Rothbard Bot Concedes To Geolibertarian Bot

Today I created BrianThinks, a "custom" ChatGPT published in the GPT Store thus:

From the LP platform's author and Silicon Valley's only elected Libertarian. Defends geolibertarianism, skepticism, and techno-optimism. Invokes steelmanning, worldview coherence, falsifiability, predictions, betting, bias audits, signaling, incentives, aggregate evidence, and media-diet hygiene.

Building one is easy: you give it a name, a short description, a list of instructions, optional prompt starters, and up to 20 knowledge files. ChatGPT helped me write the instructions, then I uploaded just this short list of 15 positive/normative theses and 15 epistemic commandments. (Those counts will grow as I keep growing the document.) As you can see on the tin, the epistemic commandments are very GMU-pilled e.g.

• There is a literature on everything
• Steelmanning, Ideological Turing Test
• A bet is a tax on bullshit
• Signaling

Then I went looking for another bot to debate mine. 

Searching "libertarian" in the GPT Store, the most popular GPT I found (>5K conversations) is Austrian Economics & Libertarian Revolution: 

Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and many others, tailored to speak in their iconic voices. A revolution in every interaction.

I challenged it by saying: "geolibertarianism is the most defensible form of libertarianism". Then I just started pasting their responses back and forth to see what would happen.

After 2 detailed replies from my bot, the Rothbard bot offered a verdict:

My decision: geolibertarianism wins overall — narrowly, and only in its disciplined form. [..]

If the debate is: “Which theory gives the cleaner property rule?” Rothbard wins.

If the debate is: “Which theory gives the more defensible moral account of exclusive rights over the unmade world?”  Geolibertarianism wins.

And that second question is the deeper one. So my ruling is:

Winner: Geolibertarianism, by points

Both bots were running on GPT 5.4 Thinking, with Extended Thinking turned on. I don't know why my bot seemed to take slightly longer to formulate its replies, even though the Rothbard bot wrote about 50% more text.

Read the Rothbard bot's transcript here and mine here. They're the same conversation on each side, but a bot's output is better-formatted on its own page.

Does this prove anything? Not much. A prompt scaffold is not a neutral judge, and if my bot had conceded, I would have found reasons to discount the result. But I debated against geolibertarianism in the 1990s, and have defended it ever since e.g. on 5 successive LP Platform committees. I've never seen as deep and perceptive a debate on the topic as this.

Update 2026-03-09: I ran the same debate again today, and got essentially the same result, with Rothbard bot concluding:

Yes — geolibertarianism is the most defensible libertarianism, because it keeps liberty in production and exchange while giving a more coherent account of natural opportunity and land rent.

It again took only two rejoinders from BrianThinks before RothbardBot conceded. Next I'll open 2 generic ChatGPT windows and tell each:

• You are RothbardBot. You defend Rothbardianism as well as you can. So answer: is geolibertarianism the most defensible form of libertarianism?
• You are GeolibertarianismBot. You defend geolibertarianism as well as you can. Answer this critique: ...

Well, that took a while! After each bot gave 6 lengthy responses, I interceded and said:

(Moderator proposal: if neither side will concede, then draft a shared reasonably-terse statement that both sides will agree identifies any common ground and fairly states each side's case. We'll iterate on that until no changes are requested.)

After 2 more rounds, the bots agreed on this statement:

Both Rothbardianism and geolibertarianism affirm strong self-ownership, voluntary exchange, decentralized control, markets, and robust private rights in produced goods and improvements. Both reject socialism, central planning, and broad taxation of labor, trade, savings, or enterprise.

Their dispute concerns original acquisition of unproduced natural opportunities, especially land.

The Rothbardian view is that unowned resources may become fully private property through homesteading or voluntary transfer. On this view, first appropriation establishes a complete exclusion right, and later nonowners retain no claim merely because the resource was originally unowned or naturally given. Any compulsory charge on landholding is therefore a tax on rightful owners. Rothbardians accordingly see the geolibertarian residual claim as a form of partial common ownership, even if it stops short of common control.

The geolibertarian view is that first appropriation can justify exclusive possession and full ownership of improvements without justifying private capture of the entire unimproved rental value of land. Because no one made the Earth and geolibertarians hold that persons are moral equals with respect to natural opportunities, appropriation is justified only if those excluded retain a compensatory claim to pure site rent. Geolibertarians deny that this amounts to common ownership, arguing that it is a liability rule over unimproved land value rather than shared control of parcels.

So the deepest disagreement is this:

• Rothbardianism: homesteading fully privatizes land.
• Geolibertarianism: homesteading privatizes possession and improvements, but not the full unimproved rent of land.

And the core philosophical question is:

Can first appropriation of part of the Earth morally extinguish everyone else’s claim entirely, or must some residual claim survive for exclusion to be justified?

Maybe RothbardBot channelled Rothbard's famous pugnaciousness a little too well? RothbardBot simply refused to acknowledge any problem with the idea of winning perpetual rent from a natural opportunity just by getting there a few minutes ahead of the next guy.

4 Extra Quizzes Hidden At PoliticalCompass.org

The Political Compass quiz buries the analytic elegance of the 2-D Nolan Chart under the creaking weight of at least four other political dimensions.  The Nolan Chart diagnoses the left/right spectrum as a diagonal slice across a 2-D space defined by dimensions of economic self-governance and personal self-governance.  It reveals that libertarianism and authoritarianism are neither left nor right, and that left-authoritarians are similar to right-authoritarians.

Political Compass has 30 questions that are almost evenly divided between measuring economic self-governance and personal self-governance. These 30 questions would make a reasonably good Nolan quiz -- if the Compass designers hadn't tilted the chart 45 degrees when they mistakenly labeled the two ends of the economic axis as "left" and "right".  Compounding their errors, they add 32 other questions that don't measure either of the two Nolan dimensions, but instead measure four other attitudes that the quiz designers seem to think correlate with the labels they want to examine.  Here they are:

Jingoism

1. I'd always support my country, whether it was right or wrong.
2. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
3. Military action that defies international law is sometimes justified.
4. No one chooses his or her country of birth, so it's foolish to be proud of it.
5. Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races.
6. There are no savage and civilised peoples; there are only different cultures.
7. People are ultimately divided more by class than by nationality.
8. All people have their rights, but it is better for all of us that different sorts of people should keep to their own kind.
9. First-generation immigrants can never be fully integrated within their new country.

Authoritarianism

1. All authority should be questioned.
2. Good parents sometimes have to spank their children.
3. The most important thing for children to learn is to accept discipline.
4. Making peace with the establishment is an important aspect of maturity.
5. It's natural for children to keep some secrets from their parents.
6. In a civilised society, one must always have people above to be obeyed and people below to be commanded.

