Glenn Reynolds asks a good question about Andrew Sullivan's inability to disagree with Glenn without misrepresenting what he says:it's telling that he can't seem to criticize me without misrepresenting what I've said. In this post he links to a tru...

Selling Treasury bonds outside of declared war or national emergency is illegal.

I'm inclined to think it's bad policy, but where does the Constitution make it illegal? A search of the text of the Constitution and its amendments yields no mention of bonds. Debt is mentioned only in the context of how the government's debts are to be paid, and whether pre-Constitution and Confederate debts remain binding (yes to the first, no to the second).

The question was: Is survival the highest aspiration?

No, but it is the first. All else is possible only because the individual -- some individual, even if not oneself -- survives.

If one-tenth of Glenn Reynolds' readership, which is presumably heavily "neolibertarian," became involved in the LP, they would dominate it within one election cycle and would be running every state party. Few local conventions have more than a handful of attendees, and very few state conventions have even a three-digit number of participants.

Give me 100 neolibertarians for two years and I'll hand them complete control of their state's LP.

Evolution is not fact, it is a theory. Too many inconsistencies for it to be fact.

Belief in something without supporting facts is called religion and you should not shove it down my throat.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

That is, in their unyielding devotion to some set of principles they designate as the essence of "Libertarianism" they take positions that are simply absurd in dealing with the real world.

To me, it's as if Libertarianism missed the whole systematic spirit of the 18th century enlightenment (despite their classical liberal economics) and are mired in the 17th century's spirit of system building and abolutes a la Descartes. (Apologies to Ernst Cassierer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment and his distinction between l'esprit systematique and l'estprit de system)

It's so, well, French! It reminds one of the excesses of enthusiasm to which the Frogs are given, and their passion for "logic" that seems to always lead them down the garden path.

Principles are what's important. Innocent until proven guilty; equality under the law; freedom from capricious authority; right to due process; freedom of association; freedoms of speech and worship; right to life; these are principles.

Small government, the cult of the individual -- these are ideological tenets. They may or may not produce a desirable moral outcome, depending if the ideology they are derived from is sound.

The problem in politics -- on both Left and Right -- is those who put ideology above principle.

I'm also curious why I had to preview the message in order to post it. I've never had to deal with such a protocol before.

Really? Wait - let me check. Ah, yes... yes... as I thought. Turns out they mean exactly what I think they do. Thanks though for your concern.

Quite welcome. Could you cite for me the source of your definitions? Assuming you can move your head far enough aside to permit enough light for reading them....

I am on board with all of Steve Verdon's points. I'm not a fan of guns, but if you want CCW, more power to you - I don't care; nutcases with guns aren't going to last long around non-nutcases with guns, so it sorts people out the same way alcohol abuse does.

The enthusiasm for blowing up foreign states, though, is something that I just can't get behind; especially the notion that if a friend of a friend told you that so-and-so was going to attack you, pre-emptive murder is justified. That strikes me as so antithetical to a (my) libertarian mindset that I start wondering if I should call myself one.

My primary voting issue is gun control; I'm against it. Gun control, as SF writer L. Neil Smith says, is a proxy for virtually every other Libertarian issue.

Abortion? Don't care; go ahead and fight among yourselves. Surveillance? Spy all you want, but don't try to use it in court. Drugs? Legalize everything. "Think of it as Evolution in Action"! After a year or so, the susceptible will have weeded themselves out of the gene pool, and those of us who remain won't be excessively tempted by drugs. Since I support CCW, I'm not excessively worried about drug-crazed criminals.

The Iraq/Iran war? I guess I'm not a very good Libertarian; I say "Nuke 'em till they glow, and shoot them in the dark!"