Greenspun's suggestion is not a serious one. It is certainly earnest, but it is also impractical to the point of being laughable. Can you imagine an politician,

Greenspun's suggestion is not a serious one. It is certainly earnest, but it is also impractical to the point of being laughable. Can you imagine an politician, of any ideology, seriously taking this suggestion and lasting more than a few months at it before they are overridden by congress, or the courts, or someone else comes in to give it a try? Its purpose is not honest suggestion; it is instead designed to make Greenspun and those who agree with him feel good about their beliefs, and perhaps convince interested readers to entertain a similar belief system as well. If you really want to give Obama suggestions, and you really want them to be taken, you ought to make them feasible. The way forward is via productive compromise and incremental progress -- and that's one of the ways in which libertarianism fails completely: when has any of you ever suggested a small step? Instead you snipe from the margins about the philosophical inequity of it all. Further along the lines of not articulating a vision for the future: - The vast majority of suggestions are negative -- what we must not do or change -- rather than positive. - Libertarian policy is exclusively derived from absolute philosophical first principles with zero consideration as to empirical effectiveness, side effects, or how-do-we-get-there-from-here. It's nice for utopian fiction and useless for the rest of us. p.s. I like how you brush aside so much of the ugliness of that era as "incidences." Assume I take you at your word that things "fiscal" were generally Good: how were things "liberty" then, hmmm? (A rhetorical question.) (edit: paragraph breaks missing in a few places)