A few points:

* Rand Paul is looking for a way to accept alternative currencies like Bitcoin as campaign contributions. That makes him technologically progressive, not backward as some people here are somehow trying to spin it! Read the whole article for more context.

* I don't see why some people interpret this as an attempt to regulate Bitcoin. He obviously supports a free market in currencies - some backed by governments (which is the reality that we presently live in), some backed by a secure distributed ledger (like Bitcoin), some backed by commodities (like e-gold or e-penguins), some by investment assets (like stocks), etc.

* He did not claim to have invented the concept of a mutual fund - he engaged in a thought experiment for a new digital currency, backed by stock(s) / mutual fund(s). This is not an attack on Bitcoin, just a different (and perhaps complementary) idea. If there's a way to do this already, I haven't heard of it. There's no reason why you can't set up a decentralized network for swapping stock / fund shares. Of course all major businesses are currently tied exclusively to national currencies, but hopefully this will soon change...

--libman (old account)

(1) Read Hayek's Choice in Currency .

(2) Charles Koch (not "daddy" Fred C Koch) informed Hayek in a 1973 letter that, since he paid into the US Social Security program for over 10 years, he is technically entitled to benefits. Charles Koch is guilty of stating a fact, possibly as a joke. Hayek is guilty of receiving a letter. It takes very little to give the socialist spin blogosphere an orgasm... With all blogs linking to The Nation article, that has since been removed from their Web-site... Guess they sobered up...

(3) "Moving to US to take advantage"?! Hayek worked and paid taxes all his life. Specific to the US, Hayek taught at the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1962, and later also taught at UCLA in late 60s / early 70s (before that aforementioned letter that you're trying to spin), and he intermittently worked on other things while residing in US and paying US taxes. He was by no means a moocher. He won the Nobel Prize a year later.

(4) There is absolutely zero logic to claims that libertarians are "hypocrites" if they don't reject anything and everything touched by the coercive monopolies of state. Hayek paid taxes / social security all his life - why can't he take back some of what was stolen from him?! Were slaves "hypocrites" for eating their masters' food?! (According to one theory (which presently I don't practice), libertarians should morally commit as much welfare fraud as possible! Was General Washington a "hypocrite" for using captured British cannons against them?!)

(5) "Until?" Neither of the two men you're slandering has significantly changed their positions (not that there's anything wrong with that if you're getting closer to truth).

(6) These "self-serving double-talking soulless punks" have saved millions of lives by intellectually confronting fascism and communism (among other forms of socialism). The Koch Family has saved millions more lives by being among of the world's greatest philanthropists (ex. cancer research).

--libman (old account)

Most libertarians [...] believe in minimalist government, not no government.

This is true, but it's somewhat complicated. Whether { we can do away with all government tomorrow } and whether { coercive national governments with minimal powers are the perpetual ideal } are two separate questions.

Some libertarians (ex. "Anarcho-Capitalists" (not to be confused with any other kind of anarchist (a chickpea is not a chicken))) believe in no government - which of course is a long-term vision. This means universal recognition of NAP, and all higher-level governance being voluntary.

Most libertarians are gradualists - we recognize that coercive government is a consequence of human folly which is not going to disappear overnight. Pure free market is a more complex system of social organization, which requires a more literate populace with better access to technologies that will make the centralized state obsolete. Some pro-capitalist libertarian gradualists even go as far as advocating direct wealth redistribution, because it would be much more efficient than the welfare state - a step in the right direction.

The transition to a freer society is not inevitable (no "historical determinism" here), and the "powers that be" (and their moochers) will of course resist. But many trends are working in our favor. Globalization and cultural integration will make nationalist collectivism less potent. The Internet is making censorship very difficult. Secession movements are becoming more and more popular, leading to more intergovernmental competition. Intergovernmental competition rewards the freest economies with the inflow of brains and capital. You get the idea.

We'll end up with thousands of nations (including seasteads and some day space stations), and people will be free to vote with their feet. Some will have freer markets than others, but the more choice people have the closer we come to the ideal of doing away with involuntary government.

--libman (old account)

RTFM.

