Some wonder at my bitterness towards Ayn Rand. Part of it is simply fear of being found guilty by association. I find her arguments in ethics so appallingly ill-reasoned and substantively perverse that, since we share a general political outlook, I fear being tarred with her nasty brush.

There's a sadness in my revulsion, too. It saddens me to see her admirers frequently miss a great point made by, say, Adam Smith or Herbert Spencer, and miss it by a mile, largely and apparently out of undue interest in and reverence towards the formulations of Ayn Rand.

Take Tibor Machan. He was given the task of introducing a reprint of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Ethics. And in that introduction, he writes this:

It is no secret that the bulk of ethical commentary, whether from the pulpit, editorials, the campaign trails, or the stages from which the oratory of commencement exercises rings forth, urges upon human beings acts of self-sacrifice. In this respect there is nothing revolutionary about Marxism, for example. Marx also places before us the ideals of selfsacrifice — his condemnation of the Lockean human-rights tradition consisted mainly of dismissing such rights as vehicles of selfishness. Spencer, however, advocated egoism. And his ethics could not be faulted for being of the hedonistic egoist variety. such as those of Jeremy Bentham and even John Stuart Mill. Instead, Spencer developed what he called a rational utilitarian moral theory. Omitting from consideration for now the difficulties of Spencer’s fusionist efforts, we cannot deny that the substance of Spencer’s ethical writings deserves extensive study We have here a brilliant theory in which the mutually compatible selfish goals of individuals are demonstrated to be the proper end of human conduct. The principles that would further this goal are the principles of rational utilitarianism, gleaned through a consideration of the self-consistently enhancing course of conduct possible for human beings to undertake.

The trouble with this is that Herbert Spencer did not advocate egoism.

Sure, Spencer wrote a fascinating chapter entitled Egoism vs. Altruism. He demonstrated the commonplace truth that self-directed behavior must take precedence over all else, and that, in fact, self-directed egoistic behavior is necessary for life.

But he followed it with another chapter entitled Altruism vs. Egoism, wherein he showed how life also depends on acts of voluntary self-sacrifice for the benefit of others (chiefly but not limited to offspring). He then spends two chapters dialectically resolving the apparent contradictions. In the end, he comes up with a synthesis which might well be called, as Spencer did put it, a rational utilitarianism, but which cannot in good conscience be called an egoism.

Now, Machan's own egoism isn't quite as outrageous as his beloved Ayn Rand's. But, apparently because of his obsession with egoism, Machan mistakes — nay; he completely ignores — Spencer's real contribution to the subject of agent-relative ethics.

Chris Sciabarra was quite right to identify* Herbert Spencer as the first dialectical libertarian. Spencer's contribution was that sophisticated. Much more sophisticated than most later libertarian philosophies, actually.

But Machan misses that. I believe because he is too enamored of Ayn Rand's philosophy, and especially with her chief obsession, egoism. I could be wrong. This could be misattribution. But I don't think so.

. . .

* Note: By the way, in that Sciabarra essay he argues against something I wrote. Here's what I wrote:

This method — I'm tempted to call it "dialectical," but Spencer's prose and position seem so far from Hegel's that the term is almost indecent — confuses many readers. But it is surely his strength.

Sciabarra counters:

It is unfortunate that Virkkala refuses to give into his temptation, because crucially significant aspects of Herbert Spencer's work are, indeed, dialectical.

I suspect Sciabarra actually did understand what I wrote. I was being ironic. I was calling Spencer's method dialectical in a back-handed way. I see no reason to make every statement in the standard, literalist manner. Even philosophy must have room for some nuance . . . without stooping to the folly of jargon or opacity. Or, ahem, dialectic. Call it rhetorical.

Economist Bryan Caplan conjectures on why monopoly governments have dominated the political landscape, considering that competing governments would be more economical. Economies of scale, he says, likely favored monopoly provision of justice services (government) in the early days, and lock-in set in, leaving us (by path dependence) stuck with monopoly government.

This is interesting, but seems too narrowly catallactic to me. Molinari's explanation (dimly remembered) strike me as better. But since my memory is so poor on Molinari's work, I'll just offer a few points that I'll ponder for a few weeks:

The origin of the state is not in goods offered on a market; pretending this is how states originate seems silly. States originate, usually, through conquest. Sometimes by the accession of several groups claiming hegemony over others. None of this looks like a market for services.

