Spam will be gone, but advertising will become less annoying but way, way more effective. But it's not a bad thing - it's part of the transition from broadcast media to narrowcast media, and from paid content to free content. The advertising will be so targeted that you actually won't mind sitting through it, because it will be for products that you might otherwise consider buying anyway.

Let's hope not. Biofuels based on corn and other food crops are bad for obvious reasons, but even non-food biofuels have their risks - among them degradation of the American/Canadian Great Plains, ecological degradation in the Third World, and the risk of invasive species (most of these non-food biofuels are fast-spreading grasses).

The most ecological energy policy is to stop the government from subsidizing oil (by building suburbia with land use restricitons), subsidizing coal, and subsidizing water. There is no magic fuel out there that will allow us to consume infinite amounts of cheap energy - nature made extracting energy expensive for a reason, and the government needs to get out of the business of trying to make it easier.

Yeah, this is what I've been saying - non-food biofuels are likely to be just as bad as corn ethanol and the like.

(cocaine rather than crack)

This is a point that is not mentioned nearly enough when people discuss drug policy - cocaine can be pretty bad, but it's nothing compared to crack. And you'll notice that crack is an overwhelmingly lower-class drug - even the crack dealers do coke, not crack. So it's very reasonable to believe that crack use would all but disappear if cocaine were legalized.

it'd probably cut back on all those unfortunate chippers who accidentally OD because they didn't know how strong their new batch of heroin was

This is a very important point. There are only two ways to unintentionally die of a heroin overdose: 1) you underestimate the purity, or 2) your dealer has cut the heroin with benzodiazepines. Both of these are direct results of the war on drugs, and deaths from these two causes would be reduced almost to nothing if heroin were legalized, as its purity and dosage would be properly labeled, and impurities would not exist (either because of government regulation or market competition, depending on where you stand in the statist-libertarian ideological spectrum). There is a third cause - mixing with alcohol - but most heroin addicts only turn to alcohol when they don't the money for heroin (or, as much heroin as they'd like), and if heroin were legal, it would be very cheap, and there'd be no reason for anyone to substitute alcohol (a substance much more dangerous and debilitating than heroin) for heroin.

(source)

I'm interested to find out your sources for the claim that government encouraged low density planning.

Seriously?? It's not blindingly obvious??? I mean, this is really a topic that could be stretched on for volumes, but here are some places to get yourself started: Euclid and zoning, roads and the Great Depression, and then the ultimate comparison: what the free market built vs. what the government built. And let's not forget that VA home loans (the primary vehicle of homeownership in the immediate post-war years) were restricted primarily to single-family developments at a time when the housing stock was not nearly as suburban as it is today. There is actually a blog devoted to exactly the idea that free market development is significantly denser, more urbanistic, and more environmentally-friendly than what's come out of contemporary American land use policy, and pretty much every post is an example of what you're looking for -- marketurbanism.com. But don't take anyone's word for it: see for yourself. Go find old buildings (excluding rural/farm buildings), and you'll see that they are way denser than your typical 2008 suburban development. Now, of course this is attributable more to the automobile than anything else, but ask yourself: how did the automobile become so widespread? Clearly private entrepreneurs weren't making fortunes off of building roads -- this was the government's work.

I also understand that freedom is more important to you than market efficiency.

This is 100% false. I have absolutely no interest in abstract concepts like "freedom" -- for me it's all about which system humanity would be better under. If state planning worked, I'd be all for it -- I don't have a dog in this ideological fight. I'm purely a pragmatist.

And in a libertarian system, that is all government is for: to protect the property of the rich from the poor.

I'm an anarcho-capitalist. I do not believe in the government in any form. I don't mean to be rude, but you're assuming a lot about me that's just not true.

Again, I ask: what does your system offer non-property owners?

Property is but one productive input. Knowledge (i.e., "labor") is the most valuable, and it's difficult to monopolize that (unless you have the government behind you enforcing IP laws and censorship, that is!). But like I said, "my system" isn't what you think it is -- under anarcho-capitalism, if you yourself do not have the means to protect and defend your property, nobody will protect your "right" to it for you. It's a system that makes owning property a lot more onerous for non-occupants, which is something that I'd think you'd like.

Oil and car companies bought up the transit companies looooong after the government started favoring cars over other modes of transit. There's just no getting around the fact that cars work best (and are most profitable) when density is low, and mass transit the opposite, and the US government at all levels worked very hard at making density low, all the while subsidizing roads in a way that mass transit wasn't being subsidized at the time.

As for "natural monopolies," this is a concept that's used a lot in introductory microeconomics textbooks, but in reality, it's a lot more complicated and controversial than you're making it seem. And anyway, what of it? What does it matter if it's a "natural monopoly"? Is real estate then, too, a "natural monopoly," since you can't have two buildings in the same place? It's an overly broad and meaningless term.

The question isn't whether or not roads are a natural monopoly - the question is whether or not roads would exist, period, in a free market transportation system. And given the historical evidence, the answer would seem to be no - when transportation and land use were left up to the free market, people voted with their wallets and chose mass transit rather than using private vehicles on private roads.

As for mass transit have externalities that need to be subsidized, this was clearly not the case before the US government began favoring and subsidizing roads over mass transit. Before then, whether or not "benefit was maximized," the fact is that mass transit was much more prevalent than roads. So you're telling me that now the benefit of mass transit is maximized?? Sounds like it was a lot more widely provided by the free market than the supposedly-welfare maximizing government.

I don't count myself among them, but most Austrian economists believe that free banking is the most crucial feature of a free market.

But personally, I'm of the opinion that the most important sector of the economy is the land use/transportation sectors, which are heavily, heavily nationalized, and have incredibly detrimental impacts on the environment. Compare the relatively free market in transportation around the turn of the century (when the vast majority of urbanites and suburbanites used private mass transit to get around) to the highly unfree market we have today (where the vast majority of people in all places used nationalized roads and live in houses with zoning and land use restrictions that force them to live in suburbia or suburban style land use patterns). The difference is night and day...hardly just "always something."

(And last I checked, there were no neo-cons arguing that we need to get rid of zoning and minimum parking restrictions in order to return to a free market in land use and transportation. So while they might have tried almost every free market tactic that your limited imagination can come up with, you ought to realize that you're only imagining the free market policies that you've seen and heard discussed in the mainstream - but if you open your mind a little, you'll see that there are countless sectors of the economy that are definitely more statist than they are libertarian.)

Federal Reserve = Austrian-based policy????

Stop...you're just embarrassing yourself.

...er, by "thank god physicists didn't believe everything Adam Smith said," I mean Isaac Newton.

Hahaha, that's the most ridiculous thing I've heard all day. Please, do let the audience know what countries have adopted Austrian school economics as policy - I'm dying to know!!