it is only AFTER we
have defined what people are justly entitled to have that we can define what
initiating force means. If we agree that you have a right to control your
own body, then punching you will look like an initiation of force.

You're perhaps confusing "aggression" with "initiation of force". "Aggression" is the all-purpose umbrella term for the things that we want to convince each other are disallowed. Libertarians typically say that both fraud and initiation (or threat) of force are the primary (or perhaps only) things that should count as aggression. I'm somewhat heretical in that I add other things to the list, such as interference with access to resources, and anti-competitive monopoly.

I think it appears uncontroversial because libertarians (and perhaps some of
their opponents) have a common, rather Lockean idea of how people may justly
come to own things.

Actually, your grounds for disputing trespass as force initiation should be based on what sorts of things can justly count as property, not how such things came into the possession of the particular possessor. So for your move to work, you would have to rule entire classes of things -- e.g., capital, or land -- as out of bounds for ownership.

I don't accept any such theory. On the libertarian
theory, taxing people to pay for a national health care plan involves force,
but an employer locking out his employees because they won't accept a
proposed wage cut does not.

It's untenable to say that compulsory taxation doesn't involve force. If you really think that the libertarian force analysis is so compelling that you have to co-opt its words while trying to disagree with it, then you've pretty much conceded the issue up front.

Using a fence or a gate or a lock to prevent trespass on one's property can only sensibly be called force initiation if you posit that the alleged trespasser in fact had some contractual or natural right (e.g. right-of-way) to access the property in question -- or if you deny in the first place that the trespassed thing can count as property. Otherwise, the idea of property includes by default the idea that trespass is force initiation.

And that just seems strange to me, and the
reason it seems strange is because I do not accept the underlying theory of
justice-as-property-entitlements.

The underlying theory is that justice includes recognition and protection of property rights. You might dispute that certain things can be property, or that property rights are inviolable. For example, I would dispute that property rights include an absolute right against non-confiscatory taxation or fairly-compensated right-of-way for natural monopolies. But I wouldn't try to pretend that taxation or eminent domain aren't initiation of force; I would just say they are justifiable exceptions to the principle about force initiation.

Denying that taxation involves the initiation of force is like denying that vaccinations involve pain.  I would argue that taxation and vaccinations are crucial for the minimization of the overall incidence of force-initiation and pain (respectively), but I wouldn't try to pretend that vaccinations aren't painful.

I don't believe I have recommended a specific procedural change here. We can
talk about procedural changes if you like.

Yes, I like. I'll ask for the third time: why not favor ignorance-based franchise restrictions instead of restrictions on owners of financial resources?

I was talking about a standard
for evaluating how justly the political system is functioning.

We were talking about evaluating the extent to which political decisions (by politicians or by voters) were being made on the merits. That's quite distinct from evaluating whether the political decisions themselves are just.

It's intended
as an alternative to the Lockean sort of theory of property rights that
libertarians defend. The difference if not whether there will be force used.
Both allow that. It's the standard for telling when force should be used.

The distinction I tried to impress on you was about initiation of force, not use of force.

On your view, a person
may do anything with his or her wealth s/he wants to make her views known.

No, on my view, a person may do any non-coercive non-fraudulent thing she wants to make her views known. You fixate on wealth in the process because your agenda is to redistribute wealth (or the political opportunities it provides) more than it is to make political decisions more merits-based.

Bill Gates can obviously do much much more than I can. You suggest that this
is obviously fairer than any alternative.

No, I suggested that no alternative is obviously fairer without being crippled by other problems. 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. 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."  (For example, it turned out that your poster-child for an objective fact crucially relevant to the 2004 election turned out not to be a fact.)

There are dangers in trying to
figure out what a just system of rules governing political participation
looks like, but these dangers have to be compared to the dangers of a system
where wealth can do so much.

My preceding quote is me making such a comparison. I can't seem to get you to do likewise. :-)

Incidentally, it's true that I believe that a more democratic system would
both require and lead to less concentrated wealth. I don't see why that
somehow invaldiates my argument,

If your reforms (or excuse me, complaints) are aimed just at the role of wealth in politics and not more squarely at the role of ignorance in politics, then your admitted goal of wealth redistribution indeed is evidence against any claim that your motive is just to increase the rationality of the political process.

any more than the fact that you seem OK
with the current distribution of wealth in the U.S. automatically
invalidates yours.

