I don't think it's rude to ask people to question their own motivations and to be honest about what they hope to achieve with various political (and thus social) projects.

I've been in the DC area since 1996 and it's fairly easy for me to state that my social life would be better if there were more open-minded liberals around these parts.

I definitely think there is room for more engagement with liberals, but I don't think it has to come at the cost of purposefully dismissing conservative allies. Why do we need liberaltarians? I would rather see more libertarians who engage with liberals and conservatives on specific issues and make progress there.

I think it's natural, and probably beneficial, to want to find common ground with people we respect. It's a good source of criticism of our ideas, and it does make life more comfortable. We just need to be careful that we're correcting mistakes, rather than adopting them.

I just don't know how one could confidently judge someone else's arguments to stem from this impulse, unless one sees such glaring mistakes that he can't imagine another plausible explanation.

I don't see anything like that. And, although I'm sure Will is very philosophical about blog comments, I think it's better to avoid seeming rude and presumptuous about his motivations.

I suspect that Will is more familiar with many areas liberal thought, and more liberal people, than I am. It's very possible that his judgment about them is better than mine. I'm just unconvinced about that presently.

I see what you are saying, but I think it is either very misleading or very confused to claim that Will is actually interested in anything similar to a Rawlsian picture of a liberal state. I don't really think the veil of ignorance story is doing most of the work in his theory-he drops it later in any case. Harsanyi has an original condition that looks more similar to what you seem to be talking about, but regardless, it seems like we are talking about some kind of broadly contractualist theory. Ok, Fine. Why Rawls? What is Rawlsian about this? If you are looking for a contractualist theory, there are plenty to choose from. Buchanan has one, Lomasky has one, Gauthier has one, Harsanyi has one, Gaus has one, etc. I think Will's position is probably closer to Gaus's if we were atually to hammer it down into a specific position. The Gausian view is importantly, that is, non-trivially different from the Rawlsian position. Differences that would be important to someone who has classical liberal sympathies and takes public choice seriously.

I'm not sure why I am arguing about what someone else (Will) should label his beliefs as, but I think the adding the “Rawls” modifier to his view is extremely misleading. I think I get what Will is saying, but there is really not that much that is Rawlsian about it. How much does fairness and reciprocity figure into the picture? I'm going to say probably not that much. Certainly not in the way that Rawls thinks about it. I suspect that all the talk of “sharing in each others fate” would be alien in Will's version of a Rawlsian synthesis.

I know that the project here is to signal that Will is close to the left, but Will is just as close to Rawls as he is to Rothbard, which is to say not that close.

If I take pollution (easy public good example) as my guide I'd pass onerous anti-union, anti-environmentalist, anti-lawyer (I skipped my qualifiers for all three) taxes on the lot.

Will, when I think of negative externalities, legally-favored unions come to mind. Environmentalists stopping nuclear power generation come to mind. To me, they thwart the public good. To me, these are large-ish issues.

Any chance we can move (name a qualifier) liberals on these issues?

This isn't a loaded question. A few liberals argue against public sector unions and antipathy to nuclear power, I don't view it as impossible.

If we're talking radical decentralized, local level direct democracy, then it can work. But you don't need a state to do that, in fact a state is anathema to it.

Try this passage from Geoff Brennan's preface to The Demand and Supply of Public Goods on for size:

“One central ambition of public choice scholarship was to insist that “political success” needed to be demonstrated before the market failure in question could establish a preference for government activity—and to demonstrate that such political success might be more difficult to achieve than the public economics presumption might suggest. Put another way, market failure was itself assessed by reference to a benchmark that economists came to understand only by contemplation of market operation in other (private goods) arenas. Market failure on its own meant nothing: Politics would have to submit to the same test. This much is familiar. And Buchanan’s work has been critical in making it so.

It is, however, important to note that the public choice tradition has never denied the logic of the market failure argument as such. Indeed, Buchanan himself made extremely significant contributions to the market failure-public goods literature. For example, what are almost certainly Buchanan’s two most famous articles—”Externality,” with W. C. Stubblebine, and “An Economic Theory of Clubs”—fall precisely into this area of inquiry. In fact, public goods theory constituted a major (perhaps the predominant) element in Buchanan’s research agenda throughout the 1960s. The Demand and Supply of Public Goods is to be seen as an important part of that body of work and should be read alongside the articles in volume 15 in the Collected Works, Externalities and Public Expenditure Theory, as Buchanan’s attempt to synthesize and focus his views on those “public goods” issues.”

What reason do you have to believe the state CAN be truly limited? I ask because, IMO, your remark is like saying “I want a T-bone steak, I want no meat on it, & I want no bones on my plate.”