You might respond by saying that if I didn't pay, force would be initiated against me.

Right. If the mafia never breaks your knees, their threat to do so is still an initiation of force.

But what about the protection of
private property? After all, I don't normally tresspass on your property, or
take something that belongs to you, but ultimately the reason people don't
do such things is because if they did force would be initiated against them.

No, the initiation here is the trespass or theft. See http://marketliberal.org/Principles.html for a (somewhat) typical exposition of the libertarian position on property rights.

I don't see a principled distinction there, and if there's one to be drawn it's a lot more muddled and less clear than "no initiation of force."

In the libertarian literature and counter-literature, it's fairly uncontroversial as to what counts to libertarians as initiation of force. The controversy is over whether other things (like employers declining voluntary association on the terms prospective employees desire) should count as aggression too.

2) The alternative I was proposing was something like political decisions
should be made on the basis of reasons that people can accept. This means
that when evaluating political systems, we should do so on the basis of
whether the system makes decisions based on reasons or whether other factors
intrude. I might lose a vote, and not get policies I want, but if I do so
because others were not convinced by my reasons, then I have no right to be
upste

Again: 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. The latter suspicion is reinforced by your repeated avoidance of the question: "why not favor ignorance-based franchise restrictions instead of restrictions on owners of financial resources?"

Note that this position assumes that a decision made on the basis of reasons
is not necessarily a decision with which I agree. You seem to think the
distinction is untenable. I'm not at all clear why.

I already told you: "You talk like an opponent of political ignorance, but you act like an opponent of the concentration of wealth."  Even if you started acting like an opponent of political ignorance, I'm extremely skeptical of your (or anyone's) ability to write rules that can fairly and non-problematically limit how much each person can say, how much each person can be heard, what each person is required to hear, etc.

3) Re: public choice. Do you really think that people act only on the basis
of self-interest?

"Only"? Strawman. The reference I cited says PCT "assumes that people are motivated mainly by self-interest". So no, I think people act predominantly on the basis of their own personal calculus of perceived short- and long- term utility. Note of course that their calculus can be less than perfectly rational, their utility function can be less than perfectly self-consistent, their utility function might not be precisely what you or I would advise, etc.

Is that a realistic model? Adam Smith didn't think so.

The model is true almost by definition, and is only false if you say that people mainly act contrary to their own perceptions of utility. If Smith ever said such a thing, he was obviously wrong.

And if it were true, it's unclear why I should interpret your political position
is anything except an expression of your own self-interest.

My personal political position is of course an expression of the utility or value I personally place on my desired outcome of maximizing human liberty. But given your leftist perspective, you probably define "self-interest" narrowly in terms of my financial or "class" interests. I can rebut that accusation by pointing out that I oppose quite a few policies that tend to benefit me financially: deductibility of mortgage interest, growth limits, software copyrights, lax patent standards, limited corporate liability, pharmaceutical subsidies, limits on white-collar outsourcing, fossil fuel subsidies, etc.  Even so, it's probably true that in my libertopia I would be better off financially than I am now -- but I maintain that would be true for most people. Also, given the unlikelihood of my political efforts having any influence on my personal finances, those efforts cannot at all be explained in terms of monetary return. (Just ask my wife!)

(As it stands, there's a lot of self-interest in politics, and that may have something to do with how screwed-up the political realm is right now.)

Public choice theory explains this quite well: the more resources that are appropriated for placement in the public trough, the more the swine will jockey for position alongside it. As noted in the Cato article I cited, the increase in campaign spending can be explained almost entirely by the increase in the federal largesse that is available to fight over.

4) Re: Iraq. Sorry, but you lost me. Do you believe that the American public
are generally well-informed about the situation in Iraq, and that they were
similarly so in the months leading up to the war? That would mean that they
recognize that Iraq was not involved with the 9/11 attacks, and that Saddam
Hussein was not working with al Qaeda.