I'm not totally OK with wealth distribution in the US. For example, I have major problems with how the government favors certain interest groups in the areas of intellectual property, natural resources (e.g. water), and government land. But I think the biggest distortion in the natural distribution of wealth is caused by the government's tax preference for consumption over savings and the government's replacement of private retirement savings with a socialized pyramid scheme. These two policies combine to discourage capital accumulation among the non-wealthy, and tend to concentrate in the wealthy the compounding effects of capital ownership. The irony, of course, is that both policies are the work of leftists who in fact oppose the concentration of wealth. The only form of redistribution they understand is confiscatory, but they know that confiscatory redistribution of wealth is considered unfair (except if done at inheritance time), so they settle for confiscatory redistribution of income. If they understood economics better, they would advocate incentives for capital accumulation among the non-wealthy. They oppose capitalism so much that they could not bear to see their beloved masses become capitalists.

>"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.

OK, fine, not "only." Let's say "primarily." Nothing I said changes
fundamentally.

IIRC, you said roughly 1) Adam Smith disagreed with this premise of PCT, 2) I act in my own self-interest, and 3) there's a lot of self-interest in politics.  (1) is either wrong or irrelevant. I corrected you on (2). And I pointed out that (3) tends to confirm PCT.

>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.

That makes it tautologically true that people always act self-interestedly.

I didn't say everyone's utility function is as magnanimous as mine.

>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. :-)

By the standard of evidence you are demanding, Hitler never ordered the
Holocaust, and John Gotti never had anyone wacked.  
Hitler probably never signed a piece of paper saying,
"Go kill all the Jews in Europe." In both cases, the evidence of
responsibility is overwhelming but not so direct.

Apples and oranges: your claim was about what Bush actually said, not about the effect (Holocaust, murder, incorrect belief) he allegedly caused.

Even if we dilute your claim to being that Bush intentionally caused incorrect belief, that interpretation requires that there be no competing reasonable interpretation -- just as there is no competing reasonable interpretation of the intentions of Hitler and Gotti. But I gave you a competing interpretation. And instead of disputing its reasonableness, you denied its existence.

It's quite possible that
Bush never said publicly, "Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the
WTC attacks." So what?

So you said he'd uttered "a bald-faced lie". So you were wrong. :-)  More importantly, you were wrong about what you claimed constituted part of the "adequate knowledge of Iraq and 9/11" that if possessed by voters would have left Bush without "a snowball's chance in hell" of re-election. So this shows that it's hard even for smart and well-informed people like you to separate their subjective political opinions from their judgments about objective historical facts relevant to voter choices. And that makes it harder to take seriously your complaints about the political process not making decisions on what you claim are the objective merits.

Bush mentioned Iraq, Al
Qaeda, and the war on terrorism in the same breath every chance he got. So
did Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc. A reasonable American (who is unfortunately
reluctant to believe his leaders would deceive him) would probably assume
that those 3 are getting mentioned together at the same time for a reason.
But there was no such reason.

I told you the reason, and yet you claim that no such reason exists. I said:

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

Should I claim that your "there was no such reason" is a "bald-faced lie"? :-)  No, because what's really going on here is just that you disagree with Bush's justification for his actions regarding Iraq. Your disagreeing with him doesn't make you a liar, any more than his disagreeing with you makes him a liar.

>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.

I've reviewed a lot of the evidence of the connection, and I cannot possibly
believe that anyone could view it and see Al Qaeda and Hussein as allies
without an extraordinary amount of wishful thinking. [..]
As evidence of a connection as far as
terrorism goes, it's extraordinarily thin.

"Allies" is somewhat vague. An ally can be someone you agree not to fight because you are fighting a common enemy. AFAIK, that's not an unreasonable description of Saddam and al Qaeda. Meanwhile, your claim that Bush vaguely said Iraq and al Qaeda were "working together" still isn't supported by any facts I see in evidence.  (As for a "terrorism connection", Saddam's Iraq was a well-known supporter and refuge for terrorists.)

>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.

Thanks for the article. I wonder--were you by any chance this charitable at
interpreting Bill Clinton's words when he claimed never to have had sex with
Monica Lewinsky? I somehow doubt it.

I take it from your silence that you still don't have a candidate Bush quote about Iraq - al Qaeda linkage that counts as a "bald-faced lie".

