... To be fair, it was a pretty big exception.

... Hope this helps. -C [1]: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard33.html [2]: http://mises.org/daily/1842

... Well, on my end of the discussion, I don't much care how people choose to define the words they use, as long as they are not being misleading or deceptive

... Maybe. But what makes you think that the left we are interested in connecting with is "the political 'left'"? I think "the political 'left'" are a bunch of

... Jefferson was neither a libertarian nor a Democrat. He wasn't a Democrat because the Democratic Party did not, in any meaningful sense, exist in 1800.

... Well, in my experience, libertarians who supported Ron Paul's presidential campaign have often tried to "defend" him against libertarian critics by

... If politics demands mendacity and moral cowardice in the face of popular prejudices, then the best choice for him to make is to stop trying to win at such

... This is an argumentum ad populum. Popular ideas are not always right, and right ideas are not always popular. Certainly, if you advance just about any

mythago:

Rad Geek @60, then you also know that Caplan’s shitty article (and its equally shitty follow-up) was a response to David Boaz’s dead-on criticism of Jacob Hornberger and similar-minded libertarians (Hornberger kinda sort backpedaled, a little bit, but god forbid he admit Boaz nailed him on seeing everything in terms of ‘what benefit does this provided to wealthy, heterosexual white guys’).

Yes, I’m familiar with the pre-existing intra-libertarian debate between Hornberger and Boaz. I don’t know Bumper personally but I am friends with people who have worked with him for years, so I’ve been hearing a fair amount of background and chatter about the whole exchange for a while now. Of course, the issue of the Gilded Age didn’t start with the intra-libertarian debate between Boaz and Hornberger, any more than it started with Caplan’s shitty article. (Kevin Carson, for example, has been criticizing romanticized accounts of the Gilded Age for years now; it occupies a major part of his first book.) Like I said, this is an existing and longstanding debate within libertarian circles., which is why I think it would be a mistake to set things out as if you had all the libertarians on one side “eulogizing” the 1880s, and non-libertarians on the other side calling them out for it.

Besides movie theaters and windshield annoyances, I also ought to mention sitting in on APA talks without having paid the registration fee for the conference.

Also, in my previous comment I meant to add: whether you’re raising the Rothbardian worry that Roderick raises, or the kind of worry that I mentioned in my comments will have some effect on what you can say about the choice of tactics. If the considerations have to do with the claims created, or not created, by a de minimis trespass, then it matters that the students in the sit-in movement maintained disciplined nonviolence (e.g., they went limp when the cops came to pull them away; they didn’t try to fight with the owners in order to stay). If you’re appealing to the Rothbardian considerations (which I think are also legitimate, although I bracketed them for the sake of discussion), it’s not clear that even matters. If the nominal owner is not a real owner, and has no right to evict, then the protestors would have a right to physically fight off attempts to force them out. Make of that whatever you will.