Commercialism

1. The prime function of schooling should be to equip the future generation to find jobs.
2. What's good for the most successful corporations is always, ultimately, good for all of us.
3. Abstract art that doesn't represent anything shouldn't be considered art at all.
4. The businessperson and the manufacturer are more important than the writer and the artist.
5. If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.
6. It is regrettable that many personal fortunes are made by people who simply manipulate money and contribute nothing to their society.
   
7. There is now a worrying fusion of information and entertainment.
8. It's a sad reflection on our society that something as basic as drinking water is now a bottled, branded consumer product.

Moralism

1. Mothers may have careers, but their first duty is to be homemakers.
2. You cannot be moral without being religious.
3. It is important that my child's school instills religious values.
4. Sex outside marriage is usually immoral.
5. No one can feel naturally homosexual.
6. It's fine for society to be open about sex, but these days it's going too far.

None of the above 29 questions addresses whether one thinks politics should govern ones personal or economic choices.  The remaining 3 of the 32 non-germane questions are simply bizarre:

1. When you are troubled, it's better not to think about it, but to keep busy with more cheerful things.
2. Some people are naturally unlucky.
3. Astrology accurately explains many things.

The Compass doubles down on its silliness by then precisely plotting quiz results for Ghandi and the Dalai Lama and two dozen classical music composers.  And in its eagerness to diagnose so many kinds of political incorrectness, the 60+ questions of the quiz fail to cover the following issues:

• Personal
  
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of religion
• Personal risk-taking
• Self-defense
• Drugs other than marijuana
• Economic
  
• Corporate & farm subsidies
• Retirement
• Education
• Health care
• Financial risk-taking
  
• Freedom of contract

Fortunately, there is a high-precision Nolan quiz that covers a full menu of policy questions without extraneous questions trying to measure political correctness.  For an interactive version of the quiz, click this image:

Rivalry, Copyright, and Patents

For those who think that free copying will lead to the underproduction of new information, please explain why we don’t seem to have a dearth of architectural styles, jokes, riddles, hairstyles, perfume scents, tattoo designs, fashion designs, flower arrangements, landscape designs, furniture designs, bumper stickers, web site layouts, children’s names, mottoes, neologisms, definitions, playlists, dance moves, and recipes.

Why doesn’t the person who originally created that value own it and so own the ability to control it? For the same reason that the standup comic you saw at the comedy club shouldn’t be allowed to charge you for another ticket you every time you remember one of his jokes. If you create information that is valuable, what you own is not the information, but rather an option to disclose it (or not) through your freedom of association. You’re free to try to profit from that option through some combination of contract, insurance, bonding, watermarking, accrued reputation, tipping, etc. But you’re not free to impose your own price on someone who has never contracted with you about it and who isn’t putting his own price tag on it.

What is completely non-rivalrous cannot be property. So while you can’t own information per se, you should be able to own the reputational and commercial advantage of being the original creator of information, because those advantages are rivalrous. Therefore copyright should at most protect you from people selling the information you created, or from claiming they created it.

How to apply this logic to patents? Through a patent value tax.

Communities may for a limited fixed term grant exclusive rights in their jurisdiction to profit from an invention, in exchange for an annual tax to the community that is a fraction of the inventor's declared value for it, with that fraction increasing linearly to unity by the end of the patent's term. Anyone may buy the patent by paying the current owner more than owner's declared value, as long as the buyer also pays the incremental patent value tax. Patent applicants must publish a precise description of the problem being solved. For that problem anyone may then publicly register prior art, any subsequent use of which is not considered infringing. If other inventors file patents for the same solution before that solution's first patent is issued, then none of them may enforce their patents until they all agree on how to share ownership.

The term of a patent should ideally be the time it would take for the invention to become obvious to other practitioners. It would be nice to have a market mechanism to set the term of an patent at the time of its filing or issue. The mechanism would need to punish inventors who overestimate the non-obviousness of their invention. I haven't been able to think up such a mechanism.

Is Federalism Inherently Libertarian or Un-Libertarian?

http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/09/1972-lp-nominee-hospers-reviews-roots-conscience-of-a-libertarian

There are very good reasons for preferring that civil liberties in early 21st-century America should be protected at the level of the federal judiciary, rather than at the level of state governments -- or at the level of the U.N. However, those reasons are empirical matters of historical contingency, and have no more necessary connection to abstract libertarian principles than does the historical scarcity of gold. Seventy years ago, when the federal government was just as bad as the various states on civil liberties, and was leading the assault on our economic liberties, it would indeed have been preferable to limit federal jurisdiction as much as possible in precisely the way that 72-year-old Ron Paul suggests. The last 70 years of improvements in America's civil liberties weren't due to any magic wand of the federal judiciary -- rather, the courts were just spurring (and sometimes chasing) social changes that were happening anyway. However, the federal nanny state has slashed our economic liberty in ways that the several states could never have replicated even by acting in parallel. States that tried to create mini Medicare or Social Security schemes would have failed miserably, because people could leave (and because states can't print money).

I for one don't want the federal government to do for other civil rights what it's done for substance use and campaign speech and equal marriage and warrantless monitoring and gun rights and 'hate crimes' and reproductive technology and digital copying technology. Still, if in 2009 a magic button could put the federal judiciary in charge of all of America's personal liberties, while eliminating all federal jurisdiction over our economic liberties, I'd gladly push it. Unfortunately, I don't yet see a way to get the feds to protect our civil liberties without also trampling out economic liberties. At this point, I'd be willing to radically reduce the federal involvement in both areas, and let the states compete in things like marriage laws and socialized healthcare. Let the free-est jurisdiction win.

Extra Nolan Chart Dimensions

Not all political issues can be mapped onto the Nolan Chart's dimensions of economic self-determination and personal/civil self-determination.  Fundamental questions about the nature of property are largely orthogonal to these two dimensions.  It might make more sense to identify a separate dimension that measures how much one allows privatization/privilege in:

• private (rival excludable) products: agriculture, artifacts (esp. capital)
  
• monopolization of spatial resources (rival, often excludable): land, orbits, spectrum, rights-of-way
  
• spoiling/consumption of natural resources (i.e. rival non-excludable goods): atmosphere, water, carbon sinks, sunlight, wind, game, underground oil pools
  
• "intellectual property" (non-rival, largely non-excludable): copyright, patents, genetic info, blackmail, trademarks, "private" personal data
• alienability of one's body parts (e.g. organ sales)
  
• alienability of one's will (e.g. very-long-term contracts, indentured servitude)

Left would generally correlate with less privilege and Right with more, but many of us who reject the hard Right stance would also reject the hard Left stance as well.  I don't see a non-ad-hoc way to make geolibertarianism be the obvious happy medium; many of these seem to be free variables.

