Susan Hogarth wrote:

SH) I also don't consider you to have provided anything I would recognize as 'empirical analysis' (SH

Here it is for the third time: "every single episode in which there wasn't a monopoly on force-initiation over a region becomes a test case for [anarcholibertarianism]. Despite the literally hundreds of such test cases, the only purported successes advanced for the theory involve a few thousand pre-industrial farmers sprinkled sparsely across medieval Iceland and the frontier of colonial Pennsylvania.  In contrast to how even bastard forms of minarchism have been so spectacularly successful compared to all other significant social experiments, the track record of anarcholibertarianism is simply embarrassing."

This also was an empirical claim: "It would be untenable to deny that history provides many examples of situations in which there was no functioning monopoly on force-initiation over a significant region for a significant period of time, for any non-embarrassing standard of significance."

And this: "I've never heard of a single case in the entire history of organized crime across hundreds of cities in scores of nations over multiple decades in which the unregulated market for protection behaved as predicted by anarcholibertarian theory.  This track record becomes even more dismal if you include all the cases in history in which there have been regions lacking effective sovereignty by a central authority. This amounts to an empirical falsification of the anarcholibertarian theory of protection markets that by the standards of social science is spectacularly conclusive."

And earlier I twice offered you this as-yet-unanswered empirical argument: "You're asking for a complete overturning of how this polity provides for its common defense and secures its members' right to life, liberty, and property.  According to the three leading indices of freedom, only 13 nations (out of almost 200) are currently more free than America. America's constitutional republican framework has been by far the most successful in human history.  It has been increasing personal and civil liberties almost monotonically for two centuries, and we are among the most economically free nations in the world, with a per-capita GDP exceeded only by Norway and Luxembourg.  Our 300 million people live and work in a continent-wide nation with a $13 trillion economy built on a twenty-first century technological infrastructure.  By contrast, anarcho-capitalists can merely wave toward a couple of medieval island nations with populations and population densities four orders of magnitude less than those of modern industrialized states.  As great as America is, we have detailed, redundant, and current empirical evidence backing up the mainstream findings of modern economic science about how market-oriented reforms within the statist framework can make America far more free and far more prosperous. You have nothing of the kind to support your moralizing a priori claim that America would be a better place if we completely dismantled our system of rights protection in favor of a promise by liberty-lovers to set a good example of aggression abstinence."

SH) Besides our substantive ethical differences, we also seem to have serious communication issues. (SH

Indeed.  It's just not tenable to claim that what I wrote above isn't an empirical argument.

SH) I do not seem to be able to ask a question and get an answer from you I find useful. (SH

Are you seriously claiming that I don't answer your questions more completely and directly than you answer mine?  Do you really want me to compile a list of my many direct questions to you that you've never even tried to answer?

SH) I don't know what values drive your sense of right and wrong. (SH

In a thread with you entitled "Defining Libertarianism", I wrote:

BH) I would define libertarianism is the belief that the role and incidence of aggression in society are to be minimized -- i.e. that the role and incidence of liberty in society are to be maximized. [...] A good way to measure how libertarian you are is by the net incidence of aggression that would likely occur if your policies were adopted. An even better metric would be to differentiate the aforementioned measure over the time variable: the change in the net incidence of aggression that would occur because of the policy changes you advocate. [...] Nobody can promise us that for the tool-using speech-capable pair-bonded omnivorous bipedal primates on this planet, it just so happens that 100% absolute aggression abstinence is always the optimal strategy for minimizing the net incidence of aggression in the societies such primates form.  I can take very seriously the detailed consequentialist arguments of a David Friedman or Fred Foldvary for advocating such abstinence, but I see very little merit in simplistic Rothbardian deontological arguments for it. (BH

BH) people should not be allowed to free-ride on the contributions of others toward such goods [viz. guaranteed access to a system for protecting life, liberty, and property], but rather must help finance them through a uniform system of marginal taxation on resource use, negative externalities, and land value, as decided under the rule of law by a maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic. (BH

If that isn't a thorough enough summary of my political principles, see also http://marketliberal.org/PlatComWiki/Statement_of_Principles_Proposals#Proposal_by_Brian_Holtz.  And if you want an excruciatingly comprehensive statement of my views on ethics, political philosophy, and virtue philosophy, then see this chapter of my magnum opus: http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#Axiology.  My views on a couple of details have changed a bit since then, and I still need to incorporate some of the ideas I've since encountered in Fred Foldvary's universal ethic and geolibertarianism, but I still stand by nearly everything in my book.

SH) But I do know you consider killing innocents as moral behavior under the right circumstances and that places a huge gulf between us that I am not sure any discussion can bridge. (SH

Are you stating categorically that you would never kill an innocent to save a thousand innocents?  Does your "sense of right and wrong" let you give a straight answer to this straightforward question, or do you still dismiss it as "stupid"?  I below excerpt my last email to you on the Trolley Problem, which alone includes around ten unanswered questions or challenges.

SH) I've thought more about this since then. It's not -speculative- so much as -stupid-. The only way it could happen as you say is for some Evil Genius (TM) to set it up thusly (SH