What it looks like is a demand for benefits gained from plunder and compulsion. So, a look at the demand for government services must also incorporate a demand for crime. Early governments take hold, sometimes, simply because everyone tries to get the upper hand. Justice as in protection and the like, is merely an excuse, at best a sometimes-produced by-product of government-as-it-usually -is, which is: Injustice.

The deep desire of people to hurt others, to not trust them with their lives, but to rule them, is one of the most dominant elements in the human psyche. Government grows from it. The idea of justice only evolves out of many conflicts, and then begins to constrain the acts of government.

There are many hierarchies of human talent. The ability to engage in combat, to kill, runs from the strongest man down to the weakest babe and oldest, frailest woman. The origin of government is in the natural ascendancy of the strong man. The cleverest strong man takes over, and rules generation after generation. Then it is the clever of mind who gains ascendancy over the strong of bone and muscle. And all this is done within a monopoly system, as it has been from time immemorial. It's not people contracting for services of these men. Or, not usually. Why? I think Molinari suggested that it was simply the natural dominance of the strong man. He was strongest, his friends were stronger, his enemies they left dead, and they greedily and naturally took as many spoils as possible.

This tradition of monopoly government was born of the greed of the early strong men, and kept in play by the greed of the clever.

Breaking that cycle will be difficult. If possible at all.

People are still creatures of hierarchy. And the greed and fear of large populations, each trying to gain some foothold in a world of conflict . . . none of this easily comports with the idea of explicit contracts made with government services like police and courts.

I'm not saying our ideas of politics shouldn't be rationalized by explicit contracts rather than ceaselessly futzed with (dishonestly) in the political arena. But I am saying that most people are much more primitive in their politics than what libertarian anarchism suggests. They want power, position, plunder. Libertarians do not offer them these things. So . . .

The world is much nastier than is painted by anarchocapitalists.

Isn't it?

Caplan might come up with an even more perceptive explanation for the dominance of monopoly governance were he to add the criminal dimension, and see the idea of justice and contract in an evolutionary context rather than game-theoretic and state-of-nature perspective.

Jonah Goldberg makes too much of the culture shift in libertarianism towards an alleged positive liberty. As usual, I find myself deeply unimpressed by Goldberg:

Libertarianism was once primarily concerned with negative liberty — i.e. delineating a zone free of government intrusion. Meyer's libertarianism was primarily concerned with the ability of the individual to find the virtuous path within "an objective moral order based on ontological foundations" best expressed in Western civilization. As such, fusionism was less a coalitional doctrine than a metaphysical imperative. But these days, phrases like "objective moral order" will get you knocked off Cato's Kwanzaa-card list. Liberty's virtue is no longer that it supports the virtuous. Rather, according to today's leading libertarians, economic freedom's virtue lies in its ability to provide everybody the custom-made lifestyle of his choice.

. . .This emphasis on the liberating power of technology and wealth — i.e., materialism and positive liberty — represents an enormous philosophical transformation within libertarianism that echoes, albeit faintly, elements of the economic liberalism of John Dewey and FDR. [emphases removed]

This is all so amazingly old hat that I can point out the worn felt and sweat rings.

What we are witnessing here is not a new commitment to positive liberty, but merely a tweak on the old Better Bathtub rhetoric of libertarian argument. With liberty you get better consumer goods, a better life, as paradigmatically represented by that Better Bathtub. The new versions of this argument, as provided by folks at Cato and Reason and elsewhere, are merely less crass than the old materialistic rap, now emphasizing the spiritual value of better things.

I've no problem with it.

Further, it doesn't explain the topic Jonah G. gleefully gee-whizzes about (to deflate) up front: the several attempts to reforge alliances with the left, or at least the Democratic Party. Indeed, the reason for that rapprochement is that, in the wake of the disastrous and deceitful reign of George Bush the Younger, aligning oneself with people who seem more than open to constitutional limits on Imperial Presidents and the tyrants thundering on the right could be a good way to . . . shore up negative liberty! Yes, it is for their favoring of personal liberties — good, old-fashioned negative freedom! — and opposition to imperialism that the left seems open to dialogue and influence. The right, as typified by GOP partisans like Jonah G., has been too open to the tyranny that the Bush administration has both boldly and timidly worked towards.