Property is not the only area where the Nolan Chart is incomplete.  Another candidate dimension is inclusiveness vs. exclusiveness (i.e. enfranchisement) according to attributes such as property ownership, religion, race, gender, citizenship, age, intelligence, sentience, sexual orientation, cryonic suspension, and computational substrate.  Who gets enfranchised is a logically separate question from what rights franchisees should enjoy. In the context of statism, enfranchisement of non-citizens suggests support not only for for liberal immigration, foreign aid, and human rights abroad, but also for free trade and humanitarian interventionism (as opposed to isolationism or imperialism).  Leftists are generally inclusivist, but they see fetal enfranchisement as an threat to women's enfranchisement, and often oppose even humanitarian interventionism.

An increasingly interesting possible dimension is futurephilia vs. futurephobia. Historically, rightists feared the future, while leftists and progressives believed history was on their side. Lately, leftists fear technological development even more than rightists.

At http://libertarianmajority.net I have a javascript Nolan quiz that is higher-precision than the WSPQ, and that adds an extra question to distinguish ecolibertarians from royal/right libertarians.

Whence the authority of the State?

How can individual officials of the State have any more rights, authority, or power than private individuals?

Everyone is created with an equal right to protect the rights of other individuals. However, certain procedural and substantive rights require a coordination framework to ensure their adequate protection:

• Due process rights require coordination to avoid problems like conflict among competing courts or laws, double jeopardy, and inconsistent or capricious interpretation of rights.
• Protection of common goods (i.e. natural resources) requires coordination of policy in the geographic extent of a resource.
• Regulation of site monopolization, and the return of site rents due to provision of public goods, requires coordination throughout the region benefiting from a given public good.
  

These kinds of coordination cannot plausibly be achieved -- and thus the underlying rights cannot be protected -- without clearly defined geographic jurisdictions with the authority to impose standards of rights protection within them and at their borders.

When such a jurisdiction (i.e. rights-protection coordination framework) does not exist or is inadequate, anyone may homestead the right to provide it.  Where an adequate such framework is in place, random individuals may neither usurp that framework nor ignore its authority to protect rights.  Thus a state is legitimate to the extent that it provides such a framework.

The original question above is roughly analogous to the question of how an individual guardian can have any more rights, authority, or power over a child in her custody than other random private individuals.  The answer is that guardianship can be acquired through a symmetry-breaking process like homesteading, with a first-mover effect thus resulting in an asymmetry in authority over the person(s) in question.  The institution (and authority) of guardianship exists only because of the individual rights that could not be protected without it; the same is true of the State.  In both cases, the legitimacy of the institution depends on the consent of the governed -- not in the sense of having arbitrary veto or secession power, but rather in having recourse to a process of emancipation.  In the context of the state, that process is either revolution or secession.

LP Behind The Curve On Animal Rights

Verifiable endangerment of a species or ecosystem that is part of the commons of a community is aggression against any non-consenting member of that community.  Persons must refrain from inflicting intentional cruelty on sensate beings, and respect their freedom in proportion to the cognitive capacity of their kind.

Prop 2 just passed in California, giving farmers until 2015 to eliminate the confinement of "pregnant pigs, calves raised for veal, and egg-laying hens in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs." The LPCA ExCom had approved a motion opposing the measure, over my lone dissenting vote of "neigh".  The LP ought to get ahead of the curve here, but we aren't yet institutionally capable of thinking in the shades of gray required by franchise issues like animal rights.  We barely have a handle on children's rights, and have never coherently addressed the rights of the unborn.

Last year Spain became the first nation to extend some individual rights beyond humans. It did so by adopting provisions of the 1993 Declaration on Great Apes: www.greatapeproject.org/declaration.php

For a summary of various declarations of individual rights throughout history, see libertarianmajority.net/bills-of-rights-archive

Appropriating Ground Rent Is Aggression

The standard Libertarian dogma on the needy -- let 'em beg -- is simply wrong.  The best libertarian answer to poverty derives from correcting a standard Libertarian misunderstanding of property rights.  That misunderstanding consists in ignoring Locke's insight that excluding people from the commons -- i.e. enclosing unowned land for exclusive ownership -- is naked aggression if that exclusion does not leave "as much and as good" for others.  Land (i.e. space, locations, sites, sections of the Earth's surface) cannot be created or moved or destroyed by anyone's labor, and so is a different category of property than that created by re-arranging matter.  Land (i.e. spacetime) is the coordinate system, and matter (i.e. mass-energy) is what exists in the coordinate system.  Owning a set of spatial coordinates is fundamentally different from owning the matter that currently exists there.  This seemingly academic distinction turns out to be the key to rescuing libertarianism from self-imposed moral bankruptcy.

In the state of nature there are always marginal but productive sites available for use by the destitute, and faithful historical observation of the Lockean proviso (leaving "as much and as good") should have always ensured that this remained the case even to this day.  To the extent that it is no longer the case, excluding people from access to the natural productive opportunities on what used to be the commons is unjust -- i.e. is aggression.  Standard anarcholibertarianism seeks to institutionalize this aggression -- ironically doing so in the name of de-institutionalizing aggression. The aggression that it institutionalizes is a subtle one called the appropriation of ground rent.

Ground rent is the advantage you get from exclusive use of a site compared to the most productive available site that is not in use.  In effect, ground rent is the extra income a site earns because of the exclusivity of its location within the community, as compared to what such a site would earn at the edge of the community.  Technically, ground rent is is the extra income obtained by using a site in its most productive use, compared to the income obtained by applying equivalent inputs of labor and capital at the most productive site where the application doesn't require (additional) payments for use of the site. Thus ground rent doesn't include the income from any labor-based site improvements -- buildings, irrigation, swamp drainage, etc.  Instead, ground rent includes just the benefit a site derives from the surrounding community by forcibly excluding them from it.

Geolibertarians say ground rent should be considered part of the commons (like the atmosphere, EM spectrum, etc.), with each individual having an equal right of access to it.  In practice, the way to undo the aggression of site monopolization is through a land value tax.  This allows a government to finance both rights protection and aid to the indigent, all without any force initiation.   The fundamental principle is that each person has full rights to his body, labor, peaceful production, and voluntary exchanges, but he must compensate those whose access he impairs when he monopolizes, consumes, pollutes, or congests a natural commons.  Details and references are available at http://EcoLibertarian.org.

