It seems to have stalled out, however.

Just kidding – but only slightly…

Thus, you don’t have to feed the trolls on the Angela Keaton thread. So, please join me in not feeding them there trolls.

Favoring an acceptance of Jesus Christ as your savior does not (and if one follows His teachings, cannot) represent a desire for compulsory “acceptance.” Indeed, it doesn’t work that you freely embrace Jesus if someone holds a gun on your head.

One can certainly argue that Drunkenmiller is not a libertarian and is an authoritarian because he favors compulsory taxation for national defense (and presumably other things he wants to have without paying for himself). However, his view that prostitution and crack smoking should be legal are not authoritarian views.

It is possible that he’s confused and hasn’t worked out consistent ethics. I think it more likely that he doesn’t want them.

Stop the wars.

I’m just spinning out the contract-law notion of duress:

Most courts would see this contract as signed under duress because of the situation of legitimate emergency.

I’m just spinning out emergencies even further. I mean, have you considered why payday lending has such low standards of evidence for whether you actually have income? It’s because they really don’t care if the customer can legitimately afford the loan or not. They’ll lend, lend, lend, regardless of the realistic ability to pay.

Again, I do not believe that the AT LAW definition should void legitimate contracts. I just think that the payday lenders operate on sharking, need and avarice and they know that is what they are doing.

…is completely unlibertarian in my view.

I see G.E’s been in the echo-chamber of his head for so long that anything people support that he supports = libertarian; and anything against that = unlibertarian.

Frankly, G.E., you have a slippery, sloppy and ill-defined notion of “libertarian”.

I don’t approve of crack usage, G.E. Do you? Does that mean it should be illegal? How hard is this for you?

In other words, the circumstances dictate. Charging ten dollars for a baby formula may be justified if formula is in severe shortage, whereas it is not acceptable (to me) to raise that price when it’s late at night and someone just needs to feed their kid. Then you’re just being a douche.

So, not one penny more at night?

I can easily see why some business owner might want to charge more at night. Perhaps it costs her more to keep the doors open at night, since there aren’t as many customers, and a smaller pool of workers who are willing to work that shift, and more robberies?

Typically, this problem gets solved by stores closing at night, but I see no inherent reason why it can’t be solved by fluctuating prices. In fact, some things (drinks, movies, etc.) do fluctuate in price based on time of day.

Any limitation on what a willing buyer is willing to offer a willing seller just reduces availability of the desired good or service – in other words, in your example, increases the likelihood that kid won’t eat that night.

I see that Paulie has already taken it here, but i’ll go ahead and make it personal. I believe the act of selling pornography, or creating it, is immoral. Am I not libertarian?

But you still disapprove, at least on a moral level, of the buying and selling of sexual services, no?

I’m trying to hash out the implications of this definition. Do you mean one can’t be a libertarian and personally disapprove of (without wanting to use force to shut down – just personally disapprove) any good or service being offered for sale?

I think they can’t disapprove of teh buying and selling of any good or service that is not in violation of individual rights. They could disapprove of the activity in question, but not the buying and selling. Lending and borrowing are critical building blocks of the free economy, and to have disdain for the one legitimate source of commercial lending in the economy, where the action in question IS the buying/selling of the good (money) and service (exchange of risk and time preference), is completely unlibertarian in my view. It is anticapitalist and I do not accept “libertarian” socialists as my fellow travelers.

This case is what we are talking about here.

I’m trying to hash out the implications of this definition. Do you mean one can’t be a libertarian and personally disapprove of (without wanting to use force to shut down – just personally disapprove) any good or service being offered for sale?

GE, do you have a definition of the term, so that I can relate it your conclusion?

Anti-state. Pro-capitalist. Pro-individualism. Simply being anti-coercion doesn’t make my definition — and besides, Druckenmiller is NOT anti-coercion, even if he is in this case.

To you anti-payday lenders out there: What do you think interest rates would be if regular banks could not create 90% of the money they lend out of thin air? Saying payday-loan rates are “high” is absurd. Fed rates are low.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/2004election.html

GE, do you have a definition of the term, so that I can relate it your conclusion?

The vast majority of anarchist libertarians I know of favor gradualism. There are exceptions, however.

The anarchist wing has a tendency to preclude gradualism.

Correct.

Libertarian = minarchist.

No. Where did you get that?

Libertarian = non-initiation of coercion principle. Some libertarians are anarchists, believing that the existence of a territorial monopoly on force is itself an initiation of coercion.

Others are minarchists, believing the existence of a night watchman state is essential to preventing greater levels of private initiations of coercion.

Some anarchists fall into the first type of libertarian. Other anarchists believe that initiating coercion/force is OK, desirable, and even necessary. While they do not believe in a state, they do believe that their collectives are justified in taking property (and, in some cases, lives) from unwilling persons, who have not done anything of a similar nature to them, by force.

This is because they consider private property to be entirely illegitimate.

The views of libertarian anarchists are different from the views of anti-private property anarchists. Thus, the term anarchist is insufficient to describe our outlook.

I just don’t see why you need the label of libertarian, paulie.

That’s what we have been historically called. I can also argue that strictly speaking minarchists are not libertarians, in that they advocate the existence of a state which is an initiation of coercive force by the very nature of its existence, but I don’t for two reasons:

1) (At least some) minarchists wish to be called libertarians

and

2) They are the allies of anarchist libertarians, at least until we get to the point of a night watchman state.