Yes, Obama thinks he can fly! So what else is new? It’s an ugly campaign, not the least helped by that stud muffin Dennis Kucinich having hopped out of the race. Oh, well. An old guy versus an ear guy. I mean, an old guy versus a young guy. Makes for an interesting nesting doll, these last 20 years. Elder Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Ron Paul…

Another thing that seems to bode well for libertarianism recently is that the Internet — while generally full of rubbage — seems to reinforce libertarian principles. Paradoxically, it seems to generally cause people to be more educated and think more clearly, perhaps due to the very large number and philosophical variety of available sources and peoples’ resulting immunization against the overwhelming amounts of bullshit. I’ve noticed people without the Internet generally seem to have curiously “mainstream media” opinions, presumably because the opinion shapers are their primary source of information. I find it enheartening that Time is covering libertarianism, but also simultaneously I can’t help but think, “Time. I remember reading that back in the good ol’ days. I wonder if anyone still reads Time?”

I think a number of other factors contribute to the potential rise in libertarianism on the Web: the “every man’s home is his castle” idea that no person’s website should be censored (but every man should be despot of his own website, a very propertarian idea), violent aversion to taxation, open and extensible routing protocols, packet switching in particular, piracy, pornography, gambling, Wild West like behavior, and the general perceived irrelevance of government when individuals can instantly network and the connections are often one-to-one (due to sockets, eBay, and long tails of distributions allowing very focused groups to aggregate from nowhere, with little planning or overhead). Finally, the technical cognoscenti of the Internet like Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, and various Internet visionaries all seem to take explicitly left or right anarchist positions. The entire topology of the Internet is highly tilted in favour of libertarian ideas, so much so that the questions of who to regulate and who to tax are oft perceived as foreign, intrusive, and a violation of privacy, rather than the “will of the People.” The tilt is actually so great that I think the libertarians would have to try hard to fail to capture mindshare in order to not make progress.

For a simple example of this, look at how Ron Paul, libertarian hardliner was relatively unknown for much of his 30 years in office, and the young people in particular — the Internet babies — took his message and ran like crazy with it.

This would be a great topic for a Ph.D. thesis in sociology.