Funny, they collect tax in PA. (And in 23 other states.)

I thought we were talking about IBM?

If that meeting with Bill Gates never happened, IBM would still have found someone to provide an OS for their PC. Apple would have still produced the Lisa, ushering in the GUI era. Only an idiot would minimize MS's influence on computing, but let's not pretend that we would all be using carbon paper and typewriters... the PC market was very active when the IBM clone steadily gained prominence, with several vendors of mouse-driven GUIs.

Done what, exactly? Created a command-line personal computer? There was a healthy marketplace full of those - some affordable, some expensive. Within a year or two of release of the Lisa, there were a bunch of windowing environments - some quite competitive like the Amiga, some terrible like Windows. I don't mean to dismiss the level of prestige that IBM brought to the table as far as businesses were concerned, but it's not as if businesses would not have eventually adopted PCs. Visicalc was already making PCs common in the business environment.

The dissection is going to be... awkward.

Are you the same guy? Anyway... there is inherent value added when you manufacture something from raw materials. The raw materials themselves are also on someone's property. Sand is not "free" and neither are microchips.

On the other hand, if someone is whistling a song and the song winds its way into your head and you start to whistle the same song, you have not stolen anything, there is no moral hazard, and copying the song was completely free.

There's a whole list in Bite magazine :)

"Can you"? Could you clarify? Do you mean legally under copyright law?

I don't understand. You don't force soundwaves to be free. They are free by default. Similarly, bits and bites are free by default. There is nothing absurd about it - proprietary software and singers are in the same boat.

All it would take is a single act of congress to make all music free. There is no moral argument here, simply one of policy. There is a belief that letting artists control their recordings will lead to more recordings, and so that's what we do. If we decide that doesn't work, or that it isn't worth it, then that government-granted "right" can go away and we are back to the natural order of things.

So I turn the question around on you: in the age of the internet and cheap professional-level recording equipment, justify why music shouldn't be free. It's almost free right now, despite the special rights over the material.

Do you really think that it would be possible for corporations to get as large as they do without limited liability?

Nevertheless, it is not part of Libertarian ideology.

Personally, I think there is probably some middle ground. It is hard to find someone who thinks that we haven't gone too far, with corporations now even getting religious freedom and free speech. We could probably maintain some kind of tort protection for passive investors while at the same time removing limited liability for anyone active in running the business. It still wouldn't quite fit into libertarian ideals, but it would be a lot closer.

Something like double liability might be a nice compromise that still allows passive investment without putting your personal property at stake. I think active participants in the business (employees, board members, executives, activist investors, etc.) should not have any kind of liability protection.

That was not a stab at implementing liberal ideals. Libertarians do not endorse limited liability as a concept - it breaks liberalism. It would not surprise a Libertarian to find out that a government invention (limited liability) ran amok, leading to the need for even more government inventions (anti-trust law).

No "-ism" is implemented completely anywhere. Ideology can only be a goal or guiding principle - reality will always prevent a full implementation.

Incidentally, the limited liability corporation runs counter to Libertarian ideals, so don't lump the corporate mess we are in along with the libertarians. Limiting liability completely screws up the personal property based incentive system.

The problem with "sticking true" in this case is that other people have had their hands in the system and liberalizing as single, small part of it will not do anything good. Among the anti-Libertarian features of the current ISP landscape: limited liability corporations, exclusive agreements with local governments, tons of existing regulation, etc. It may very well be that we would all be better off with the libertarian ideal of a free and open market where individual liability and property concerns keep everything self-regulated... but that is not even close to what we have. Trying to shoehorn a single scrap of Libertarian thinking on to a completely non-Libertarian system is a sign of poor critical thinking skills, IMHO.

(I consider Libertarian to be my base ideology, but I deviate from it wildly to try and stay pragmatic.)