Never ask people what they identify as. The descent into self-parody is just one of those things. It's really curious to me that basic ideas, like the Efficient

Never ask people what they identify as. The descent into self-parody is just one of those things. It's really curious to me that basic ideas, like the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, are still such hard nuts to crack. "Private courts paid for by the applicants" - go read "Machineries of Freedom" by David D. Friedman. Catch the finer points. He writes well; it's just a foreign concept. His grounding is non-Anglo Saxon law, from the perspective of literally SCA stuff. I think of the book as sort of a ... Talmudic dialogue on alternatives to what we're used to. Is it something that should or can be implemented? Can't say. Probably not if I had to guess - crosses too much path-dependence. The framework I use for "what is libertarianism" tends these days to be the three axis model from Arnold Kling. To wit: conservatives are concerned about barbarism, "liberals" are concerned about oppression; libertarians about coercion. "... white males with skills..." - well, that's very path dependent. It's also the target audience for say, Heinlein novels. Y'know, nerds :) The internet of the '90s was a big vector for libertarian ideas. "Normal" people won't bother with it. So you have had 20+ years of libertarian bikeshedding online. Finally, the Clean Air Act... it's easy to forget the junkyards full of cars where all the air control stuff just stopped working, to forget the rather steep learning curve, to forget it all really didn't work out until adaptive control in engine control modules became commonplace. To treat it as ... "holy writ" ( uggggh, horrible metaphor ) is leaving a lot of information on the floor.