... They're still alive, and currently in control of about 3 dozen autonomous villages in Chiapas. Which is more than I can say for most Mexican revolutionary

I don’t think that “innocent” in “innocent suspect” can be understood as an alienans adjective just as such — an innocent suspect still is a suspect. For Jones to recognize Smith as innocent would be for Jones to no longer suspect them, but of course that’s an epistemic issue, whereas Smith’s innocence or guilt doesn’t depend on Jones’s state of knowledge.

It does have the interesting feature of being like Moore’s paradox in a certain respect — you have a description which is not internally contradictory (it’s perfectly possible for a person to be both innocent and also suspected), but nevertheless cannot be rationally applied in a first-person context (I can rationally say that someone you suspect is innocent, and I can even admit the possibility that someone I suspect is innocent; but I cannot coherently assert that that is actually the case, since for me to describe someone as innocent is for me to thereby remove them from my list of suspects).

Roderick: I’ve often seen it claimed that freedom for women was actually somewhat stronger in the late medieval period than in the early modern period. Of course I’ve seen the opposite claimed as well. I haven’t studied the issue enough to judge one way or another, but I don’t rule either position out.

One of the funny things that happens in discussions about this stuff is that the Middle Ages often get indicted for events that actually happened in the Renaissance and early modernity. One of the strong reasons for saying that early modernity Europe was even worse for women than medieval Europe had generally been, is the mass torture and mass murder of hundreds of thousands of women in the European witch-craze from the mid-15th through the mid-18th century.

Yet this gynocide is almost never discussed, except by a handful of feminist scholars, as an important feature of modernization; witch-hunts are far more commonly treated as either an isolated incident that just happened to overlap with the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, or, worse, as if it were somehow a medieval phenomenon, quite in spite of the fact that it didn’t start until the last half of the 15th century, whereas most secular and religious authorities in medieval western Europe, from Charlemagne up until the 14th century, held to the Augustinian doctrine that witches did not exist, that any belief in the efficacy of witchcraft was heretical, and even (as at the Council Frankfurt) held that witch-hunters could be punished by death.

MBH: But you can’t a priori rule-out the ability to commoditize debt

No, but I think you can discover some apriori conditionals (of the form “If condition X obtains, then you cannot successfully commoditize debt”). And I think that some of those conditions have antecedents which can be known (aposteriori) to be very unlikely to ever turn out false. (E.g., basic facts about the extreme diversity of ways of making a living and the extreme diversity of time-preferences among human beings.)

And, in any cae, like I said, I think that the important distinction between what’s being called “commodity money” here and other kinds of money isn’t actually the distinction between commoditized and non-commoditized goods, but rather an underlying distinction which (under present conditions) the commodity/non-commodity distinction tends to track — the distinction between goods in hand and promises of future delivery of goods. I certainly think that that distinction is conceptual, not just empirical, and has a lot of important features which can be spelled out apriori, on praxeological grounds.

MBH: especially were there program which did consider debtors on a case-by-case basis.

Huh? I’m not sure I understand where you’re going here. My point is that, to precisely the extent you have to consider debtors on a case-by-case basis, you’re (therefore) no longer treating debt as a commodity. People evaluate Van Goghs on a case-by-case baiss; they don’t buy barrels of petroleum or tons of wool that way.

MBH: Right? To classify as a commodity there just has to be demand somewhere.

No. Not all goods are commodities. Among other things, a commodity good is (1) fungible and (2) produced by multiple producers. But debt in general is not fungible: its value varies with the risk of default, among other things, which has historically made it very difficult to commoditize successfully.[^1] U.S. government debt (within particular classes of debt) is fungible (e.g., US$1 of one T-bill is as good as US$1 of another T-bill), but it’s fungible precisely because it is only put out by a single producer, not by multiple producers.

Of course, technical quibbles aside, the real point of distinction here is that the kinds of money called “commodity money” are typically based upon an existing good which is already in hand. (Because of the standard list of desiderata for monetary goods, the goods-in-hand tend very strongly to end up being classic commodity goods like precious metals, base metals, agricultural produce, etc.) The other kinds of money which we’re discussing are not a record of an already-existing good, but rather are based on promises for future delivery of some good which does not yet exist, or some service which has not yet been performed. (In the case of government fiat money, the “service” not yet performed is simply the “service” of not punching your head — that is, the value of the money comes from the fact that it pays your taxes.)

[^1]: Of course, there were some pretty prominent recent attempts to do so — that is, to convert debts into fungible goods by adopting some common standards of classification for the “quality” of the debt (e.g. the risk of default) which could be used as a reliable signal for the real value of the debts, without having to consider much of anything about debtors on a case-by-case basis.

You may have noticed that this has so far turned out rather poorly, and has generally not succeeded at its intended aims.

I demand a form of currency whose value remains constant in all frames of reference.

Monetize c!

Given that gold is currently trading at upwards of US $1,100 for a 1oz round about the size of an old dollar coin, dude must either have some really small pockets, or else needs to carry around a lot more money than most of us do.

... Yes, I certainly agree with you about that. If there is a use to labels like "left-libertarian" and "right-libertarian," it's certainly not as a tool to

Andy, I agree that you should organize and engage in winnable battles. What I disagree with is your assessment of which battles are most winnable, and at what costs. The facts on the ground are that efforts at legalizing and regularizing status by means of piecemeal legal reforms HAS NOT WORKED, whereas efforts at getting the benefits of legalization by alternative means outside the system has worked to some extent. The existence of large, flourishing shantytowns is proof enough: the parallel systems that they create outside of ordinary legal channels for securing homes, work, property rights, personal security, dispute resolution, community recognition of family arrangements, etc. just are demonstrations of working alternatives to legalization. These alternatives seem to have done a much better job at actually improving ordinary people's lives on the margins than legal-reform campaigns have thus far. My problem with legalization schemes and similar legal reform campaigns isn't that they somehow offend against my sense of purity. It's that they rarely deliver what they promise, and what they do deliver is typically at very high cost and very low quality. I don't have a beef with practicality; what I have a beef with is the kind of dogmatic appeal to "practicality" where it is assumed that something must be the more practical option *just because* it involves compromise with the existing political system and operates according to conventional rules of political etiquette. In fact, I think the reverse is often the case: the political game is typically rigged, and you can get better results faster, cheaper, and more reliably by working out ways to route around the damage. See also http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/01/26/in_which/ and http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/02/07/countereconomic_optimism/ for comments on practicality and winnable battles.

... I think that the anarchist-minarchist divide clearly cuts across the left-libertarian/right-libertarian divide. (Most of the paradigmatic paleolibertarians