o/~ Come on you all gotta listen to me: / Lay off that Scaife; leave that Koch-aine be… o/~

If A tells B that A will kill B if B doesn’t perform action X (which B has no enforceable obligation to do), then A has aggressed against B. If A falsely tells B that C, of C’s own accord, will kill B if B doesn’t perform action X, then A is a liar or simply misguided, but not a criminal.

The threat of force is merely “disingenuous political rhetoric” now? Not coercion?

Oh, come on. You’re equivocating on the term “threat.” There’s “threatening” in the sense of a promising to inflict harm yourself, and “threatening” in the sense of merely frightening. Merely frightening someone with the prospect that an unrelated third party will harm them (without your direction, and indeed quite against your will) may be founded or unfounded, and it may be honest or dishonest, but even if dishonest it is not coercive in the sense of violating someone’s rights. There is quite obviously a difference between threatening Gramma that if she votes for X, you are going to bash her head in with a hammer (that’s coercive), and warning Gramma that if she votes for X, then Obama is going to bash her head in with a hammer. The latter is no more coercion than any other sort of false prediction — about hurricanes, say, or financial catastrophes, or an apocalypse or whatever other dangers people make unfounded predictions about.

Of course, again, if the warning is unfounded, but you spread it anyway due to carelessness, willful ignorance, or dishonesty, then you’re violating your ethical and intellectual obligations to deal with Gramma honestly. But you are not threatening to invade her rights (or to direct anyone else to invade her rights, either). There is absolutely no plausibly libertarian theory of justice which would allow for forcible suppressing mere specious warnings, on the grounds that they are somehow equivalent to actionable threats.

Personally, I can’t stand the New Koch.

Out of curiosity, are you suggesting Jesse Walker is a “so-called” libertarian? And, keeping the sanctified left-right distinction intact, how exactly would you classify his work?

a) But in what sense does the government’s creating something count as the community’s creating something?

Presumably the government is that entity that the community (however formed including voluntarily) is one in which the constituents have contracted to transfer some their authority of self defense to a common entity. But, that is not the premise of the discussion I do not think. I believe that the question is in pushing forward toward that voluntaryist society, are compromises and interim steps vulgar? Is cutting one branch from a tree wrong because there are three that need pruning?

b) Why is the past origin of an institution more important than how it functions now? If it turned out that the Supreme Court was once an independent arbitration agency that was later granted monopoly powers, should that change our evaluation of its actions?

I am not sure that I implied that past origin was a factor, but that the two need to be separated as different entities and their origin spoke of their authority for action. One acts on its own, the other is in a special place of trust holding in it the proxied authority of its constituents. That that authority never be let go beyond what any one constituent might have, with an economy of scale.

Monopoly is an ethical breach.

This sounds a bit like the argument that Marxists have occasionally given, that we should try to provoke the government into becoming even more outrageously unjust so as to awaken resistance in the populace. But a) it’s a tad risky, and b) it’s kind of tough luck for the victims of the increased injustice.

I would not approach it as malicious provocation. I would however not shirk from removing an “evil” even if it were “balancing” another just on that strength. Two wrongs just do not make a right and I do not believe that this “balance” is really a balance.

I certainly don’t think anybody has an enforceable right to be free of disingenuous political rhetoric.

Um. The threat of force is merely “disingenuous political rhetoric” now? Not coercion?

Don’t the elderly have the right to not be fooled into believing someone is out to kill them who isn’t?

A “right” in what sense? I certainly don’t think anybody has an enforceable right to be free of disingenuous political rhetoric. Everyone has an ethical obligation to be honest, so the elderly (like everyone else) have legitimate grounds for complaint if people are deceiving them. But not everything that’s unethical is morally criminal.

Hypocrisy is nothing compared to …

Well, whatever, but the Rachel Maddow segment you asked me about was a segment about the Kochs’ alleged hypocrisy. So my response was about the complaint that was being made in the segment you asked me about, not about some other complaint that you think is more important.