Dear libertarian knight seeking to win honor via comment battles with heathen blogger dragons:

I range pretty widely in topics here at Overcoming Bias, and sometimes I consider government policies.  Sometimes I even consider policies that, gasp, violate your favorite libertarian moral axiom, something like no one must ever affect anyone without a notarized consent form.  At which point many of you feel an apparently overwhelming urge to comment on this crucial fact (often smugly).  As if this were some sort of news.

Its not, so please don’t.  I know about your favorite axiom, and I usually notice when something violates it.  I get that you are really really convinced by it, more so than of anything ever.  But listen: I’ve heard that argument and I’m not moved.   Your position is so predictable that I can easily anticipate your response.  I have usually anticipated it, and rejected it.  Liberty is a fine heuristic, but efficiency is more what I want, so I’m willing to consider sometimes violating your liberty axiom.  Like you I am wary of big government, but because of bad consequences that often follow, not a liberty axiom violation.

We get it that you disagree, but when you just declare that fact again (and again and again), intelligent readers, well aware of the existence of libertarian axiomatists, learn only of your continued willingness to impose costs on unwilling others, to signal your continued devotion to your cause (which supposedly relates to preventing imposing costs on unwilling others).

So please, save your breath.  If there must be one post here at OB where you repeat your concerns yet again, thinking we just haven’t heard them enough, about my considering violations of your liberty axiom, please, just make it this one post, and leave the rest be.

Now back to our regularly scheduled wild speculations. …