In the case of Clinton, a federal judge formally ruled that Clinton gave "intentionally false" testimony. Judge Wright wrote "the record demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence that the President responded by giving false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process". Thus you're trying to compare a non-lie by Bush out of court to what was adjudicated to have been a lie committed by "a member of the bar and the chief law enforcement officer of this Nation" in front of a federal judge. (For the record, I think Judge Wright could have and should have pre-empted the impeachment by sanctioning Clinton as soon as she found out about his perjury.)

>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 [..]

See my previous remarks re: Gotti and Hitler. The best con artists do not
flat out lie so much as create an impression through repeated innuendo,
suggestion, etc. If you like the term "deception" rather than "lie," fine by
me

I'll take that as a retraction of your "bald-faced lie" claim about an Iraq-9/11 connection. However, your Hitler/Gotti example still fails, because you quote my alternative explanation without even attempting to dispute its reasonableness.

(although it doesn't change the fact that Bush lied through his teeth
about the dangers of Iraq's alleged WMDs).

Here we go again... Please quote the false statement, and cite the evidence that Bush knew at the time it was false.

>Most SS payments go to seniors who are above
>the poverty line.

That seems irrelevant to me. You seem to think government programs are
obviously wrong unless they are only targeted at the very poor, like some
form of charity. I don't see that at all.

If a government entitlement program is aimed more at intergenerational income transfer than at alleviating poverty, that's indeed obviously wrong. Social Security in effect buys votes from grandparents with debt billed to their grandchildren. It's a combination of vote-buying and taxation without representation.

When my four-year-old asks why voters picked "Anna" instead of me to be a "leader", I explained it's because Anna takes money from some people and gives it to lots of others (such as farmers and grammas and grampas and teachers) so they will like her. She thought about this and then sagely said, "Daddy, you'll never get picked to be a leader if you don't give money to people like Anna does."

>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.

Your first link didn't work when I tried it. I'm not sure I get the point of
your claim.

You don't get why I consider massive intergenerational inequity to be a problem?

It's quite possible that the program will require adjustments to
deal with the rising number of older people in the future. That doesn't make
it a Ponzi scheme.

The first SS beneficiary, Ida May Fuller, paid in a lifetime total of $44 and received benefits of $20,934. People entering the system now get negative returns.  How is that not a Ponzi scheme?

All of the figures I've seen "proving" that the program
will not be able to sustain itself have rested on highly questionable
assumptions (e.g., that American growth rates will remain quite low),

I didn't say there was no level of payroll taxation at which the system could "sustain itself" -- i.e. meet its own calculus of benefits, which now constitute negative returns for new participants. My point -- which you did not even attempt to address -- is that it's simply immoral to continue a program with such massive intergenerational inequity and that causes such massive dis-saving in the economy (by having each generation plunder from its children instead of saving for its own future).

and even then the program appears capable of sustaining itself decades into the
future.

False. There are no projected revenues to pay off the T-bills that the SSTF will start redeeming in twelve years. The only thing that can "sustain" it are massive extra-systemic tax increases on generations to which the system already gives negative returns.

I don't know any other problem that won't hit for decades that gets
this much attention from politicians.

The intergenerational larceny has been happening for decades already. If you find out that your pension fund is a Ponzi scheme, it's inadvisable to ignore this fact for a couple decades just because you're only in your forties. And since people need to change their expectations about how the system will work, the earlier we fix it the better.

Bush & co. are only raising concerns about the "crisis" of Social Security so that they can get away with
destroying it.

A problem isn't exempt from being a "crisis" just because it has been bad for a long time and is getting steadily worse.

Incidentally, do you really think that the use of the term "larceny" and
"Ponzi scheme" to describe this is more accurate than the use of the term
"lie" to describe Bush's deceptions re: Iraq and al Qaeda?

Yes. It is illegal in all 50 states for a private pension plan to operate like Social Security, financing the benefits of current retirees with the current contributions of future retirees.

can you really prove that FDR KNEW that the rising number of older people in the
future would make the program unsustainable? You'd have to prove that to
show that it truly is a "Ponzi scheme."

A Ponzi scheme "involves paying returns to investors out of the money raised from subsequent investors, rather than from profits generated by any real business." This accurately characterizes SS from that day in 1940 that Ida May Fuller received SS check number 000001 -- even if there had been some combination of population growth, productivity growth, and life expectancy that could have kept the door revolving for what was FDR's foreseeable future. It's possible to design a Ponzi scheme that is "sustainable" as long as human population is growing, but it's still a Ponzi scheme.