I have many friends and allies who admire Jonah Goldberg. I do not. To me he seems just another near-witless conservative pundit and GOP rah-rah shill. And that word, kerfuffle; I've tried it once or twice, I think. And found it ugly and stupid , too suggestive of a low IQ . . . or else low taste. Probably both. The conservative pundit and blogger class uses it over and over again. Do these folk think it makes them sound Menckenian? (Stick to brummagem, people!)

It makes them sound moronic. That is, more moronic than they are by argument alone.

As for Tyler Cowen's comment, quoted by Jonah G., it deserves better commentary than Jonah G. can provide:

Those developments have brought us much greater wealth and much greater liberty, at least in the positive sense of greater life opportunities. They’ve also brought much bigger government. The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism. Many initial victories bring later defeats.

I am not so worried about this paradox of libertarianism. Overall libertarians should embrace these developments. We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal.

I don't consider what I call the Luxury Theorem of Government Growth a paradox, for starters. Libertarianism provides a normative agenda, not a theory of social evolution. To note that government tends to grow in a democratic republic, in part because increased wealth brings a lower marginal utility to the wealth forgone by government extraction, is hardly earth-shaking. It is a very old notion. And it fits well with other notions, such as explored by Public Choice economists; you know: the problem of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits.

It's just something those who argue for liberty have always had to deal with. That is, if they were smart.

Those who foolishly played the prediction game, resting their prophetic stance not on critique but on hope for revolution, had troubles. But I discount them. This is Rothbard's legacy at its worst. Smart libertarians reject such nonsense. Liberty's value does not increase because of a coming cultural evolution towards less government, or because of a government collapse as a result of liberty's spurning. Liberty remains the ideal, and retains salience even when the tide turns against it.

It's worth noting that savvy economists were discussing this a century ago and more. And most lost their bearings (though Molinari and Clark did not, it is worth remembering).

Also worth noting is this: The Luxury Theorem of Government Growth is closely related to the Laffer Curve (a very old principle, really). Governments can extract more at a lower rate, often. Similarly, the more the wealth in society the more that society can support higher rates as well as more extractions in total. It's part of the same principle set.

I don't see how this changes the case for establishing negative liberty.

I also disagree with Tyler Cowen regarding this: the older story of big government crushes liberty is being superseded by advances in liberty bring bigger government.

There is a dialectical, two-way relationship here that he's looking at in an alarmingly one-dimensional way. This astounds me, actually, since Tyler C. usually strikes me as one of the smartest cookies in the jar of contemporary libertarian economics.

Oh, well. No one is right all the time. Cowen himself may even express second thoughts, now that Jonah G. has trotted out his arguments to prove a remarkably silly point.

Apropos of yesteryday's post — Unlimited liability? The very idea! and my comment on Clark Stooksbury's blog — I should note that Clark responded to my query:

The point I'm making about [limited liability] and Libertarians is that it is an intervention in the marketplace that Libs never seem to criticize or even acknowledge as such.

Maybe. I've heard it talked about. But, granted, not much. My main question is: isn't unlimited liability, too, an intervention into the marketplace? That is, any theory of (and practice of assigning) liability is precontractual. It is not in itself a market activity. Unlimited liability strikes me as impractical. So why even bother with it.

I should note that what I am defining as unlimited liability is not the same thing as strict liability. Or, at least I don't think they are the same! Currently, one can hold people in a corporation for their acts under strict liability. But you cannot hold shareholders responsible to the degree that you can take all their wealth in a lawsuit, if, say, a corporate office or employee does something that might justify a tort, or an action against breach of contract. Or even a crime.

Strict liability, as I understand it, is a theory of legal responsibility that limits the idea of negligence.

Limited liability for corporations limits the extent of responsibility for investors in a business. It does not limit (as far as I know) the corporate liability itself — the corporations assets are always up for grabs in a lawsuit against it — or the employees. I could be wrong about the latter.

Hey: I could be wrong about all this. It has been nearly thirty years since I read Epstein's book on strict liability, and it was tough slogging at the time! And limited liability in a corporate context? I haven't even read the Wikipedia entry on it! (Hmmm. Maybe I should.)

Is a parent's liability for his or her child's actions a related issue? It strikes me that the older a child gets, limitations on the liability of a parent for an offspring's acts is utterly legitimate, considering that growing up is a process of gradual emancipation.

