You wrote:

No one believes in protecting every action that one might take to get one's
opinions heard.

We Libertarians believe in protecting every such action that doesn't involve the initiation of force.

My views might be much more persuasive if I had all likely critics in the media murdered

Murder requires the initiation of force.

There are some things one cannot do because they give you an unfair advantage at expressing your views.

I would love to hear from you a principled definition of "unfair". The best one I've heard involves the initiation of force. The only other principled definition I can think of would require that nobody receive an audience that is larger or smaller than anybody else's. You could introduce a numerical factor into the larger/smaller calculation, but any factor other than unity would seem arbitrary. What factor would you recommend? One hundred? One million?

I think that if one person (say, Rupert Murdoch) has billions to spend on making his
views known, he has an unfair advantage over everyone who doesn't have such
resources.

If you consider his outsized megaphone a threat to the democratic process, then you would have to go much farther than limiting campaign advocacy at election time.  You would need systematic censorship of all political, ideological, or religious speech that exceeded any person's quota of allowed expression. If my book of political advocacy got too popular, you would need to censor its further distribution. You could try to make exceptions for speech that asserts what is objectively true, but then you would need a Ministry of Truth.

And again, you could not in any principled way limit your censorship to merely financial resources. You would have to limit the use of fame/celebrity/notoriety, and even the ability to organize and bundle the resources of volunteers. You claim that "money is the most important and most dangerous" resource right now, but there is no evidence that your calculus of "danger" isn't driven directly by your desire for a particular outcome.

One can have no confidence under such circumstances that the
force of the better argument has carried the day.

If you're looking for a political process that will guarantee victory for what Peter Stone considers the better argument, you won't find it -- short of the enthronement of Peter Stone. If instead you admit that the ideal political process would not always ensure victory for the best argument, then you have the very messy job of showing that your proposed procedural changes a) are worth their prima facie censorship costs, and b) aren't an attempt to rig the game.

BH: If you were serious about such a goal, you would propose ignorance-based franchise restrictions. That you don't suggests that you have other goals (whether you realize it or not).

PS: Of course I have other goals, although not the sinister agenda you imply. I
don't just want the best policies to be enacted; I want them to be enacted
because most people agree that the reasons for enacting them are good
reasons. The latter part is not dispensable.

Then why not favor ignorance-based franchise restrictions instead of restrictions on owners of financial resources?  You talk like an opponent of political ignorance, but you act like an opponent of the concentration of wealth. I call that not only sinister, but also deceptive (or self-deluded).

I don't just want political outcomes the way I may want a hamburger. To
think that is to reduce politics to just another consumer choice, which is a
line of thinking that IMHO results in really screwed-up politics (like the
ones we have now).

Political choice indeed needs to be handled differently from consumer choice, but only inasmuch as political choice involves the initiation of force (by police, tax collectors, soldiers, bureaucrats, etc.). Deciding how political choice should work is *itself* a political choice, and I doubt you can show that there is some such meta-choice that is better on a scientific or a priori basis. (I think free-wheeling speech in an unfettered marketplace of ideas is demonstrably best, but only has been shown to be such through messy a posteriori empirical argument.).

I think I have good reasons for the political outcomes I
desire. I think that if they are good other people should accept them. If
they don't, I have to ask why. It could be that my arguments are not
sufficiently compelling, worked out, etc.--that's always a possibility. But
it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether there might not be other factors
getting in the way.

Of course. And there are available explanations involving factors that are not inconsistent with the rest of the leftist worldview. But consistent explanations are not always correct explanations.

PS: If all voters with an inadequate knowledge of Iraq and 9/11 were excluded [...] then Bush wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell

BH: If all the voters with an inadequate knowledge of the entitlement crisis were excluded... then Kerry wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell.

PS: Now I think you're being extremely unfair. There seems to be a lot of debate
among well-informed people about how to handle the "entitlement crisis,"

I'm being no more unfair than you were. There is a lot of debate among well-informed people about Iraq, too. I'm quite satisfied that I can defend Bush over Kerry on both Iraq and entitlements against any arguments you care to muster, so your original "snowball's chance" contention is simply false.

[nobody informed would] deny that the claims upon which Bush based his desire for war--that Saddam Hussein was developing WMDs, and that Iraq and Al Qaeda were working together--are true.

Bush didn't quite say Iraq and Al Qaeda were "working together", and Kerry himself believed at the time that Saddam had or was developing WMDs and needed to be disarmed.

Surely taking the U.S. to war on grounds now known to be fraudulent is uncontroversially a terrible thing

Being wrong is not the same thing as being deceptive -- and it's deceptive to pretend otherwise. Where is the evidence that Bush knew there were no WMDs?  You might instead argue that Bush should have known or taken more care to find out, but a far stronger case can be made about what Kerry knew or should have known about entitlements.

far worse than anything bad Kerry may or may not do with Social Security over the next 4 years.

Let's see: a few hundred billion spent on Iraq, liberating tens of millions from a tyrant who had killed almost two million human beings. Contrast that with trillions in unconstitutional inter-generational larceny by the Democratic party, used to purchase decades of political tenure. There's no comparison.

You seem to want to imply that anyone who makes claims about what policies are right and wrong, and whether the political process is recognizing these claims or not, is some kind of fascist.

That's ludicrous, because I obviously make very strong claims about what policies are right and wrong, and as a member of a marginal third party I clearly don't think that the political process is generating the best results. However, you call for apparently open-ended restrictions on speech, and while such policies have at least one thing in common with fascism, they hardly merit such an inflammatory label.

I know a lot about public choice theory. [..] most public choice theorists cannot give a simple answer to the question, what's so damn terrific about democracy?

If you question whether ultimate political power should reside with the people, you don't exactly give yourself a good defense against charges of fascism. :-) 

Any theory that assimilates choices over political choices to choices over brands of toothpaste cannot possibly answer this question.

If you indeed knew "a lot" about Public Choice Theory, you'd know that it does not purport to be a complete and self-contained system of political philosophy. It is instead a branch of economics, and thus does not make value judgments.

I believe that democracy is supposed to generate decisions based on good reasons that most citizens recognize and accept. I think by this standard our process falls woefully short.

In fact, Public Choice Theory is the best explanation for *why* it falls woefully short: voters and politicians act out of rational self-interest, and both have an interest in voters not being fully informed.

But even buying the claim that voters are often
rationally ignorant, the media can influence how well-informed people are,
by raising or lowering the costs of gathering and making use of good
information. Right now, the media does a crappy job of it.

Wouldn't you say this in any situation in which the media doesn't influence people to think like you do?

BH: You fallaciously assume that your perspective is the objective standard by which to measure concern over media bias.

PS: I don't assume it. I give reasons for it. You're not really saying the reasons I give are wrong.

Sure I am. In our discussion up to that point, you assumed that your Bush complaints regarding Iraq are more important than my Kerry complaints regarding entitlements. You've now tried to argue to that effect, but I'm confident my arguments to the contrary are stronger.

Do you think that the voters who think that Saddam Hussein was closely allied with Al Qaeda were ill-informed?

Can you cite a source for your "closely allied" allegation? When I investigated this issue, I only found one poorly-worded poll at the heart of the conventional wisdom that X% of the voters were misinformed on this issue. At any rate, I'm sure a higher percentage of voters are misinformed about entitlements than about the relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Such judgments lead naturally to questions about why people believe stuff like this. None of this requires a Ministry of Truth, as you seem to imply.

I didn't say a Ministry of Truth is required for you and I to form judgments about how well-informed the electorate is.  I said a Ministry of Voter Informedness would be required for there to be legal standards of how well-informed the electorate must be. I note that you made no comment on my idea for competing candidates to collectively create the standard of informedness in their elections.

the reason I'm not a libertarian is that I believe libertarians recognize all the evils of state control over people's lives and none of the evils of corporate control.

The fundamental mistake of leftism is the notion that declining to associate with someone is the same as coercing them. By this logic, supermodels declining to have sex with you qualifies as coercing you.

I don't want my life run by any bureaucrats, whether they be state or corporate employees, thank you very much.

I'd love to hear a rigorous definition from you of what it means for a corporate employee to "run your life". I just don't agree that me offering you a product or a job constitutes running your life. By contrast, the government using armed force to control what product or job I can offer you is definitely running my life.

Do you believe there are such things as true and false beliefs about politics? How about better or worse public policies?

Yes, given certain axioms that are widely accepted but are also subject to somewhat varying interpretations (like the threshold at which influence becomes coercion).

If you do, then what is wrong with inquiring how the political process works.

I never said it was wrong, and I of course do it all the time. What is wrong is thinking that one can have objective legal standards of political informedness -- or worse, that arbitrary and selective censorship of your class-warfare opponents is a neutral way of increasing voter informedness.

Presumably, you don't like entitlement programs, government regulations, etc. But democratically
elected governments put those into place. Are you saying the people who
supported those governments are wrong? And were there reasons why they were
wrong? If so, you're doing exactly the same thing I am.

No, to do exactly as you I would need to call for selective censorship of those with unfair amounts of celebrity, or unfair resources from collecting union dues in closed shops, etc.  I've offered two alternatives to censorship -- 1) no representation without taxation, and 2) disenfranchisement based on failure to pass candidate-defined tests -- and your response has been studied silence.

Libertarians, I fear, act as though anyone who defends government policies
are trying to impose their views on the masses,

Government is BY DEFINITION the imposition of somebody's will on somebody else -- at gunpoint. My employer can't use force to keep my services, my supermarket can't use force to keep my business, my tennis team can't use force to keep my participation. That's why none of these entities count as governments.

but anyone who defends the free market is just letting people do what they want. The decision to have a
laissze fair government is a decision like any other, and it needs to be defended like any other.

The decision not to incinerate Jews is a decision like any other. Does it really need no more defense than my decision that people should not have force initiated against them?

Once you admit that, I don't see how you can seriously act as though what I'm doing is so bad.

I don't thing morality is ultimately and completely objective, but I reject the absolute moral relativism that says all political viewpoints are created equal.