A famous quote from FDR suggests he specifically wanted his pay-as-you-go revolving-door system to make beneficiaries think they were just getting back the money they had contributed. He said "We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."  How could FDR have thought that Ida May Fuller had a "moral" right to 500-to-1 returns on her contributions? And what are the odds that Ida May voted for anyone other than Democrats after she started getting her checks?

>Fighting poverty is a legitimate government function.

Why? What does that have to do with protecting property rights?

Protecting property rights isn't the only legitimate government function. See http://marketliberal.org/Principles.html for details.

Means-testing will make it a form of charity, whereby some people pay for
the benefits others receive.

It's already the case that some people -- the young -- pay for the benefits that others -- the old -- receive.

That is completely alien to the spirit of
Social Security, where all pay and all benefit.

All pay, but only some are net beneficiaries, while others are merely net contributors, and the distinction is based not on means but on age. The "spirit" -- i.e. illusion -- of SS may indeed be that all are treated equivalently, but that's just not the reality of SS. Your "all pay and all benefit" criterion would be apply better to a mandatory individually self-financed system with a means-tested safety net.

If the program were ever
means-tested, it would be dead in the water. When the effects of cutting a
program affect only people perceived to be poorer and less "deserving" than
you, it's pretty easy to get away with shredding that program, no matter how
serious the need.

Only 13% of the federal budget is spent on means-tested entitlements (i.e. Medicaid and welfare), versus 35% on non-means tested entitlements (Social Security and Medicare).  The former number has been pretty steady over the years, which pretty much refutes your thesis.  If the "need" is "serious", I don't see how you can morally justify a trickle-down welfare that lavishes benefits on the non-needy just so that the needy can enjoy some leftovers.

Social Security has been political indestructible for 70
years precisely because it doesn't work like that.

Social Security has been indestructible because it is a pyramid scheme, and pyramid schemes always look good in the initial phase in which investors get positive returns. With that phase finally being recognized as over, Social Security has rightly become quite destructible.

Compare the struggle Bush is having trying to "reform" Social Security with the ease Clinton and Gingrich had torching AFDC.

AFDC was not "torched", but rather was replaced by TANF.  AFDC had moronic paternalisms and mal-incentives that made it an easy target for reformers, and TANF is clearly a better -- but not optimal -- program. As Bill Clinton wrote: "it was the best chance America would have for a long time to change the incentives in the welfare system from dependence to empowerment through work". Subsequent history has proved him right.  See e.g. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/Test092001.cfm and http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1304464/posts .

>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.

Forgive me, but I don't feel victimized. I don't know anyone who's been victimized by it.

You don't know any working people born since 1950?  (That's roughly the break-even point between being a victimizer versus being a victim. See table 25.2 at http://cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb108/hb108-25.pdf.)

I know lots of people who've been victimized by economic
policies of Reagan/Bush I/Clinton/Bush II,

Can you give me an example?

but Social Security? All I know is people who've gotten money for their retirement.

I suspect you know a lot less than you think you know. In just my immediate family, I have parents who have retired with a healthy net worth and two pensions after earning in the (low) six figures, and who (like all living retirees born in 1938) now collect Social Security benefits far in excess of everything they ever paid in plus interest. Meanwhile, I have a brother who works for around $10/hr with no health or retirement benefits, whose 15.3% payroll tax helps finance my parents' benefits, and who himself will see negative return on his lifetime contributions.  But he will be getting checks of a nonzero amount, so I guess by your logic he counts as one who will have "gotten money for their retirement". 

That just doesn't sound to me like soldiers putting electrodes on someone's genetalia, or sicking an
attack dog on them while they're naked and somebody takes pictures of it all for fun.

Not all forms of victimization make for sensational pictures with blurred-out faces on 60 Minutes. I don't know whether any of the Abu Graib victims were innocents, but I know my brother is. Is there no level of taxation the government could impose on him to buy votes from wealthier seniors that would make him count as a victim?  (If it helps, consider that the path of resisting such taxation is one that ends up with incarceration and likely anal rape.)

A little bit of proportionality seems appropriate here.

Indeed!  What I'm talking about is a deliberate policy explicitly written into law and victimizing tens of millions of Americans over the last several decades and on course to continue for decades more. What you're talking about are some disgusting and isolated rogue misbehaviors that have resulted in a tidal wave of investigation designed to end the practices and punish the perpetrators. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

We had SEVERAL THOUSAND PEOPLE ROUNDED UP BY THE FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT AFTER 9/11, AND PUT IN JAIL INDEFINITELY WITHOUT GRANTING THEM A
TRIAL OR THE RIGHT TO A LAWYER!