Investing in a company is an awful lot like investing in a child. You hope to get some returns, but the people who take the money become the ones most responsible for using those funds.

My former colleague Clark Stooksbury believes that the limiting of liability of corporations is somehow a major problem for the idea of liberty. In his latest blog entry, he says as much.

Please read it, and then click the comments, and read my comment. Am I wrong?

I thought limited liability was about limiting the liability of shareholders to the value of their stock. This doesn't seem so wrong to me, especially when you consider what would happen were the limitation removed: we'd be left with bankers, mainly, as the chief investors of accumulated capital.

But I could be wrong. I am awaiting to be enlightened.

(Note: you can communicate with me directly from my contact page.)

It strikes me that that Wikipedia article on libertarianism is badly done. The emphasis on "natural rights" vs "consequentialism" is nothing to lead with. It is a possible interpretation of disagreements, but really, the range of opinion is not limited to this one dimension of metaethics. Norman Barry gets the credit for the distinction, but R.W. Bradford, writing as Ethan O. Waters, is partly responsible for popularizing the distinction.

I remember Bradford writing his early Watersian pieces. I insisted he stop using the word utilitarian as he had started out doing, and switch to consequentialism instead. But in the end I just tugged at my hair and gave up. Bradford wouldn't really break out of this particular simplified, one-dimensional perspective he'd latched onto.

Oh, well. Libertarianism will survive. It's a pity that this particular matrix overlays so many mindsets, though. It's a double pity that it plays such a huge part in the Wikipedia article.

For more on this subject, Liberty published a conference panel on the subject in its first 2005 issue. I've yet to read it.

All property is defined through exclusion. If a thing is mine, it isn't yours. If it's ours, it isn't theirs. This is made fairly clear by the etymology of the word private, affixed to the word property in common speech about the institution:

Middle English privat, from Anglo-French, from Latin privatus, from past participle of privare to deprive, release, from privus private, individual

To hold private property is to deprive others of that property.

That's why many people don't approve of private property. It seems like stealing, depriving others and all. Property is theft, wrote the first self-proclaimed anarchist.

The reason we allow private property is that, once a person has a claim against others for something, his or her uses of that something tend to benefit society more than if anyone could just up and take it or use it. Private property allows for long-term investments and exchange, and exchange allows for minute orderings of valuations in a social context, thus giving incentives to everybody to make the best use of what they have. When property is left in the commons, it tends to degrade in quality, through overuse. This is called the tragedy of the commons. It goes on throughout history. To offset this, you can either regulate resource use (by custom and taboo, religious threat, or political and legal machinations) or privatise it, where the regulation is divvied up severally, to the various owners. (Hayek preferred the term several property, not coincidentally.)

I tend to prefer private property to common property, though I see the rationale for some common property.

On the subject of intellectual property, I've been mildly fascinated by the debates amongst people who are otherwise stalwartly for private property. There are many libertarians, for instance, who oppose some or all constructions of intellectual property (IP).

Stephen Kinsella is one. I've not read much of his work, though I think it is obvious that he's an intelligent guy.

Hmmm. I just used the word guy. I rarely use that word. Why not gentleman? Well, on a brief discussion of IP on the mises.org site, I replied to one of his anti-IP comments. It was not a wholesale attack. But Kinsella responded as if it were. Nothing he said would cause me to disagree, overmuch; he seemed to miss my point. But he did put "scare quotes" around my name Wirkman.

Apparently, he not only does not respect private property in intellectual property, he doesn't respect another person's name.

Perhaps he does this because he first read me using a different first name. Oh, well. During that same period of time I went by TWV, and that W did stand for something. It stood for Wirkman.

An interlocutor who not only misses the point of a small challenge but also insults his disputant is not someone whose books on theory I'll likely read soon.

Confession: I've not settled my mind on the issue of private property in intellectual matters. But, uh, here's my standard way of looking at copyright:

Say I write a novel.

I publish the thing, selling it and giving it on the express condition that no-one else copy it, or duplicate it for sale or free distribution.

I don't see how I'm violating anyone's rights in doing this.

Now, someone sees an abandoned copy of the book lying on a park bench. He hasn't purchased it; he's bound by no contract. He reads, thinks it's a great story, takes it to Kinko's and makes a thousand copies, which he promotes and sells for a small profit. Why shouldn't he do this?