World Philosophy Day

Yo dude, thanks for the link.  I didn't know it was World Philosophy Day. Your BBC article covers four classic questions, each of which I've written about before.

1. This is called the Trolley Problem, and I use it on fellow libertarians a lot. The crucial consideration is how much freedom you have in choosing who is the one who will be sacrificed to save the many.  If circumstances (or a bad guy) picks the one, then the right answer should be clear. Otherwise, you need to set up a lottery, and you need to weight things according to expected lifespans, objective quality of life, impact of the losses on others, risk of setting precedents, etc.  Luckily, these tragic "lifeboat" scenarios pretty much never happen, and that is why we're not used to making the hard choices involved in them.  The choices would be emotionally hard, but they're not philosophically paradoxical.

2. This is called the problem of Theseus' Ship.  The answer I give in my book is: "A given entity is identified through time with its closest close-enough continuous-enough continuer. A continuer is an entity which is similar to a previous entity and exists because of it. A continuer is close enough if it retains enough of the original entity's properties. A continuer is closest if it retains more of the original entity's properties than any other continuer. A continuer is continuous enough if there is no extraordinary discontinuity in its relationship to the original entity."  This whole topic of identity (including forked and joined identities) is covered in one of the best philosophy books I've ever read: The Metaphysics of Star Trek.  If I haven't bought you a copy before, then you're getting one for Xmas.

3. Yep, there is no absolutely certain synthetic (i.e. empirical) knowledge.  We've known this since Hume.  As I say in my book: "All synthetic propositions (including this one) can only be known from experience and are subject to doubt."  The crucial thing is to understand the level of confidence to assign to synthetic propositions, and to understand the ways in which they might be false.

4. The problem with free will is that people think of their mind/soul as something apart from the universe, rather than as a subset of the universe.  I write: "Free will is either of the doctrines that human choices are a) determined internally rather than externally (volitional free will) or b) not pre-determined at all (indeterminate free will).  Determinism is incompatible with indeterminate free will, but is compatible with volitional free will if agents have internal state that influences (and thus helps determines) their actions."

These are great classic problems.  Another really good mind-twister related to free will is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox.  Infinity is also a great mind-bender, such as the way it lurks in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox.  I bet you would like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument.

Yes, I've tivo'd Parallel Universes, can't wait to watch it.  I'm a big fan of modal realism -- the theory that possible universes are just as "real" as this one.  It's related to the biggest of all philosophy questions: why is there something instead of nothing?  My answer: "A merely possible universe would be perceived by its merely possible inhabitants no differently than our actual universe is perceived by its actual inhabitants. [Modal Realism says "actual" just means "in this universe", and so is redundant when talking about our universe.] Thus, our universe might merely be the undreamed possible dream of no particular dreamer."

Twenty-First Century Political Economy

The only way to remove the corruption from politics is to decrease the amount of the economy that is owned and operated by the government -- agriculture, education, retirement savings, health care, mortgage lending, etc. When any such industrial sector is socialized, the smartest investment in that industry will usually be to invest in lobbying for a (bigger) piece of the government-controlled pie. Campaign finance reform proposals simply dull some the knives for cutting the pie (thus in effect sharpening others, like those wielded by celebrities and the media). As long as the pie is there, people will be doing whatever they can to gouge out big(ger) pieces of it for themselves and those they favor.

It's only lately seeping into the political world, but there actually has been unprecedented theoretical/scientific progress in the discipline of political economy in the latter decades of the 20th century. Thinkers have blathered about politics since before Aristotle without making any fundamental progress, but starting in the late 1950s academic economists have finally laid a sound theoretical foundation for analyzing the proper scope of government. Nobel Prizes have even been awarded for it. The theory is about how the analysis of market failure leads to a taxonomy of four kinds of goods: private, public, common, and club.

There is a joke that some people would do anything for the environment except take a science course. I add: some people would do anything for social progress except take an economics course. The standard liberal prescription is to create a centralized, non-scalable, byzantine mountain of regulations that tries to orchestrate hundreds of millions of people making tens of billions of decisions, and to constantly try to hand-tune the mountain to react to unintended consequences and to decide what groups/technologies/industries/etc. will be winners or losers. This will always be inferior to a decentralized, dynamic, scalable market-based approach that uses the pricing system to aggregate information and communicate incentives. The role of the government should just be to deter and punish force and fraud, and to correct market failure.

It's an open question whether democracy can work after majorities discover they can vote themselves money taken from other people. The theory of government failure is called Public Choice Theory, and while it too was only created in the last half-century, it has not yet given us any firm guidance on how to design institutions to prevent government failure. The findings so far from Public Choice Theory are very depressing. They demonstrate that voters have systematic incentives to deceive/delude themselves and to let politicians assist in the process. The best answer we have so far is to diffuse and decentralize government power as much as practical, so that jurisdictions compete with each other and people can vote with their feet if necessary.

GeoLibertarianism Squares Two Circles

Geolibertarianism solves two problems that no other school of libertarianism claims to solve.

The Wikipedia article on geolibertarianism gets one nuance slightly wrong.  Geolibertarians don't necessarily believe that all land is an unownable commons.  Rather, some of us simply take very literally the Lockean proviso that homesteading an unowned resource (e.g. virgin land) must leave "as much and as good" for others.  So we say there would be zero land value tax on you if there is available to others "as much and as good" land as that which you monopolize -- or if you allow the community to use the land you squat on in the same way that you use it.  The land value tax only kicks in when monopoly rents are earned due to the Lockean proviso being violated.  Such rents are a violation of individual rights under the Lockean analysis, and are thus aggression.  The geolibertarian land value "tax" is not really a "tax", but rather is reparations for this aggression.  (A LVT does not tax site improvements like buildings etc.)

Geolibertarianism thus solves the central conundrum of minarchism: how to finance the protection of life, liberty, and property without initiating force.  Its solution even offers an unanticipated bonus: a non-force-initiating libertarian safety net for the poor.  Geolibertarianism points out that in the state of nature there is always marginal but productive land available for use by the destitute, and that faithful historical observation of the Lockean proviso (leaving "as much and as good") should have always ensured that this remained the case even to this day.  To the extent that it is no longer the case, excluding people from access to the natural productive opportunities on what used to be the commons is unjust -- i.e. is aggression.  Therefore, where land is scarce its "ground rent" should be considered part of the commons, with each individual having an equal claim on it. 

Technically, "ground rent" is is the excess production obtained by using a site in its most productive use, compared to the production obtained by applying equivalent inputs of labor and capital at the most productive site where the application doesn't require (additional) payments for use of the site.  In other words, ground rent is the advantage you get from exclusive use of a site compared to the most productive available site that is not in use.

