Some people seem amazed that arguments this bad get put on billboards by "respectible" thinktanks:

Can they be serious? Can they possibly think that this will persuade anyone to doubt the overwhelming evidence about climate change, because a few people who are not only criminals, but mentally ill, believe it’s real? Can you imagine anyone with a shred of self-respect for his or her intelligence, even arch conservative climate change deniers, buying the case that climate change can’t be real because Charles Manson and the Unabomber think it is!?

I find this somewhat delightful, in that it is such a blatant and probably successful attempt to appeal to the subrational lizard-brain emotional mental circuitry, with no danger that it can be confused with anything remotely sensible. So yes, they are serious, they are unapologetically trying to bypass reason. It is not meant to "persuade" anybody of anything, simply to strengthen some Pavlovian associuation pathways in the brains of susceptible dimwits driving by.  And of course it is also a successful attempt to get publicitiy, of which there is no such thing as bad.

Back in my youth I noticed that somehow May Day, the international day of labor solidarity, had been replaced by something called "Law Day". I distinctly remember that even a callow high-school student such as myself could see that this was a crude and blatant attempt at propaganda, the government trying to forcibly alter the meaning of something that didn't belong to it. In a similar vein, the wingers at Volokh have proposed to turn it into "Victims of Communism Day".

This effort is a bit more subtle and convincing. God knows that there are a lot of victims of communist regimes and they deserve some memorials. However, a minute's worth of thought reveals the underlying motive for attempting to tie together Stalin's mass killings with perfectly legitimate struggles of labor for an eight-hour day, right to strike, worker safety...so this seems just as crude and hamfisted as the earlier effort.

Somewhat interesting dust-up between Balloon Juice and Cato/Radley Balko. Triggered by a stupid fight about an internet poll, but produced some clarity about why libertarianism is not really a great thing for people concerned with police misconduct (like Balko):

One of the best, most certain ways to help those who are frequently the subject of police misconduct is to remove them from the poverty and political dispossession that makes police misconduct against them possible. That is an effort that both Balko and the Cato Institute have worked tirelessly to oppose.

I was wondering when libertarians would chime in on the Foxconn/Apple controversies. Shouldn't they have jumped in to point out all those workers are working 60-hour weeks voluntarily? And killing themselves voluntarily? Seemed a bit slow on the usual kneejerking, but eventually EconLog obliged.

Hm, this post is boring. How about an expose of the libertarian/satanist nexus to spice it up?

Tyler Cowen, who for some reason I think of as the least aspergerish member of the George Mason libertarian cabal, shows he can embarrass himself like the rest of them.

Cowen has in fact written many defenses of autism and Asperger's, or at least their "cognitive style", urging us to think of them as examples of neurodiversity and that such people do and should make significant contributions to society. That's an intriguing proposition that deserves some consideration.

But if the contribution of aspys is going to be proclamations like the above, which (as you would expect) are defined by being absolutely unaware of the emotional needs and personal rights of others, then they already have a home on the political right and don't need any more encouragement. That kind of neurodiversity has already contributed to the shredding of the social fabric to the point where it barely exists anymore.

Not exactly libertarian-bashing, this article is performing the actually more important task of talking about the intellectual corruption of economics as a field and how it might be undone:

It is time to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about the public status of economics as an expert discipline: it has grown to be far more powerful as a tool of political rhetoric, blame avoidance and elite strategy than for the empirical representation of economic life.

This is a pretty useful chart. If it doesn't explain why Ron Paul has some distinctly non-libertarian positions, it at least helps you keep track of what they are.

It was obvious to me a long time ago that one area where libertarianism fails spectacularly is in issues relating to children -- who tend not to fit into its very limited idea of what a human being is, since they are not autonomous, self-sufficient, rational, utility maximising atomic units (neither are adults, of course, but it's more obvious in the case of children).

Well, the folks at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, who since they try to combine libertarianism with human values often find it necessary to engage in pretzel-like intellectual contortions, seem to have somehow come up with the idea that in libertopia it will be OK for the government to require child-rearing licenses:

With a parental licensing program, if you get pregnant, you go to get a license to raise the child or you decide to give up the child. You violate no law by becoming pregnant. Once pregnant, you violate no law until the child is born—and only then if you decide to raise it without getting a license. And perhaps you are allowed to take the licensing test multiple times if you fail at first.

Smell the freedom! I guess it's on a par with current lib posterboy Ron Paul completely OK with allowing the state to control what a woman does with her uterus.

(via LGM, with the logic dissected in some detail, along with a good Murray Rothbard bonus.).

This is kinda inside baseball, and I'm definitely not inside, but I can't resist posting this very minor discovery.  Antiwar.com apparently posted this:

A Washington Post piece charting Ron Paul’s rise in the polls contains the usual “but he can’t win” caveat, along  with this nugget:

“Yet, while the libertarian-leaning Texas congressman is earning support for his tight-fisted fiscal positions, he’s so out of step with the GOP mainstream on foreign policy and some domestic issues that even his most loyal aides doubt he can use his momentum to win the Republican nomination.”

Very interesting. Who are these “loyal aides” who snipe at Ron behind his back? And just how “loyal” are they? Earth to Ron Paul: rid yourself of these fifth columnists before they stick the knife in deeper.

Speaking of a libertarian fifth column: Matt Welch and the Reason magazine/Kochotpus crowd are at it again, crowing over the phony “Ron Paul newsletters” non-scandal, claiming “credit” for it — all the while claiming that he is “rooting” for Ron, really he is. He then treats us to five or six anti-Ron pieces, and then — in the interests of “fairness” — links to a few pro-Ron blog posts from the contemptible weathervane Andrew Sullivan and some others.

 The only reason the Reasonids can get away with this without destroying Reason as a libertarian institution is because they are subsidized by the Koch brothers and big neocon money — they don’t have to answer to their libertarian subscribers. Welch, the human praying mantis, and Nick “I’m so hip” Gillespie tried to push Gary Johnson, but he’s even more unpopular than their boring magazine. So now they are sucking up to their friends on the Washington Beltway cocktail party circuit, showing how “anti-racist” and politically correct they are by joining the Republican Establishment and the neocons as they try to smear Ron. They don’t care about the libertarian movement outside of the Beltway — all they care about is pushing their vapid book and peddling their “hip” version of watered down “liberaltarianism

Isn’t it time to show the Reason crowd that the market rules?

And then retracted it, leaving only this remnant behind (the above text is from their RSS feed):

This is crap. You agreed that we would not attack other libertarians without talking about it. You are not the Obama of Antiwar.com, declaring war without a decision by the rest of us minions.

Hm...I thought one actual advantage of libertarianism (as opposed to more leftish anarchist tendencies) is that you don't actually have to get consensus to do every little thing, and he who owns x controls x. Apparently not. Antiwar.com is an odd mixture of left and right anyway, and I feel slightly bad about poking at them since they are the type of libertarians I might want to have a beer with.

A charming Ron Paul/Dr. Seuss mashup, with pictures.

An excerpt, from Horton Deserves to Die:

...a case study of an affable, good-hearted taker named Horton. Dr. Paul shows you how we’d all be better off if Horton was dead. In real life, Horton is helped and in turn helps others, who in turn help others, who in turn help even more others. Dr. Paul patiently breaks down the cause and effect ripples and shows how not helping Horton in the first place, and allowing him to die, breaks this awful cycle of dependency.