If it's opt-in, or you can very easily opt out without giving up anything else, then it's a subscription. Otherwise, it's a tax.

Businesses hire people when they have a job that needs doing, provided that it's worth the cost. Not every potential job is worth its cost, and minimum wage artificially raises that cost, with the obvious result that some jobs simply go undone.

There is also the matter of competition which is not subject to the minimum wage—not just under-the-table employment and offshoring, but also automation. With the increased minimum wage, businesses may find that it's now cheaper to employ a machine, where before they would have given the job to a human. Or perhaps they simply increase their existing employees' workloads rather than hiring someone else to handle the "unskilled" jobs.

Even if every business did act like it was insensitive to wages, as you seem to think, that would just mean that the marginal ones are no longer profitable and thus go out of business, further reducing both the supply of goods and the demand for labor.

Emphasis very much on the "figuratively"—and it's not the employer holding the gun. If the worker does not consent then he is merely left in his original state, and is no worse off than he would be in the absence of the employer. Regardless of any external pressures, whether from nature or the government or other sources, the employer-employee relationship itself is completely consensual. A free market is one where people's natural rights are respected, not one where everyone is guaranteed an equal bargaining position. The fact that the job means more to the worker than it does to the employer does not prevent this from being a free market.

What "interesting" lives you imagine most /. users to lead.

You say that as if it is supposed to mean something to me - as if I am supposed to respond with "Oh! The HEARTLAND INSTITUTE organized the conference? Why didn't you say so! Oh, the irony! Denning is going to tear them a new corn hole!". Well, let me share my contextual understanding of your sentence: Remember that [Unknown individual] is addressing the [Unknown Institute] organised [Unknown Acronym] conference.

Doctor who was on for what, 47 years before Tennant's catch phrase? But I instantly heard Rigel's voice when I read the launch vipers option.

16 minutes? tl;dw

Bitcoin has an extremely predictable rate of supply inflation (the kind meant here) which follows an exponential decay curve and will be under 1%/yr. by 2020 or so. There could be some very minor supply deflation after that point due to people losing their keys, but it should never become a major factor.

The price inflation and deflation you allude to is partly due to being a very young high-risk/high-reward venture. If Bitcoin is to reach even a fraction of its potential as a currency, the price per bitcoin must end up several orders of magnitude higher than it is now to match the increased demand, or there simply wouldn't be enough to go around. On the other hand, concerted political opposition could render it useless in most of the major markets. Whether the innovators or the politicians will win in the long run is anyone's guess at this point, thus the risk.

The other part, which is likely to dominate in the long-term if Bitcoin succeeds, is a reflection of normal changes in the demand for money. Central banks usually try to dampen out demand-driven price swings by manipulating the supply of money, but they are in fact an essential part of balancing present and future demand for goods, and suppressing them leads to an economy-wide misallocation of resources.

That depends on what you're trying to trace. While it's true that the transactions themselves are public knowledge, they don't include any personally identifiable information. Tracing the movement of bitcoins through a series of single-use addresses on the blockchain is easy; tracing the changes in real-world ownership is an entirely different matter. Unlike money moving through a series of bank accounts, there is no central entity to tell you who controls each address.

The difference is that, unlike wild horses, a free market is made up of free individuals with individual rights. You're talking about putting reins on people and channeling their efforts toward ends you consider productive. Think about that for a moment. There's a word for harnessing people and putting them to work for you without regard for their rights: slavery.

The unharnessed free market may not be quite as "productive" (from your perspective) as a captive, harnessed, non-free market, but a choice between "productive" slavery and "unproductive" freedom is really no choice at all. Slavery isn't an option.

In terms of the "global warming problem", at least. The population of Australia is a rounding error. (7,050M global population - 23M Australians = still over 7B people; Australia is about 3/10th of 1%). The entire population is less than the city of Shanghai, or Karachi, or Beijing... The top 20 cities in the world have 10 X as many people of the Australian continent.

Good on them that they are voting not to piss in the wind. Specifically, this wind.

Even if humans can significantly affect the rate of change of global warming, taxing the most advanced economies is not going to help as much as doing [insert magic policy here] to change the course of the emerging economies which are going down the path that the 1st world traveled half a century ago.

That's only true if you needed their permission to do X in the first place. The EULA can't unilaterally revoke your existing rights. Generally the enforceability of a EULA rests on copyright; if you're not doing anything that would violate the copyright, you have no need to agree to the EULA. (And—in the US—simply using media you already have a legal copy of is not a copyright violation; the "temporary copy inside the computer's hard disk or RAM" reasoning originally used to justify most EULAs was struck down ages ago, when the copy is essential to the use of the media.)

You do realize that productivity is measured by economic value, right? Not by energy expended? If you're so sure that others making far more than yourself are doing similar amounts of work, why not apply for their position? You can do the job, right? Why wouldn't they jump at the chance to save a bunch of money paying you 2x instead of paying the current guy 10x? For that matter, why haven't they done this already? There's no shortage of people looking for work.

Perhaps there's more to the job than you realize.

You're thinking of pacifists, or possibly communists. Libertarians are the realists in this scenario; we realize that humans are imperfect, and that, as a direct consequence of this, giving a select group of imperfect humans the practically unlimited power of government is not a recipe for a better world. ("Select" because, for the most part, they are self-selected as the most likely to abuse the position... one doesn't generally set out to become a politician out of the belief that people have the the right to live their lives peaceably without third-party interference.)

Libertarians are opposed to all abuses of power, not just those which originate from government. We oppose the government specifically because it embodies the systematic abuse of power, and, unlike other criminal organizations, maintains the pretense that its abuses are somehow "legitimate". That does not mean that we are OK with non-government entities violating others' rights, or think that in the absence of government everyone would "just get along". There will continue to be bad actors out there; we will still need to defend ourselves against them. But without government they at least won't have a ready-made system available to amplify their offenses and shield them from the consequences.

Well then, if we're talking about a subpoena rather than a warrant then that's an entirely different matter. Warrants are much more powerful in some ways, but for that reason are much more constrained. If you fail to turn over subpoena'd information without a very good explanation then you should expect the court to presume that it would have been as damaging as possible to your case, meaning you'll probably lose.

However, no one should ever face fines or jail time for simply refusing to comply with this or any other form of court order. The ability to hand out fines and jail time for "contempt of court" makes the courts much too powerful; this is a stark example of the "rule of man" rather than "rule of law" and has no place in a free society.