that most of our readers already read Marginal Revolution.  But just in case not, I want to recommend a linked pair of Tyler’s posts: Common Mistakes of Left-Wing Economists? and Common Mistakes of Right-Wing and Market-Oriented Economists.

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While I’m doing a short-links post: Glenn Greenawald on Guantanamo and Bradley Manning; and John Quiggin.  I must admit that my ’00s-era hope for a liberal-libertarian reconciliation to replace the old fusionism had a lot to do with the collapse of the rule of law under Bush, and conservative apologetics for same; I did genuinely believe that on this hard kernel of liberalism and libertarianism, Obama’s Democratic Party would be meaningfully better.  I said to an audience at Princeton in 2008

“I have arguments I’ve been developing for many years about why libertarians belong not in a great fusionist alliance with conservatives but rather in common cause with our fellow liberals.  I think that’s been an interestingly hard argument to make, but we meet at a time, a few weeks before an election, when I think the immediate conclusion to draw is boringly easy.  No libertarian can hope to see the party of torture, denials of habeas corpus, indefinite detention without trial, and boundless unsupervised executive power returned to office.  If our core root liberalism, if our roots in the struggles of common law against absolutist king or in John Locke or in Montesquieu or in the American Revolution mean anything at all, then it means a four percentage-point difference in marginal income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power.  That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance seem kind of silly. “

Well, it’s time to return to those traditional arguments, since even after a change of party, we’re still not up to a minimally acceptable threshold on what I consider the hard kernel of liberal concerns.

Martial law, military power, and Admiralty Court trials were a major set of reasons why pre-revolutionary Americans thought that they had been deprived of the basic rights of Englishmen:

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation […]

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

It remains my view that marginal differences in tax rates are far less consequential in terms of liberty than these kinds of concerns– if only we could find political friends who could be counted on to share them.

I guess this ceased to be a short-links post a while ago.