion and am therefore "unqualified."

I realize that in this situation you're supposed to just lie and fake it, but I have a problem with being honest when I'm not supposed to be, so I get to chose between submitting resumes to jobs that I'm unqualified for (but in reality could do perfectly well) or for jobs that I'm entry-level jobs that I'm over-qualified for.

I wouldn't vote for a candidate who had a tech policy, because there is nothing in the United States Constitution that authorizes the existence of such a thing.

I guess you can bury them next to Apple, because out in the real world I still see lots of comments on various weblogs. The ones with the fewest comments are generally the ones which have anti-spam measures in their comments, probably because people are less likely to go to the extra trouble in order to post a comment which, in the grand scheme of things, is almost certainly going to be pretty trivial anyway.

Incidentally, I'd never heard of "FriendFeed" before reading this post. From following the link, it looks like another of those "what the heck is the point" Web 2.0 things.

On 1, I _do_ talk that way. Coercion is coercion.

On 2, politically recognized rights are irrelevant to actual freedom, because the government will just "interpret" them in whatever way happens to suit the government. All that really matters is how free people are in reality.

For example, here in the US it's a politically recognized right (under the highest law of the land) for me to walk down the street with a machinegun. In reality, if I tried to do that here in LA I would certainly be murdered by the government almost immediately, because in the US the politically recognized right to keep and bear arms is irrelevant to the way things actually are.

Sounds like some of those janitors who are providing too much supply of unskilled labor in Silicon Valley should move and get jobs in New York.

Some libertarians have a strange attachment to due process and the rule of law, and as such look with great disfavor on the government kidnapping and abusing hundreds of children whose parents haven't even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted.

I do agree that it's not necessary to write such long posts to make the point, which is really quite simple:

Owning slaves is _in and of itself_ an inherently anti-libertarian thing. Nobody with the tiniest shred of decency or humanity could possibly think otherwise.

All this long, long thread has demonstrated is that John V and William are exactly the sort of people Rad Geek was addressing in his original post.

"If you can estimate inflation better than the market, you can short stocks to buy bonds or vice versa. Bonds pay off constant, inflation-pummeled dollars, while stocks price in the inflated revenues of the underlying company."

That imposes additional requirements not specified by Tyler Cowen, though. Specifically: that the market's estimate of inflation be exactly the same as the government figures, that you already be rich enough to be messing around with stocks and bonds, and that your personality includes a willingness to gamble a lot of money.

I don't dispute that if you know the government's inflation claim is wrong _and a whole bunch of other things are also true_ that you could be a very rich man. However, the number of people for whom all those other factors _are_ true doesn't seem to be very big.

Tyler Cowen's post doesn't make a whole lot of sense. For example, how does it follow that you will be a very rich man if you know that the inflation estimate is wrong? And then there's this sentence:

"If there's anything wrong with gdp statistics, it's either environmental problems or that we don't have good measures of the productivity of government itself."

Anyone who could seriously talk about "the productivity of the government" obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.

Also, the inflation rate has nothing to do with how rich America is now, as he implies, but with how much of that current wealth the government is stealing by inflating the currency.

"I was hoping to see laws or views he supported/held that showed an anti-libertarian POV.

There, slavery aside, I see very little to nothing."

Reading this absurd statement reminded me of that joke about "But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"

If I were to make the statement "Jeffrey Dahmer was anti-libertarian," purely on the basis of his having killed and eaten seventeen people, would John V also see "very little to nothing" to support it?