Yep.

Testing out Disqus comments.

Test.

Thanks, Tod!

Thanks, Glyph! Yeah, I'm sure there's some influence there though the Shins were never a big favorite. The thing about writing songs is you can always hear the influences through the cracks.

That's strange. IE works for me and I haven't heard any similar complaints. Maybe try clearing your browser cache. If that doesn't work, you can always try smacking the side of your computer really hard. Or...Firefox/Chrome/Opera, etc....

Congrats, Elias!

For my part, I always pictured Burt as far more yellow.

It should be posted soon.

So what's more important: handsome or chill? You can't have it both ways.

Radiant, but also maybe just a tiny bit bored looking...

Oh, quite. Very pretty, Nob.

It's like déjà vu all over again. Oh, and when you talk to Megan ask her where my guest blogging spot is...

I'm agnostic at this point. I could see the show going any number of directions. As you say, it's just a pilot and while there are occasionally brilliant pilots (Lost, Breaking Bad) more often than not they're a poor representation of the following series.

Sure, which is why democracy is so important, alongside some form of constitutional and legal limitations. The question is one of balance.

Okay, so we can probably quote lots of libertarians defending democracy, just as we can quote Hayek saying he prefers a liberal dictatorship. It sort of misses the point either way. What does an ideal libertarian society look like? If we are to draw it out to its logical conclusion, or to its ideal end-point, how much democracy is left? How do libertarians prevent democracy from re-embiggening the state which it will almost certainly do?

I suppose I see libertarianism as the last little step before anarchy, and anarchists would need a similar mechanism to keep people from acting democratically to form a state. In both instances, I don't see how this is done short of some serious level of coercion. This is the main point - not whether von Mises has a fondness for democracy because it handles power transfers better than other systems. The point is that in order to really get to an ideal libertarian state you need an enormous amount of anti-democratic coercion. Maybe that's more ideal than the coercion in our current society - I don't think so, but it's a fair point. But you're dodging that point by saying that it's "more courageous and more analytically useful simply to admit it, to realize that some coercions may after all be necessary for achieving the ends you prefer, and to recognize that any amount of coercion should give us pause just the same."

I never said taxes weren't coercion, after all. I said that libertarians talk about how coercive they are all the time and other forms of coercion, but rarely do we hear of the sort of coercion necessary to implement a truly libertarian society.

Of course, libertarians themselves have a huge hodge-podge of views, so this is more of a critique of the use of the term coercion to describe everything other than libertarian society itself than it is a critique of any individual libertarian whether that's you or von Mises or Ron Paul. Society is always coercive. I don't see a libertarian society as any less coercive than the one we have now. Just different.

Creepiest song I've heard in a long time, that I can't get out of my head:

Mike Farmer - I say this because what you demand is more radical than what I demand. You want to abolish the welfare state entirely. That's a much larger leap than my hodge-podge of deregulated markets + robust welfare state. I'm asking for a mixed economy to stay mixed but get more free on the one hand and more socialist on the other. You want a minarchist state. Your idea, I believe, is less pragmatic - which, by the way, says nothing of the merits of the ideas themselves. I respect your ideas, I just disagree with the feasibility of their implementation.

I think the conversation is as open-minded here as it's like to be anywhere. It's also about as civil as you're like to see outside of an echo chamber.

Brandon - not at all. My opinion on the theory of libertarianism is quite positive, actually. My problem, and my description here, is how I see libertarianism playing out *in practice*.

Furthermore, while I agree that maximization of moral hazard can be very bad, providing things like universal healthcare are hardly the ways I would worry about that happening.

The problem with this line of argument, Mike, is that we basically already have a very mixed economy and the parts where people are given things like food stamps or medical care are quite literally the least harmful parts of that system. In fact, you could easily keep or expand those parts, and still make leaps and bounds in the "leave people alone" department. I can never really understand why any libertarian even gives a shit about Social Security or Medicare or any of that while wars rage, prohibition and mass incarceration continue apace, and so forth. Priorities!

@DarrenG - pragmatism looms very large in my thinking lately, I admit. Ideology, theory - these are deeply alluring, but also fundamentally flawed on their own. Ideology is inevitably tempered by political realities; theory watered down by pragmatism. So it goes.

Well I think the idea is to have the sort of redistribution and safety net needed to allow people to work a lot less. So you could freelance or work part time and not be destitute.

I suppose Bill means "prose" not "pros" (but who knows? I'm just guessing). When he gets all superior my inferior (interior?) complex is a blessing. But I've seen this declinist apoplectic nonsense before, and this time I'd rather just show you the door. Thanks for playing, no use staying, if all you can do is play holier than thou. When entire comments boil down to how my dog could kick your dog's ass, I'll pass. I'm bothered enough by lack of paragraph breaks - to stake much more on this would be a mistake.

Actually, all kidding aside, there is some pretty graphic sexual violence in this book.