Well, the state has indeed stepped in with copyright protection and defined abandonment of property out of existence, the better to promote the power of contract and the efficacy of market interaction. It has made property rights more firm. It has added value to the product. It allows a person to spend several months or years of his or her existence in the elaboration of a work of art and then get some remuneration over it. Without such protection, the chances of a publishing industry springing up are much less.

I guess that's what IP people are against. They're against that defining out of existence of the abandonment of property.

I haven't heard it expressed like that for the simple reason that most libertarians ignore the question of abandonment of property. But that seems what's germane, here.

For my part, I've no part with that extra step in the extension of contractual rights to abandonment/acquisition.

But then, I'm not an anarchist.

I also see a parallel between IP and land ownership by non-resident owners, that is, landlords. Say one establishes property in a parcel of land by usufruct. Then leaves, but with signs saying they'll rent out the parcel at such-and-such rate. Why obey the sign? A person could just reclaim the land. It's abandoned! The signs are mere intellectual property! Rent is evil, land-ownership by continued use is all.

There are anarchists who hold to this view of property.

Trouble is, leave on a vacation and somebody can claim that your property has been abandoned. And they take up stakes. Or renters could say: my landlord doesn't live here; I do! I ain't payin' a dime.

This is no way to conduct a civilization. There have to be general rules of abandonment. In land and intellectual property.

Of course, I could be wrong; Kinsella's book may take all these issues to consideration.

But I likely won't read it until he proves himself a more dignified interlocutor. I mean, is what I wrote really so nasty? Am I unintentionally harsh? (Click here and then click COMMENTS to read the interchange.)

Then again, maybe it was something I wrote in the past. Kinsella admires the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. I don't. And I've stated that lack of appreciation on numerous occasions. Is that worth a verbal war?

I am such a grump. Britannica finally gets a decent article on libertarianism, and all I do is pick nits.

I should be thanking its author, David Boaz.

And yet, I really dislike the article. Strongly. With no small amount of disgust, even. It seems written in a style ill suited to an encyclopedia. Implicit in the whole article is that libertarians agree. Time and again, Boaz offers particular (sectarian) terminology as agreed terminology, particular arguments as points of agreement, where the agreement is loose at best.

According to the principle that libertarians call the nonaggression axiom, all acts of aggression against the rights of others—whether committed by individuals or by governments—are unjust.

First, the nonaggression axiom is Rothbard's term. Most libertarians don't use it. Many refuse to treat it as an axiom at all.

Second, this paragraph does not define the principle. The quoted sentence is a mere tautological statement: rights must be defended; encroachments against them are unjust. All that's added is that encroachments or abridgements of rights are to be called aggression. Nonsense. What a misuse of language.

What libertarians tend to agree to is the idea that all our rights derive from a basic right, the right to liberty. Liberty is defined as something like an absence of opposing coercive force. Coercion — that is violence, compulsion, and the threat thereof — may not be initiated. When initiated, that's a violation of rights. But once there's a violation, coercion may be used in defense.

Of course, Rand and Rothbard and lesser thinkers like LeFevre have so polluted the language of libertarianism that there's little agreement among libertarians about the exact definitions of constituent concepts. Aggression may or may not be a good word to use to designate initiated force, libertarians' main bugaboo.

Although various theories regarding the origin and justification of individual rights have been proposed—e.g., that they are given to human beings by God, that they are implied by the very idea of a moral law, and that respecting them produces better consequences—all libertarians agree that individual rights are imprescriptible—i.e., that they are not granted (and thus cannot be legitimately taken away) by governments or by any other human agency.

Well, maybe I should just give up, then, eh? Apparently, I'm not a libertarian.

Why do I say this? Because I'm not convinced of this talk of imprescriptability. Never have been. I understand the desire to see rights as imprescriptable. But just because you want something doesn't mean it exists.

There's a lot of this kind of stuff in the article. Here's a whopper:

Libertarians deny that their views imply anything like atomistic individualism.

Except, of course, for those libertarians who are very atomistic in their individualism, who despise social controls outside of law, too, who think of all social arrangements as contracts and nothing but, nothing more, nothing less, and . . .

Oh, well. Atomism is a defect in many libertarians' ideologies and in their private lives. Not David Boaz's, sure; and not mine. But I don't see why an encyclopedia article should avoid admitting that some libertarians are indeed stupid enough to embrace the errors that their debaters want them to embrace. Some libertarians' love their opponents' strawmen!