Libertarians have much better ideas for making people pay for externalities than statists, and these ideas are becoming ever-more practical as pollution-tracking technologies improve.

Pollution is a violation of Property Rights. It can be tracked from its source via ever-improving new technologies: imaging satellites, censor drones, floating / underwater / underground censor bots, etc. If dozens of Web-sites can have hundreds of millions of users, why can't all people verifiably affected by a pollution source, acting in their interests, sign on to class action lawsuits against pollutants? This naturally leads to an economic system where polluters pay their neighbors, creating incentives for filters, carbon sinks, etc.

--libman (old account)

First of all, the libertarian position is that we need a free market in currencies - not just picking one winning solution like gold or Bitcoin, or the idea / prediction that I present below. In the past, having a myriad of currencies would have made price tags and cash registers very complicated, but 21st century tech is making this ever-less of an issue. Banks, supermarkets and other businesses, neighborhoods, churches, charities, etc could all issue their own currencies, and conversion between them would be trivial. On a level playing field, as we already see in market segments like online encyclopedias and uncomplicated software, non-profits with the most open solution have the competitive advantage. The market will decide what the most popular way is, while dissenters will still be free to do their own thing.

As technology advances, all scarce chemical elements are vulnerable to long-term supply inflation risk - nano-bots gathering gold particles in the ocean, asteroid mining, stelar-scale antimatter-powered particle colliders, etc. Bitcoin (and the hundreds of other cryptography-based currency networks) are awesome, but they're designed specifically to confront the coercion-based "legal tender" of the present day, rather than for optimal transaction time, convenience, deterrence of theft, etc. It still remains to be seen which alternative currency networks do best in the face of (government-backed) DoS attempts, volatility, etc. National governments will surely try to hold on to power, but in the long-term more and more people will see them as obsolete - violence will only accelerate their fragmentation and collapse. In the long term, in a freer and more rational world, markets will likely go back to preferring a currency that is backed by something tangible and scarce. Most people don't want to risk losing their life savings if their laptop gets stolen or hacked (or if the party you trust to hold your wallet gets hacked, etc)...

I can think of no better "tangible and scarce" things in the universe than living biological specimens, that have to be kept alive. This solves two problems at once - backing currencies, as well strengthening the market incentive to save species from extinction. About 5000 years ago people decided that gold is scarce and thus a convenient medium of exchange, even if abstracted through paper money; in the 21st century people are realizing that endangered species are too!

Instead of holding gold in a vault (or worse, being backed by government promises and force alone), new banks would own safaris, aquariums, terrariums, insectariums, paludariums, etc that efficiently assure the proliferation of species, "mining" them through breeding. This of course would lead to inflation quickly if just a small number of species was involved, but currencies can be backed by a basket of MILLIONS of different (sub)species, weighed in value according to their rarity. The plant / animal's unique characteristics, health / quality of life, etc could also be a part of the formula. If done right, "mining costs" (the cost of housing, feeding, etc the life-forms) would make it very difficult to cause major inflation, and minor inflation would be nothing but a natural "tax" that makes it unlikely that any more natural species will go extinct.

There are believed to be 8.7 million varieties of species in the world, most being small and thus easy to preserve. For comparison, the variety of species of books published by humans is 129 million and growing, with some titles existing in many millions of copies. Imagine something like a huge library, but with shelves containing containers of plants and insect colonies, monitored and maintained largely through digital censors and robotic automation. There can be many living species -backed currencies, each having its own contractual protocols, competing for users and investors large and small.

The word "capital(ism)" is etymologically based on the word "head". As much as pro-capitalist thinkers like Ayn Rand and myself may wish it referred to human intelligence, the historical origin of the word refers to heads of cattle - a form of property that predates metalworking and the agricultural revolution (much less the industrial / digital / 3D printing / space / robotics / AI / cheap energy / transhumanist revolutions, and whatever other revolutions will come). It will be quite ironic, if my idea about species based currency comes to fruition, as we will have come full circle... No matter how much we master the universe, the living things that evolved along-side us on Earth will always have a special place, in our wallets as well as our hearts...

--libman