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Thursday, March 6, 2008

Hogarth's magic 8 ball

 
Susan, you can spin it all you want, but the bottom line is that you don't have the courage of your convictions if you call it "fear-mongering" for Carl to straightforwardly report that you would terminate Medicare and Medicaid next week if you could.
 
We'll just have to agree to disagree over whether it's "encouraging" micro-aggression when you announce that henceforth, micro-aggression will only be policed when its victims are willing to pay for targeting, contesting, winning, and enforcing a tort claim the cost of which is many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the damages involved.  This one is just too obvious to bother debating.
 
It's also simply laughable to suggest that it would require "an omniscient being who could See All and Know All and understand perfectly the interplay between cause-and-effect perfectly" to know whether letting tailpipe emissions go un-taxed would lead to more of them than otherwise.  If the future is such an impenetrable opaque void to you, maybe you should end your campaign for LNC and leave the steering of the Party to people who can see far enough into the future to anticipate whether maybe -- just maybe -- the sun might rise tomorrow morning.
 
We're talking about taxing gasoline so that a million micro-aggressing commuters don't create so much of the smog I see as I type this looking out over Silicon Valley.  Your comment about "murder[ing] tens of thousands of innocents" is of course a red-herring attempt to change the subject, but I'm happy to point readers to the debate you lost with me over how/whether to end the Japanese empire's genocidal war of aggression: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2393.
 
I completely agree that the "only" thing you advocate doing against aggression is "add[ing] a '+1' to the non-aggressors column" -- and that's why I think you're not as libertarian as I am.   I know you feel the opposite is the case.  The most important difference between us remains that you think the LP's foundational texts should declare your clean-hands principles to be more libertarian than my anti-aggression principles, whereas I hold that the LP should be more ecumenical in cases where people like you and me each think that the other hasn't come far enough on the path of libertarian intellectual development.