Yes: Many libertarians are utter fools. Many support strawman positions, positions that are risible, indefensible, and often just plain silly (as my old boss Bill Bradford liked to put it). The standard, paradigm case for this was Ayn Rand. She took up the strawman of selfishness and ran with it. But this wasn't easy, because egoism weighs heavily on the runner, it being nuts and all. And yet many libertarians, to this day, treat Rand and her new concept (which was really just old-hat nincompoopery, older than Nietzsche, at least as old as Stirner, but in her version particularly jumbled up and incoherent) with undue respect.

Now that I think about it: why do I call myself a libertarian? Why not just give up? Let the One True Way folks and the strawman nutjobs keep the term as their own.

Maybe I should call myself by an old term, now unused. I'm a Locofoco!

I'm awfully tempted to buy the Collected Works of J.S. Mill, offered by LFB.com. But my question is: how can there be a Volume Ten of an eight-volume set? And where's number nine?

Sometimes I free ride on the smiles of strangers; sometimes, I smile but the stranger on the street does not smile back. In both cases? No exchange. The stranger gets the benefit of my smile, but I don't get the benefit of his. Or vice versa.

This is the problem of the free rider in a nutshell.

How to respond?

Walk on by.

The standard language of natural rights is largely idiomatic. What is said is not literally true. But one is supposed to understand the intent. For example: I have a right to liberty.

A right is a claim to obligatory treatment. But this basic right has been whittled away in our society, and its full operation was never in place, really. Governments routinely abridge this right. They don't recognize it. You do not really have this right.

Now, I could say, I have a right to vote in my county, and I would be completely correct. The government is obliged to take my vote when an election is held. And count it. Were it discovered that the government regularly takes my vote and stuffs it in the trash can, not only would i object, so would most citizens in the county, and the trashing of my vote would stop.

There. I effectively possess the right to vote.

But I do not effectively possess a right to liberty. There are all sorts of things that I could be at liberty to do, and do without abridging anyone else's liberty, but which I am prevented from doing. By the government. I may protest these alleged rights violations, but there is no hue and cry about them in my county, and I effectively possess no such right.

When we say I have a right to liberty, we are really saying I should have a right to liberty. The having is something we should have, not something we actually do have. This is a moral claim, outside of normal law and politics.

It is idiomatic speech. When one says keep your eyes peeled we mean to keep your eyelids up and our attention focused, not literally to take out a peeler and do something drastic to your eyes; when one says over the hill, we think of a metaphorical hill, the peak of which we pass in life at some point; if we are getting down to brass tacks we rarely want to have anything to do with pointy little stick-ems, and certainly don't want to be down there on the floor with them; or if one of us kicks the bucket no one expects to hear any clanking.

Idioms come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. (See what I mean?) In normative talk, one of the ways to make the suggested norm, ideal, or rule more compelling is to suggest that the should really is an is. Not just a should.

So we speak of rights as existing apart from their defense and respect in society. They exist in some metaphysical realm. And we have them even when, unlike property we actually own, we can in no sense bring them into causal connection and make them a lived reality. (To use a Mengerian construction.)

In this way, ethics seems like it descends into error. J.L. Mackie propounded the Error Theory of ethics, arguing that human beings naturally misuse philosophical concepts in ethical suasion, asserting, say, objective value when no such value has been demonstrated.

I prefer thinking of this as the Bluster Theory of ethics. We overstep our argument and assert an existent where all we have is a preferred course of a counterfactual or imaginative nature.

I tend to clean up my language and not descend into full-blown natural rights talk. Those philosophers who still assert deep philosophical import into what I see as idiomatic speech I look upon, I'm afraid, with a little condescension. They simply haven't separated speech, and speech acts, and imagined acts, and norms as distinct concepts. They are muddled.

Their muddle is to act as if bluster were an epistemic method. It is not.

My quickly written discussion of the 19th, Taxation is not theft, is under discussion on Reason's Hit and Run, courtesy of Reason editor Brian Doherty. I should probably respond to it soon.

I will also have to read Brian's big book on the history of modern libertarianism, coming out soon.

I'm more eager to do the latter than the former!

I had the feeling, by the way, that most discussants on Reason's site did not click through to mine to read the full post.