National’s younger brother?

I’ll agree he was being a bit snarky. I would have found it hard to resist too, and the counter response to Holmes was a substantive as it was snarky. Jim’s basic point was that while government may have spent money in the enforcing of some rights, the rights do not thus come from the government. Hence the point that sexual freedom does not become a government created freedom just because it sponsers a display of it.

As to the ability of a debate show format being superior, I highly doubt that. If you let it go free form like you suggest, the whole thing becomes one person interupting another without giving them time to build an argument. I don’t find that helpful at all in sorting out who has a stronger argument. If it’s a structured debate, as in the presidential debates, it’s no different then a written debate. Holmes had, and did, have time to reply to any distortions he felt Bovard was making in his first article. Bovard just didn’t agree they were distortion. Upon reflection, I have to say I mostly agree with him. Either Holmes’ point is trivial - it costs money to enforce rights. Or it is distorting — becausse it costs money to do anything, all rights are the same. This makes the “right to parrots” the same as “a right to a fair trial” as long as the government pays for both. Huh?

Anyway, if you are proud of the distortions in the above essay, that’s your business. I know what I read in there, and I know that it has changed my mind about your academic fairness and objectivity.

I did not at any point say that written exchanges lacked worth, so you’re really up to the same tactics with your spinning recasting of my statement here.

But apparently, that’s your method.

Rather sad, for someone who prides himself on being a font of libertarian theoretical thought. It really makes you look no better than Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh or John Gibson. But if that’s how you want it to be, that’s your choice and your right.

“the written medium’s lack of immediate response”?

What the heck?

Writing is a far superior mode of conveying clear ideas than is a talk show format.

People can read Sunstein’s books, people can read my books, and then people can do their reckoning.

I was a commentor on a panel at which Sunstein spoke at the 1994 American Political Science Association. The subject of the panel was his book, Democracy and the Problem of Freedom of Speech.

I don’t have a tape of the exchanges, but if memory serves, it wasn’t that different from the Playboy piece.

Although the Founders feared factionalism, they figured mankind’s reasoning and communication abilities would win out in the end….or at the very least, result in the lesser of evils. Well, the tutorial in dysfunction we have been given over the last several decades has built to a crescendo and so it appears at long last, that even anarchy looks to be a damned sight better than the trends currently afoot. As a result, the shills for Big Government, “liberal” or “conservative” , it doesn’t matter… are setting to work at ridiculing traditional libertarianism as an outdated mode of thought.Too much money and power is at stake to not at least try and convince the American Citizen that their nascent, crypto-fascist government is not good for them.

When the full force of evidence against the current regime is finally revealed, perhaps the dialectic of the American Republic will start up again and we’ll see these Brer Rabbits for what they are, begging not to be thrown into the briar-patch wing of democracy they profit so much from. The Republic is no longer a Republic, it’s a continent -sized bait and switch. That helping hand you’re looking for is not the one attached to your reputed friend’s long arm o the law and now stuffed in your pocket, clutching your wallet…it’s at the end of your own arm. We’ll know the game has finally run it’s course when we see the shouting and dueling pundits represented by a “fiscally-minded Small Government Socialist” who is debating a “Big Government Conservative”. Actually, I think we’ve already seen it but the mind doesn’t want to quite admit to such levels of extreme stupidity.

I’d like to hear an engaged live discussion among Holmes, Sunstein and Bovard. I think it would be a good one. The exchange in writing here is a bit of snarky potshotting by Bovard, and relies heavily on the written medium’s lack of immediate response.

Great piece of writing in the rebuttal letter. I shall never travel to Philadelphia again without the intriguing image of coital wrestlers. Flying Philadelphia Fuck! Was the WWF big back in 2000?

Anyway, I don’t know that I’m a libertarian - much more a skeptic of most political thought than anything. But it does strike me that the hole in Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration is the notion of ’securing one’s inalienable liberties by forming a government’. In other words, individual, God-given liberties are generally at such threat by governments (George III in this case) that one has to throw up another government to protect those same rights.

But this is the impasse I see in the anarchists’ (of any stripe) arguments. At some point in their earthly existence, they must band together at some point in some sort of common cause. When they’ve done that, they’ve got more or less a beastly government.

Unfortunately, government - like most of the bad things in the human condition - will be with us for quite some time, if not forever. The trick of it, seems to me, is to keep it castrated, caged, and on a starvation diet and certainly don’t let it out for any Philadelphia-style fucking!