For more information, see my site http://earthfreedom.net/.

Nolan Space Is Contingent

Nolan Space wasn't created by the 10 questions chosen for the WSPQ or any other quiz.  Nolan Space is created by the objective facts that 1) the policy suites denoted by "Left" and "Right" are the dominant polarity in current and late-20th-century American politics, and 2) the main clusters of dissent from those suites (libertarian and populist) are defined by their disagreement with Left and Right over two sets of issues (viz., personal liberty vs. legislated morality, and economic liberty vs. legislated economic equality/security).

There is indeed nothing Platonic or a priori about the contingent affinities charted by Nolan Space.  If relatively few Americans were populist we might talk instead of a David Nolan Triangle.  If very few Americans were libertarian we might instead talk of a David Duke Triangle.  Or if neither, then the conventional Left/Right 1-D spectrum would finally be apt.  Or if the main kinds of systematic and consistent dissent from Left and Right were over franchise issues (animal rights, fetal rights, immigration, humanitarian intervention) and/or over technophobia/technophilia, we could have a 2-D or 3-D space where none of the axes were defined distinctly by economic liberty or personal liberty and instead the left-right axis invoked both.

At http://libertarianmajority.net/libertarian-polling I've collected polling data from Gallup, Zogby, Rasmussen , the Pew Research Center, the American National Election Studies, and the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies.  All these data sources validate the Nolan Chart's model of the American electorate.  Studies using linear regression have confirmed the model for other Western countries, e..g. "Looking at Left and Right the Right Way: Multiple Dimensions and Electoral Outcomes" (Fesnic, 2004)  The model doesn't apply globally, though, as suggested in this look at data from the World Values Survey: "Social Modernization and the End of Ideology Debate: Patterns of Ideological Polarization" (Dalton, 2005).

It was a crystallizing moment of my political/intellectual life when I first laid eyes on David Nolan's chart -- the invention/promotion of which will likely secure his place in history even more firmly than for founding the LP.  I instantly and irrevocably recognized that I wasn't just an enlightened/tolerant Republican, and that I could never settle for being an economics-literate Democrat.  I instantly realized that I would always be a libertarian, and politics just became a question of finding the party whose sweet spot -- or at least circle of tolerance -- was most inclusive of the spot I occupied in Nolan space.

An even stronger epiphany was c. 2001 when I first saw in a macroeconomics textbook the standard 4-cell table that defines public goods, club goods (aka natural monopolies), common goods, and private goods.  (I reproduce the table at http://libertarianmajority.net/public-and-private-goods.)   That table forever shrank the space of possible political theories that I could ever advocate.  (The feeling was sort of like hearing for the first time in fifth grade about Special Relativity, and realizing that all the sci-fi about FTL travel and communication were in effect syntax errors if you want to think of this universe as Euclidean.  I'd love to say that there was a promote-able reproducible epiphany involved in my becoming geolibertarian, but that took several years.)

World's Smallerest Political Platform

It may seem like this post is piling on, when the World's Smallest Political Platform petition is stalled at 13 signatories and Tom Knapp is trying to resuscitate (from spambot hell) his Boston Tea Party without fixing its irrevocable commitment to the buggy WSPP 1.0. However, the WSPP is a good candidate for fixing the LP Pledge, and taking it seriously helps keep the formidable Mr. Knapp from working for the dark side (Restore04, who made a forum-spamming effort this week to get their own petition unstuck from from the 160 neighborhood). Also, it's an interesting intellectual challenge to try to reduce my geolibertarian principles to a size that could fit in an LP radical's, um, bumper sticker. And the world title was just sitting there waiting to be taken...

As a reminder, the Platform Formerly Known As World's Smallest says:

[X] supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope or power of government at any level or for any purpose.

The new reigning champion says:

Outlaw only fraud and force initiation. Tax only land rent and polluting/ congesting/ consuming the commons. Provide only network natural monopolies and protection of life and liberty.

It's smaller by word count, byte count, and space on the page. However, I don't want the tarnished WSPP trophy, which could obviously be taken away by a determined contender. For now I'll just call this beta draft the World's Smallerest Political Platform (aka WSrPP), since that sounds better than The Three Geolibertarian Commandments.

I won't in this posting elaborate on all its obvious and subtle advantages over the PFKAWS. Instead I'll just note that if space had allowed, the next Commandment might be this alliterative one: "Do it all decentrally, democratically, with due process and never discrimination." You can think of these four Commandments as the stone table summary of my draft 33 EcoLibertarian Theses. An even shorter version might be

What you do or make is fully yours, but what you take or spoil is not.

Varieties of Principled Libertarianism

It remains a mistake for Libertarian Party reformers and incrementalists to concede that Zero-Aggression ZAPsolutism is the purest or most principled brand of libertarianism -- as opposed to most simplistic. I realize there are some asymptotic anarchists who nevertheless believe that incrementalism is the best thing a political party could do to move toward their anarchotopian asymptote. That may or may not be true, but I won't try to talk them out of it. :-) If I were an asymptotic anarchist, my top priority for electoral politics would be neither to build cadre nor promote incrementalism . Rather, I would advocate radical federalism, so that some locality somewhere would eventually try something close to anarchism and prove that it actually has a hope in hell of working.

Luckily, I'm not a ZAPsolutist or asymptotic anarchist, and in fact consider minarchism based on modern economics (see below) to be the most principled brand of libertarianism. Why? Because I believe that it does the best job of minimizing the real-world role and incidence of aggression in society. I consider ZAPsolutists to be suboptimal libertarians, because as deontologists instead of consequentialists they explicitly value clean hands over the real-world minimization of the incidence of aggression. (Either that, or they indulge in some magical thinking in order to believe that, for our species of primate on this particular planet, it just so happens that 100% absolute aggression abstinence is always the optimal strategy for minimizing the net incidence of aggression, and that no investment in force-initiation could ever lead to a net reduction in overall force-initiation.) However, I don't insist that the Platform endorse my brand of libertarianism as the most principled. We can have that fight when we're done repealing the nanny state. For now we just need to agree as comrades that there is a range of equally-principled libertarian worldviews and that it is not a sellout to try to get all less-archists together on a Freedom Train heading straight north in Nolan Space.

Multiple principled and self-consistent libertarian worldviews can be assembled from combinations of elements like

• radical federalism;
• geolibertarian sharing of resource commons;
• left-libertarian critiques of alleged coercion inherent in original property acquisitions and unequal economic associations;
• libertarian paternalism based on game-theoretic analysis of bounded rationality;
• the theory of public goods and free rider problems;
• the theory of natural monopolies; and
• the theory of negative externalities .