Please cite a source giving details about your claim. The non-uniformed combatants detained in Guantanamo Bay are not entitled to even POW status, let alone the Bill of Rights protections applicable to criminal defendants. I've heard of the "762 aliens [who] were detained in connection with the FBI terrorism investigation for various immigration offenses", but these detentions were far from indefinite and the situation has been thoroughly investigated: http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2003/06/detainees.html  The Justice Department has done plenty of stupid things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_act#Alleged_abuses_under_the_PATRIOT_Act) since 9/11, but "destroying the Bill of Rights" isn't one of them.

How about an Attorney General who believes that RULES AGAINST
TORTURE ARE "QUAINT" AND "OUTDATED?"

That's not what he wrote. Have you even read the Gonzalez memo (http://www.fishkite.com/notes/gonzales_memo.pdf)? It says:

The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limiations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e. advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments.

The context was whether or not to apply Geneva POW status to captured al Qaeda and Taliban combatants. The memo does not mention "torture" as an interrogation technique, but instead warns of the vagueness of the GPW language:

First, some of the language of the GPW is undefined (it prohibits, for example, "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment"), and it is difficult to predict with confidence what actions might be deemed to constitute violations of the relevant provisions of GPW.

Second, it is difficult to predict the needs and circumstances that could arise in the course of the war on terrorism.

The memo just isn't the brief in support of torture that you've been misled into thinking it is. It is instead an argument that non-uniformed al Qaeda and Taliban combatants should be denied the POW status that they so clearly do not deserve.

What would Bush have to do before you'd accept that he's trying to destroy the Bill of Rights?

Establish a religion. Or prohibit the free exercise thereof. Or abridge freedom of speech. Or of the press. Or deny our right to keep and bear arms. Or subject people to double jeopardy. Or compel self-incrimination. Or deny jury trials. Or impose cruel and unusual punishments on convicts.  Stuff like that.

If you read through the Bill of Rights, and then think about American history, it's still the case that these rights are far better-protected in the last quarter-century than at any previous time. The only systematic exceptions to this trend would be 1) seizures related to the drug war, 2) takings related to zoning and eminent domain, 3) the effective repeal of the 10th amendment, and 4) the sweeping limits on 9th amendment freedom of contract since the New Deal. None of the stupid actions of the Bush Justice Department even approach these things in terms of scale and scope. (Do lefties like you even count the 9th and 10th amendments as being in the Bill of Rights any more?)

>If you look at the last 40 years instead of just the last 4, the trend
>is obvious and undeniable. It's just not tenable to say that we've
>reached an inflection point and now the default course is a complete
>reversal of the last half-century's progress regarding racism, civil
>rights, divorce rights, sexual freedom, reproductive freedom, gay
>rights, criminal procedure, free expression, gambling, and even
>society's attitude towards substance use. It's just historically
>illiterate to say the sky is falling and we are in--
>or even headed toward -- a police state.

America's progress on all these points has had its ups and downs for a long time. We do not know what the low point is.

It's a truism to say we don't know the future, and it remains untenable to claim without evidence that the above trends aren't almost completely monotonic over the last half-century.

And the most dangerous thing in the world is to assume that because America is somehow special that "it can't happen here."

America is indeed obviously special. It's a truism to say anything can happen anywhere.

BTW, it ain't just about the last 4 years. It's about the coalition that's been growing for the past 40 years to attack both the political and the economic changes of the New Deal and Great Society eras. The two attacks are closely interconnected; we have a coalition of fanatics in power

Ah, if only it were so. Of the sixteen forms of erosion of economic freedom that I identified, the Bush "fanatics" have made a serious effort to reverse only one (socialization of retirement finance) -- and their efforts have little hope of any effect. They pay mere lip service to three or four other items in the list, but in fact have made none of the areas better and several of them worse.

There indeed has also been a counter-current in America (and across the Western World) since at least the 1970s consisting of
selective deregulation, selective privatization, sounder currency, free trade, and lower marginal taxes. But the fact remains that most of the the Socialist Party 1928 platform is now law. See
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-long041101.shtml

that favor corporate control of our lives (call it "economic freedom" if you like)

I do, because it obviously is. Can you name for me the corporation with the most "control" over your life?  The two corporations currently with the most influence on me are Yahoo (my employer) and Microsoft. I won't be ending their influence on me any time soon, because I recognize the value I get from my positive-sum relationship with them.  Does my wife "control" me because my (completely voluntary) relationship with her is so valuable to me that I do not choose to end it?  Just because an offer is too good to turn down doesn't mean it constitutes control of you.

