More from Stephan Kinsella here and here, and another reply from Kevin Carson here.
It’s frustrating not to be able to jump in here yet (especially since Stephan’s and Peter Klein’s interpretations of my position have grown increasingly strange, and I want to grouse about it in detail) but I’m surrounded by stacks of term papers and final exams right now ….
If I’d known how many more parts there’d be I wouldn’t have started the damn Latin titles. In any case, my last post should’ve been Pars Septima, not Pars Septa. Argh! Oh well.
Wait, this post has an actual topic: Shawn Wilbur weighs in on whether big chain bookstores benefit from state intervention. (Spoiler alert: yes.)
More from me on the conflation debate anon.
Kevin Carson offers an excellent, lengthy reply to some of the critical commentary on my Cato Unbound piece.
More from me L8R.
Some of my right-libertarian comrades seem to think that labour unions can succeed only by violent means, whether directly or via the state. Maybe not.
I hate to be in the position of defending Bill O’Reilly, but Keith Olbermann’s rant against him last night was pretty shabby.
Olbermann thought he’d caught O’Reilly in a contradiction because in a recent interview O’Reilly called himself a supporter of the separation of church and state, while in an earlier statement O’Reilly had, in Olbermann’s words, “called the separation of church and state bogus.”
No, he didn’t. What O’Reilly actually said (as was clear from the excerpt Olbermann provided) was that he didn’t buy the “bogus separation-of-church-and-state argument” against the display of Christmas symbols and such on state property. In other words, it wasn’t the separation thesis itself that O’Reilly was calling bogus, it was the inference from that thesis to a specific policy conclusion.
Now as it happens I think O’Reilly was mistaken in calling that inference bogus. Still, it was clearly the inference and not the premise that O’Reilly was calling bogus, and so Olbermann’s triumphant crowing over O’Reilly’s supposed inconsistency was either dishonest or sloppy.
I still prefer Olbermann to O’Reilly, but at some point during the campaign he really jumped the shark for me.
My final contribution (a brief and hopefully eirenic valediction) to the Cato-sponsored portion of the discussion is up at Cato Unbound.
In other news, Peter Klein has responded to my earlier response, and P. M. Lawrence has counter-responded. I’ll have more to say anon.