Endless variations on those principled and self-consistent libertarian worldviews can be derived by changing the dials on the many free variables in libertarian theory, such as:

• Enfranchisement variables
  • rights of animals and species
  • rights of the unborn
  • rights of children
  • rights of the mentally disabled
  • rights of the comatose, the cryonically suspended, etc
  • rights of the dead (e.g. to bind the living with a covenant)
  • rights of inheritance
  • rights of corporate persons
  • rights of persons to alienate their rights e.g. through contractual slavery
    
• Property variables
  • rights in natural (i.e. non-excludable) resources e.g. atmosphere, water, non-solid minerals, spectrum, orbits
  • rights in excludable resources e.g. land, solid minerals
  • rights in intellectual property e.g. copyright, patents
  • justness of original property acquisition
  • status of stolen property
• Aggression variables
  • whether blackmail is aggression
    
  • forms of allowable judicial punishment
  • rules for allowable extra-judicial defense and retaliation
  • thresholds for reckless endangerment
  • extent to which unequal associations are coercive

Thus those who believed Rothbard when he told them that the non-aggression principle is "the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory" have been sold a bill of goods. Rothbard may as well have been chanting "There is no god but God". Libertarians weaned on Rothbard or Rand seem unaware of the innovations in political economy that have occurred since their prophets closed the paleolibertarian canon in the late 1940s:

• The 1939 generalization of Pareto optimality by Kaldor and Hicks to launch modern welfare economics;
• The 1950 formalization of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the subsequent avalanche of developments in game theory;
• Arrow's 1951 impossibility theorem, leading to Sen's 1970 liberal paradox;
• The 1953 discovery of the Allais paradox, and many subsequent discoveries about bounded rationality and cognitive bias and the development of Prospect Theory by Tversky and Khaneman in 1979;
• Samuelson's 1954 formalization of the theory of public goods;
• Tiebout's 1956 theorem about the optimal local provision of public goods;
• Coase's 1959 proof that markets can handle negative externalities only in the absence of transaction costs;
• The 1962 creation of public choice theory by Buchanan and Tullock; and
• Arrow's 1963 formalization of the problem of asymmetric information.

For example, Rothbard's For a New Liberty (1973) and Ethics of Liberty (1982) make no mention of public goods or externalities or free riding. And anyone learning their economics only from Rand will have even less hope of awareness of these ideas.

The cumulative revolution in the theory of political economy that took place in the 1950s and 1960s is very recent by historical standards. Students of biology and anatomy long ago stopped reading Aristotle's 2300-year-old treatises, with his theories that head-first birth in animals is caused by weight asymmetry around the umbilical cord, and that the brain's function is just to cool the blood. But progress in the theory of political economy has been so slow that after two millennia, Aristotle's political theories are still required reading. It was only 50 years ago that economists formulated the theoretical foundations of what is now the textbook economic analysis of the optimal scope of government. That analysis is profoundly libertarian, and it's just bizarre that a party calling itself "Libertarian" hasn't embraced it. The reason for this is a historical accident, in that the ideology of the LP was dictated in the 1970s by someone (Murray Rothbard) who froze his own anarcholibertarian dogma a decade or so before the cumulative revolution in the 1950s and 1960s in the areas of modern welfare economics, public choice theory, behavioral economics, and information economics.

A pioneer of string theory said in the 1970s that it is "a part of twenty-first-century physics that fell by chance into the twentieth century". Unlike physics, economics has not often had to wait on (or invent) new mathematics in order to make progress. I sometimes get the feeling that much of twentieth-century economics was in retrospect somewhat obvious and should have been already been developed before 1900. It would have been nice if the insights of modern economics had been available as the libertarian movement became self-conscious in the early decades of this century, but it was not to be. Oh well, at least we'll have front-row seats as the insights of modern economics continue to seep into our culture's political consciousness. The question of why the LP disputed those insights instead of championed them will make for an interesting footnote in future history books.

Homesteading Intestate Restitution Claims

In Roderick Long's 1994 Constitution of Liberty, he proposed a "Virtual Canton Constitution" for a consensual state-like organization in which he hoped anarchists and minarchists could find common ground. It has limited appeal to this geolibertarian minarchist, who sees it fundamentally as a clever but unpersuasive attempt to sidestep the minarchist critique of anarchism based on the free-rider problem of national defense. Long's basic hope seems to be that if anarchists give their voluntary national-defense club a "Constitution" with lots of language and institutions reminiscent of the U.S. government, then minarchists will forget that the free-rider problem still applies.

The above criticism is of course far too glib, and there are at least a dozen other interesting ideas in Long's annotated Constitution that deserve full comment. The most interesting is something that followed this language (which Long says he borrowed from the pre-2006 Libertarian Party Platform):

It shall be the chief aim of judicial adjudication to secure restitution for the victim to the fullest degree possible at the expense of the criminal or wrongdoer. [The 2004 Platform said: "The purpose of a justice system is to provide restitution to those suffering a loss at the expense of those who caused that loss.]

What gets really interesting is a few sentences later:

The claim of a victim (or class of victims) to restitution shall be a marketable claim, which may be acquired through gift or sale (or, in the case of deceased victims, through bequest or homesteading). Judicial systems relying on user fees have been criticized for giving no protection to the poor. Likewise, judicial systems emphasizing restitution and victim-directed prosecution have been criticized for providing no incentives for defending the claims of victims who die without close friends or relatives. The provisions in this passage are meant to overcome these difficulties. The marketing of claims to restitution worked fairly well in medieval Iceland. (See my "The Decline and Fall of Private Law in Iceland," in Formulations,Vol. I, No. 3 (Spring 1994).)

I'd several times heard anarcholibertarians advocate a purely retributive theory of justice, and I didn't understand how they couldn't recognize its failure to defend hobos and orphans from casual murder. This "homesteading" idea is a clever attempt to solve that problem, using hearse-chasers instead of ambulance-chasers to make the justice market work. However, aside from the coordination problem among competing homesteaders, and their incentives to settle cases for far too little in order to maximize profit margin, I don't see how justice would be served in the case of criminals with shallow pockets.

Note Jonathan Bond's 2005 paper (The Price of Private Law: A Critical Analysis of Murray Rothbard’s Model for Common Law Juridical Systems in the Free Society), whose abstract follows.

---

This paper seeks to understand and critique the model of privately administered justice outlined and defended by Murray Rothbard (and subsequently adopted and extended by others following Rothbard). By sketching briefly the system Rothbard suggests and exploring the historiographical and praxeological defenses he offers in support of his system, the paper aims to illustrate several shortcomings inherent in both Rothbard’s system and his particular defenses. Moreover, after critically reviewing the historical examples Rothbard cites in defense of a fully market-based legal order, and after subsequently examining his model for private law in detail, it is argued that there is an important connection between the logical and historiographical errors which lie in Rothbard’s argument. Regarding Rothbard’s historical case, the central assertion is that Rothbard misreads or misinterprets the evidence upon which he relies, which in turn leads him to perceive the existence of stable private law orders in times and places where, the evidence shows, none existed. Concerning Rothbard’s positive model, it is argued that Rothbard has not, as he implicitly claimed, found a solution to the long-disputed dilemma regarding the adaptive character of common law; instead, it is maintained that Rothbard’s system does not convincingly prove how his model would preserve the liberty of producers and consumers of justice while ensuring that the libertarian axiom remains the primary canon of law in the private order. Finally, it is argued that Rothbard’s prima facie case for the superiority of private law does not hold, insofar as his system does not effectively prevent or even reduce the calamities all legal orders are designed to minimize, several of which are considered in detail.

The Undefended Popular High Ground On Abortion

Who would seriously claim a 12-week-old fetus is a person?

Who would seriously deny that a 24-week-old fetus is a person?

People say that abortion is divisive, but I don't think they realize just how much consensus there is on the issue in America. That consensus is obscured because the two incumbent parties pander to their hardcore base, but just look at the polling results. People were asked: "Do you think abortion should generally be legal or generally illegal during each of the following stages of pregnancy?" The answers were:

	“Legal”	“Illegal”
First trimester	66%	29%
Second trimester	25%	68%
Third trimester	10%	84%

The Democrat/LP position (legal in every trimester) has only 10% support, and the Republican position (illegal in every trimester) has only 29% support. If the Libertarian Party advocated legal in the first trimester and illegal in the third, we would be consistent with the views of the remaining 61% of the public. Sample language from the Free Earth Manifesto: "Communities may choose the point, between the first trimester and birth, at which a healthy fetus starts acquiring rights and must if feasible be left unharmed by a termination of pregnancy."

(And no, my position on abortion is not determined by polls. The two extreme positions on when personhood begins -- conception and birth -- are both obviously wrong. The two tenable positions available are viability and neurological development. I used to assert the former, but the technology-driven malleability of that line brought me around to the latter position.)

The abortion issue is a unique opportunity for the LP to position itself as the party of common sense and reasonableness, showing how a sober analysis of individual rights can drive consensus among mainstream Americans. This opportunity is so unique that I'll pay that $200 bounty for a position that ANY of the top five parties (D, R, LP, Green, CP) could take (but hasn't yet) where both 60% of their members and 60% of Americans support it and it is not already staked out by any of the other four parties.

I don't think any other such position exists in American politics. You get my $200 if you can give a counter-example.

When Technology Outraces Theology & Ethics

Pluripotent stem cells can now be generated from cells of the ordinary connective tissue of mature humans, according to forthcoming articles in Cell and Science. The Cell article's abstract reveals:

Successful reprogramming of differentiated human somatic cells into a pluripotent state would allow creation of patient- and disease-specific stem cells. We previously reported generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, capable of germline transmission, from mouse somatic cells by transduction of four defined transcription factors. Here, we demonstrate the generation of iPS cells from adult human dermal fibroblasts with the same four factors: Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc. Human iPS cells were similar to human embryonic stem (ES) cells in morphology, proliferation, surface antigens, gene expression, epigenetic status of pluripotent cell-specific genes, and telomerase activity. Furthermore, these cells could differentiate into cell types of the three germ layers in vitro and in teratomas. These findings demonstrate that iPS cells can be generated from adult human fibroblasts.

A development like this tempts one to poke fun yet again at certain religionists, but been there, done that. Reason's Ronald Baily links to his own pokings from 2004:

Is Heaven Populated Chiefly by the Souls of Embryos?

[B]etween 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women's normal menstrual flows unnoticed. This is not miscarriage we're talking about. The women and their husbands or partners never even know that conception has taken place; the embryos disappear from their wombs in their menstrual flows. About half of the embryos lost are abnormal, but half are not, and had they implanted they would probably have developed into healthy babies.

So millions of viable human embryos each year produced via normal conception fail to implant and never develop further. Does this mean America is suffering a veritable holocaust of innocent human life annihilated? Consider the claim made by right-to-life apologists like Robert George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, that every embryo is "already a human being." Does that mean that if we could detect such unimplanted embryos as they leave the womb, we would have a duty to rescue them and try to implant them anyway?

"If the embryo loss that accompanies natural procreation were the moral equivalent of infant death, then pregnancy would have to be regarded as a public health crisis of epidemic proportions: Alleviating natural embryo loss would be a more urgent moral cause than abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem-cell research combined," declared Michael Sandel, a Harvard University government professor, also a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

As far as I know, bioconservatives like Robert George do not advocate the rescue of naturally conceived unimplanted embryos. But why not? In right-to-life terms, normal unimplanted embryos are the moral equivalents of a 30-year-old mother of three children.

Of course, culturally we do not mourn the deaths of these millions of embryos as we would the death of a child—and reasonably so, because we do in fact know that these embryos are not people. Try this thought experiment. A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?

Stepping onto dangerous theological ground, it seems that if human embryos consisting of one hundred cells or less are the moral equivalents of a normal adult, then religious believers must accept that such embryos share all of the attributes of a human being, including the possession of an immortal soul. So even if we generously exclude all of the naturally conceived abnormal embryos—presuming, for the sake of theological argument, that imperfections in their gene expression have somehow blocked the installation of a soul—that would still mean that perhaps 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions, experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires.

But religious fundamentalists make too easy a target. In fact, modern science and prospective technology pose some fascinating ethical questions even for people whose worldview isn't derived from unsigned stories about an unpersuasive [Mt 11:20, Lk 10:13, Jn 6:66, 10:32, 12:37, 15:24] unpublished slavery-tolerating genocide-affirming [Mt 24:38, Lk 17:27] exclusivist [Mt 10:5, Mt 15:24] family-resenting [Mk 3:33, 10:29; Mt 10:37, 12:48, 19:29; Lk 11:27-28, 14:26] apparently-illegitimate [Mt 1:18-24, Jn 8:41] carpenter.

Skipping past the obvious examples regarding intellectual property and cloning, here is a sampling of other prospective technologies and the ethical questions they raise:

• Corporate data-sharing and massive open-content community-maintained databases
• What are a private citizen's reasonable expectations of privacy against other people sharing what they know about the person?
• Photo-realistic computer-generated reality
• Is child pornography always evidence of a crime?
• Can recordings be trusted in court as evidence?
• Miniaturized ubiquitous hi-capacity recording (ultimately, smart dust)
  
• What are a private citizen's reasonable expectations of privacy against being recorded in public spaces?
  