Perhaps you mean that corporations in general have too much influence on our lives. But that's just a repackaging of Ted Kaczynski's silly complaint that the products and opportunities of modern technological capitalism are so wondrous as to constitute coercion against the alternative decision to live as a hunter-gatherer in a shack in Montana.

and a religious fundamentalism that's every bit as wacky as that of the Taliban.
I don't see how you feel the two can be separated; rather, I fear that you
like one and dislike the other.

I have a sterling record of opposition to religious fundamentalism, but your Taliban comparison is yet again untenable hyperbole. You again undermine our common cause by caricaturing our position as one that is obviously and demonstrably false.

>By contrast, the last seventy years have seen an enormous erosion of
>our economic freedoms: minimum wage, maximum hours, plant closure
>notice, family leave, "equal pay for equal work", numeric goals in
>minority hiring, union exemptions from antitrust, growth controls,
>urban planning, rent control, monumental intergenerational inequity
>through a socialized retirement pyramid scheme, massive regulation of
>healthcare, socialized health insurance, farm subsidies, federalization
>of education, environmental regulations based on bureaucratic rules
>instead of market incentives, etc. etc.

With all due respect, to be afraid of Left-wingers in 2005 America makes
about as much sense as being afraid of Jews in 1936 Germany. I don't know
how else to put it. Have you noticed that the Left has no organized
political power in this country at all?

Leftism has sufficient power that my list of sixteen restraints on economic freedom remain the law of the land. It's undeniable that our position and inertia in policy space are over toward the Left's goal of economic security, even if our momentum has recently been slightly toward increasing economic liberty.

Political debate extends from the
corporate-sanitized Democrats to the almost openly fascistic Republicans.
And if you think calling them fascists is more hyperbole, perhaps you'd care
to tell me which of our personal freedoms Bush values more than Mussolini.

Sorry, I'm bored of wiping the foam from the corners of your mouth. :-)  If you think you have a fact-based analysis to back up your "almost openly fascistic" charge or Mussolini comparison, then please present it and I'll be happy to rebut it for you.

This is the country that produced John Brown and Susan B. Anthony as well as J.
Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy. It produced the Ludlow Massacre, COINTELPRO,
Jim Crow, and the internment of Japanese Americans as well as the Civil
Rights Act, the Free Speech movement, and (you won't like these, but) Social
Security and the 40-hour work week.

Your dystopian complaints range from three decades to a century out of date. My complaints are all about policies embodied in current law.

The work week, like hourly compensation, improves naturally due to increasing productivity and the choices it enables for workers.  We could overnight change the minimum wage to $1/day and the maximum hours to 80 hrs/wk, and it would budge the working conditions of only a small fraction of workers -- none of whom would agree to the new extrema. This is Macroeconomics 101, but leftists in their ignorance fantasize that we perpetually hover just one or two laws away from reliving Oliver Twist.

The economic folk superstitions underlying leftism are so widespread in the populace, and so entrenched even in people who consider themselves well-educated, that I sometimes despair whether the uncontroversial findings of modern economic science will ever play the indispensable foundational role they deserve to play in public policy (let alone politics).  But then I think of that counter-current I mentioned above, and I hope that in the marketplace of ideas the Economic Science meme-complex tends to be a disinfectant for the Economic Ignorance meme-complex when the two of them meet head-on.  So it's not necessary that a majority of rank-and-file voters understand why their economic folk superstitions are wrong -- but it would be nice if they did.

There are people who embrace the good part and others who embrace the dark part.

I don't buy this good-Jedi vs. bad-Jedi theory of American politics. It's intellectual laziness to assume the worst possible motives in those who disagree with you. Politics is far too complex to reduce to a facile good vs. evil dichotomy. Those who do so are merely announcing that they've given up on understanding why anyone would disagree with them.

>But neophobes will be an indefinite threat, because they can
>always claim that the End Is Near, and no track record of failed
>doomsaying can shake their conviction that this time they're right.

Sorry, but what the heck is a necrophobe?

Neophobia is fear of novelty, especially of techno-economic progress. Think Ted Kaczynski, or the Green Party.

I do hope, BTW, that Americans are as decent as you claim. If so, the
Left will rise again.

Only if Americans are not as smart as I claim. :-)