I would venture that the American public is at least as well-informed on Iraq as you are on whether the Bush administration ever issued "a bald-faced lie" about Iraq - al Qaeda linkage. :-)

This would be an amazing thing; right up to his speech on the aircraft carrier, Bush was saying, "We have removed an ally of al Qaeda."

You said Bush said Iraq and al Qaeda were "working together". Your "ally" quote doesn't quite substantiate your charge. For an overview of some evidence relevant to how closely they were associated, see http://www.techcentralstation.com/092503F.html.

If the Bush administration didn't convince anyone
there was a link--which was, frankly, a bald-faced lie, as there never was
ANY credible evidence of such a link

A lie is a false statement which the speaker can be shown to have known was false. Please quote the "bald-faced lie" that you think the Bush administration issued about an Iraq - al Qaeda link. If it's any help, see the compilation of administration statements at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3119676.stm.

It's well-known that the Bush administration never claimed that Iraq was involved in 9/11. You could say that the Bush administration's statements about Iraq in the 9/11 context were designed to create a belief in that involvement. I could say that they were designed to build support for dealing with a regime that was a proven supporter of terrorists and a proven pursuer of WMDs. (For a good neutral overview of the Bush administration's attitude toward Iraq, see pp. 334-338 of the 9/11 Commission report.) Reasonable people can differ here, and you're just deluding yourself if you think that there are some objective facts about Bush and Iraq that make voting against Bush a no-brainer. You need to separate the relevant facts from your judgments about them and (especially) your values underlying those judgments.

5) Re: Social Security. Sorry, but you REALLY lost me. "Trillions in
unconstitutional inter-generational larceny?" I don't see how you could
expect anyone to accept such a characterization who doesn't believe that all
taxation is theft. Did I miss something, or wasn't that money used to
provide for millions of senior citizens, to such an extent as to reduce
dramatically the poverty rate among the elderly.

Yes, you missed something. Most SS payments go to seniors who are above the poverty line. SS is inter-generational larceny not because it is taxation-based, but because it is a Ponzi scheme. For more info on the intergenerational inequity that is an uncontroversial attribute of SS, see http://www.trinity.edu/~mKearl/ger-pol.html and http://mwhodges.home.att.net/soc_sec-a.htm.

Are you really saying that's not a legitimate government function?

Fighting poverty is a legitimate government function. The way you fight poverty is with a means-tested benefit funded from general revenues, such as a negative income tax. You don't fight poverty by socializing the retirement industry, and especially not via a scheme in which each generation steals from its children and grandchildren instead of providing for itself.

6) I'm saddened to hear you sound so supportive of the Bush Administration.

I'm just correcting some misunderstandings you have about Bush's record and how he compares to his primary alternative. The fact remains that the Bush Administration drove me into the arms of the Libertarian Party, to such an extreme that in 2004, not only did I for the first time vote against federal Republican candidates, but I also ran against one. (For more on my political odyssey, see http://marketliberal.org/Bio.html.)

Here we have an administration that seems OK with torture, with locking
people up without criminal charge or access to an attorney, with conducting
secret searches without a warrant, etc. That all sounds like a new and
rather crazy assault on personal freedom, much worse than anything Social
Security ever did to me.

I'm appalled by how the Bush administration has trampled on the civil and human rights of the hundreds of people you're talking about. However, Social Security is trillion-dollar larceny that victimizes a hundred million people.

Mind you, I don't especially like Kerry, but he
simply has not pursued the destruction of the Bill of Rights with anything
like the zeal of Bush, Ashcroft, Gonzales, etc. On the question of freedom,
there shouldn't be any comparison between them.

"Destruction of the Bill of Rights" is hyperbole that has no place in a serious discussion of the relevant (appalling) events. Such hyperbole in fact undermines the cause of us who oppose Bush on these matters, because it reframes the issue in a way that allows Bush to successfully rebut the hyperbole merely with a sober recounting of his actual record.

Here is my analysis of how the Left and Right compare on the question of civil and economic liberties: