Shannon Love

We can think of libertarianism as falling between two poles: the anarcho-libertarian that views all government as a threat and the classical-liberal that views government as necessary but inherently dangerous.

Both poles worship the free market but each side approaches the origin of the free market from different directions. This difference in concepts of the origin of the free market creates many of the divides in libertarian thought. For example, it predicts whether a libertarian will or will not support a war.

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Online poker players are concerned that sophisticated programs (called bots in computer lingo) will win poker games on online gambling sites. They fear the bots will systemically defeat the human players and rake in all the money.

Of course, the ultimate evolution will be bots playing bots. Then humans can go do productive work while the bots take care of our critical gambling needs.

Property and privacy are antithetical. Property is by definition a statement of who controls a particular resource. If an ultimately public linkage does not exist between an individual and a resource then that resource has no owner. The property system and the free-market that depends on it cannot function with anonymous ownership and anonymity arises from privacy.

If we have an environment with a high degree of privacy, we automatically have an environment with a high degree of anonymity. With a high degree of anonymity we have weak property rights. With weak property rights we have a weak free-market mechanism

This antithesis has extraordinary consequences in the Internet age.

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Reportedly, CBS will announce today that they concede the infamous Bush AWOL documents are forgeries.

Once that happens, the story will then become the providence of the documents. Many believe that CBS has been slow to declare documents forgeries because then they would be obligated to say who they got them from. Speculation is rife CBS does not want to reveal the source because it is a high ranking member of the Democratic party like Max Clealand. Such a scandal would most likely destroy the Kerry campaign.

I am typing with crossed fingers now, hoping that no major Democrat was involved. I think it would be a disaster long-term for the nation and for the policies that I support if Kerry goes down due a scandal, especially a scandal that he was unaware of. There are two major negative outcomes from Bush winning by default.

First, winning by default can seriously undermine a winner’s mandate. It’s hard to claim you have widespread support for your policies when you won office because the other guy didn’t show up or disappeared. Bush needs a firm mandate to finish the war and to advance the ideas of the “Ownership Society.”

Second, the Democratic party needs some serious self-reflection and reform. It needs new 21st century ideas and new leaders. Getting trounced in a fair fight will prompt this reform while losing due to scandal will delay it. It will be easy for democratic stalwarts to say, “We would have won if only it were not for the scandal.”

I think everybody assumes that the source of the forgeries is rooting for Kerry for whatever reason. I just hope like hell it’s nobody on his payroll.

(cross posted at Shannon Love’s Blog)

(Update: CBS says Burkett gave them the memo but he claims he is not the forger and just passed them along from someone else.)

(Update: Ap reports Kerry campaign official spoke with Burkett at the request of CBS. Crap.)

I think that Bush has a significant advantage over his opponents in the AWOL story.

He knows what really happened.

Everybody else is just guessing, but Bush knows. This gives him an enormous strategic advantage. His opponents don’t really know what happened so they expend a great deal of resources chasing mirages and basing strategy on them.

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