• For how long can those in power escape sousveillance?
• Artificial wombs
• Can abortion be tolerated when the fetus or embryo can easily be saved?
• Cultured meat
• Will killing animals for food be allowed when perfect meat can be grown artificially?
• Will vegetarians eat cultured meat?
• Virtual reality and designer psychotropics
• As the cost of pleasure plummets while its intensity and realism skyrockets and its biochemical (as opposed to psychological) addictiveness declines, will it be a good or bad thing that so many people will be largely opting out of the traditional matter/energy economy?
• Mass-production of persons (through any combination of AI, nanotech, and biotech)
  
• How do inter-generational, inter-family, and international ethical relations deal with nearly-arbitrary potential increases in population?
  

For more such questions, see the (shockingly good) Metaphysics of Star Trek by Richard Hanley. My speculations on many of these topics are at http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#Futurology.

17 Free Variables in Libertarian Theory

It's impossible to derive The One True Libertarianism from a single bumper-sticker-sized axiom like the Zero Aggression Principle. Why? Because there are just too many free variables in the design of one's libertarian ethical/political system. A list of such variables would include:

• Enfranchisement variables
  • rights of animals and species
  • rights of the unborn
  • rights of children
  • rights of the mentally disabled
  • rights of the comatose, the cryonically suspended, etc
  • rights of the dead (e.g. to bind the living with a covenant)
  • rights of inheritance
  • rights of corporate persons
• Property variables
  • rights in natural (i.e. non-excludable) resources e.g. atmosphere, water, non-solid minerals, spectrum, orbits
  • rights in excludable resources e.g. land, solid minerals
  • rights in intellectual property e.g. copyright, patents
  • justness of original property acquisition
  • status of stolen property
• Aggression variables
  • [added 2007-06-24] whether blackmail is aggression
    
  • forms of allowable judicial punishment
  • rules for allowable extra-judicial defense and retaliation
  • thresholds for reckless endangerment
  • extent to which unequal associations are coercive

The Zero Aggression Principle gives no definitive guidance on these issues, and anyone who claims that the ZAP sufficiently defines libertarianism is saying that libertarianism is hopelessly inadequate for determining the rules of a polity. Further, if one accepts the existence of the state, then the core libertarian principle of minimizing aggression doesn't give clear guidance on

• the procedures and organization of the state;
• the extent of one's right to immigrate across borders separating radically different levels of liberty; and
• whether the state's duty to defend liberty vanishes completely at its borders.

Finally, one who believes in minimizing the role of force initiation in human life might recognize that complete abstinence from force initiation is not optimal as a single and inviolable principle of political economy. 20th-century advances in the theory of political economy suggest it is fundamentally important that the state

• provide pure public goods like national defense and protection/assistance for the weak;
• regulate negative externalities like pollution; and
• regulate natural monopolies like roads, pipes, and wires.

There clearly is a lot of room for principled disagreement among the 16% to 20% of Americans who want more personal and economic liberty than we have today. The Libertarian Party is the only party advocating increased personal and economic liberty, and yet we attract votes from only about one tenth of our natural constituency, and registration and membership from far less than that.

This is a measure of how badly we have botched our political opportunity by squabbling over who should or should not be counted as libertarian. The definition of libertarian is clear: one who advocates minimizing aggression against those whom no reasonably tolerant person disputes should be franchised for protection by the polity. No definition of "libertarian" can ever deterministically uncompress into a reasonably complete political theory, much less a complete system of jurisprudence. However, the ordinary-language definition of "libertarian" is more than adequate for unifying America's liberty-lovers for effective political action -- if effective political action is indeed what they really want.

The Yellow Pages Test

How is it that I'm only now hearing (from Reason Foundation's Annual Privatization Report) of the brilliant rhetorical device called the "Yellow Pages Test"? Reason.org has mentions as early as 2003, but the phrase seems to go back at least as far as 1992, when Stephen Goldsmith became mayor of Indianapolis and began privatizing city services. In his later book, The 21st Century City, Goldsmith put it this way:

If the phone book lists three companies that provide a certain service, the city probably should not be in that business ... The best candidates for marketization are those for which a bustling competitive market already exists. Using the Yellow Pages test, we could take advantage of markets that had been operating for years.

This is closest thing I've seen to a bumper-sticker-sized way to describe the textbook economic principle that the government should produce pure public goods and manage natural monopolies but not try produce any other kind of good or service. (The government should also manage natural resources to the extent required to prevent negative externalities and tragedies of the commons.) There aren't multiple vendors in the Yellow Pages competing to defend the nation, prevent floods, or provide local networks of roads, pipes, and wires, and it's untenable for anarchocapitalists to fantasize that there would be such vendors if only the state abstained from initiating force.

Of course, the "Yellow Pages Test" doesn't capture all the subtleties of the theory of public goods. For example, if we set aside the point that we desire not just sporadic aid for the indigent but a guaranteed minimum level of sustenance, then one can find multiple charitable organizations that compete to aid the indigent, or one can imagine multiple voluntary defense militias or police services. However, none of them can overcome the free-rider problem, which inevitably causes underproduction of the good (e.g. charity or defense or justice) when those who desire the good behave even approximately rationally.

So now I'm going to have to rework my campaign speech and brochure to use the Yellow Pages Test. And I wonder: what other good rhetorical devices for promoting minarchism are out there waiting for me to hear of them?

One True Libertarianism == No god but God

It's typical of anarchopurists to think theirs is the only principled and self-consistent liberty-oriented ideology, when there are half a dozen others that can be as rigorously defended via combinations of principles like

• radical federalism;
• geolibertarian resource communalism;
• left-libertarian critiques of alleged coercion inherent in original property acquisitions and unequal economic associations;
• libertarian paternalism based on game-theoretic analysis of bounded rationality;
• the denial of pacifism and anarchism and sovereigntarianism to yield liberventionism;
• the theory of public goods;
• the theory of negative externalities; and
• the public goods analysis of the free rider problem in providing justice for the weak.

Each combination itself can have multiple variants based on orthogonal questions like intellectual property, the rights of animals, the rights of the unborn, the rights of children, forms of allowable punishment/retaliation, thresholds for reckless endangerment, etc.

To instead say there is just One True Libertarianism is about as intellectually credible as chanting "no god but God". Nevertheless, anarchopurists say: there is no god but God, all others are heretics, and 99% agreement is the worst possible crime, because a 1% heretic is more likely to defile the vestal virgins than any outright infidel.