Joe: Liberals argue that private charities will not be sufficient. That’s an empirical question, and it’s one that would be hard to answer short of actually trying it.

These premises aren’t sufficient to make the liberal case for the welfare state against libertarian objections, unless you add the further premise (or a more rigorous formulation thereof):

If voluntary charity isn’t sufficient to provide for autonomy, then people can legitimately be coerced into making up the difference.

But that’s not an empirical claim, and it doesn’t just fall out of a “respect for autonomy,” either: after all, it involves sacrificing at least one person’s autonomy, putatively to bolster another person’s autonomy; and it involves sacrificing one form of autonomy, putatively to bolster another form. Libertarians could very well regard charity as a duty, and could hold, empirically, that voluntary charity won’t in fact be “sufficient” (by whatever standards) for everyone to count as having lived up to that duty. The only thing they would need to maintain, to remain consistently libertarian, is that you also have a duty not to coerce anybody to make it “sufficient.”

Jeremy: “Certainly there are those on the left who advocate greater state control, deprioritization of business freedom, obnoxious anti-americanism, etc. However, you must look at it from the perspective of the other side as well. Having a Kerry/Edwards sticker may not make you a Molotov cocktail throwing Black Bloc’er …”

Just so we’re clear, whatever you think of the Black Bloc, they do not “advocate greater state control.” Black Blocs are an anarchist protest formation. They favor the abolition of the State as such. If you think that being of the Left, or the radical Left, ipso facto equates to greater state interventionism, then you need to think harder about the variety of people who come under the Leftist banner.