Ask a Gilded Age Libertarian Woman!

LorenzofromOz:
Yes, as a thorough-going subjectivist I believe revealed preference through choice is the ultimate measure. Wage data helps us grok the size of the difference though.

The person I was arguing with is a fan of Carlyle (and to a lesser extent Fitzhugh). Carlyle regarded labor as morally good and leisure as bad. Of course, as a fan of economics at its most autistic, I must disagree.

I am one of those Walter Block type libertarians who approves of voluntary slavery contracts (or uninhibited contracting generally). I'll have to check out your post and perhaps respond, maybe over the weekend.


liberalarts:
I try not to speak in absolutes about people. There may be people who existed then or will exist now who would voluntarily make that trade, though they could be in a very small minority. A major issue in contention here is marital law, which was particularly important because of the (policy independent) difficulties a typical unmarried woman would have back then. If a modern man has no plans ever to marry, he might be willing to trade restrictions currently affecting him for ones he knows will never apply. Perhaps another way to phrase your question would be to imagine that we can exogenously adjust the wealth of an imagined 19th century society to match ours (for ceteris paribus reasons) and ask whether a man would like to be a woman in that society. That raises some complications about what it can mean to "be" someone else and yet retain any sort of identity, but we've complicated things enough already and most ponderers are not stopped in their tracks by non-salient philosophical muddles or even logical contradictions.

What I think is interesting in all this is the emphasis on legal and economic rights or the lack thereof with very little discussion on the religious, societal and social coercion of women in a fully patriarchal culture. The irony to me is that religious and social oppression of women is still around today in a way that was probably similar to the 1880s, with one big difference, women today have legal recourse that women didn't in the 1880s.

You'll find a LOT of women who have been oppressed by religious and cultural patriarchy today at THIS SITE.

Ask any woman there to imagine have no legal recourse to escape their oppression, much like the women of the 1880s.

TGGP -You are right, Nozick did also include the draft and restrictions on consumption in the TosS, then again the government retained the right to call up soldiers in 1880 just as it does now. They were't drafting then, but they did 20 years prior and would again in future wars. You surely don't disagree with my final conclusion, though, that no man would trade current liberties (or lack of) for those possessed by a woman in 1880?

LorenzofromOz, I've actually argued with people (okay, a person) over whether slaves were actually better off after emancipation. He cited Slave Narratives, I cited some data on earnings and the revealed preference of runaways.

Olga, Caplan was not asking whether there are lots of people who aren't prosecuted, but whether there are people who are. Similarly a great many people (including drug users) have not been prosecuted for drug crimes, but the presence of people who have been tells us the laws are being enforced.

Barry_D, from what I've heard the impact of the availability of birth control (either technology or legally) is not detectable in trends for the rate of births generally or illegitimate births more specifically.

liberalarts, Nozick's T.o.t.S (which I haven't read in the original) involves more than just income taxation. Quoting from step 5: "He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking. " From step 6 "[...] what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on". From step 7 "adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way [...] policies covering the vast range of their powers". None of the other steps involves any sort of constitutional limitation on the kinds of powers that may be exercised over the slave.

Revealed preference of runaways is a pretty telling point, I would have thought. Also, in further support for your arguments, those who look at consumption patterns often forget about preferences for leisure.

Entirely coincidentally, I recently posted on the problems with libertarian arguments for slavery.

Mark is right. Nozick, for example, in his Tale of the Slave equates income taxation with slavery. No modern man would ever trade places with the choice set of an 1880s woman just to be part of a libertarian family unit where his wife had all of the property right powers. Not one.

One disadvantage of the anecdote, besides the "sampling" criticism, is that there are radical feminists who believe similar things to de Cleyre today, when (it might be argued) women have a lot more freedom of most kinds.

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

- Valerie Jean Solanas

This is not to suggest Kaplan is right, just that Howley's approach is deeply wrong.

Is anybody else here doubled over in hysterical, manic laughter after reading the same crew that routinely equates paying income taxes with chattel slavery claim that women in the 19th century had more libertarian freedom than they do now, despite coverture laws? I mean really!!!

You know, these sort of claims do nothing to quell the suspicion held by many on the left that the vast majority of "libertarians" are just privileged white dudes who hate paying taxes.

There's "enforcing" other than that which happens in a court of law. When my grandmother grew up, there was no longer any -enforcing- worth speaking of, in court, of the prohibition on pre-marital sex. (I'm talking Norway here)

But ask her neighbour, who got pregnant at 20, without being married, if the rule was "enforced" or not.

"But ask her neighbour, who got pregnant at 20, without being married, if the rule was "enforced" or not."

First, there's an excellent chance that she got pregnant due to legal and social restrictions on contraceptive information and technology.

Second, she probably had the choice of marrying the father of her child, or sinking into the dregs of society (probably prostitution).

Third, once she was married, she was under the control and domination of her husband to a degree which we'd consider extreme.

A lot of commentary on this post would seem to have a hard time arguing that slavery was bad because hey, we can't ask all the slaves.

Personally, I thought property rights were pretty important to libertarianism and a system that denies one party to a marriage any individual property rights on the basis of them being a woman while not offering any other form of marriage is a pretty massive curtailment of liberty. As, indeed, was having no legal recourse against rape within marriage, as they had no separate legal personality.

Liberty is not about what you want, liberty is about what you can do.

Thank you very much! You are making an excellent point here.

It is like saying that you know Taliban can behead or shoot women for being alone in public. But they somehow survived the Taliban rule... Those guys must have been really lax on their law system...

I know 19th century libertarianism^H^H^H individualist anarchism overlapped heavily with the "free love" movement and a number of them scandalously engaged in "free" marriages with egalitarian vows, so that would seem to suggest the laws were significant. I would like data though. On the other hand, they couldn't have been aware of what would come after them. There were a good deal of Spencerians back then railing against violations of laissez faire economics which seem trivial by our standards. Somehow this from Timothy Lee seems relevant.

"I believe that Wilkinson is right on the larger point, which is that libertarianism requires a comprehensive doctrine to be meaningful"
It can be meaningful but very sparse (or incomplete as a vision of "the good life"), just as "federalism" doesn't say much about how more local governments should ideally behave. Within libertarianism there are debates over "thick" and "thin" versions. Will has also spoken in praise of Rawls' purely political vision of liberalism drawing on contractarianism.

silentbeep:
I think Caplan (and presumably Ambrosini) are engaged in a sort of two-step. The first is that the written law making marriage restrictive was no more enforced back then than it is now. The second is that the older model of marriage with specialized production through a gendered division of labor was efficient. As Wolfers & Stevenson like to point out, nowadays production is less of an issue and marriage (or cohabitation) is more about synergistic consumption. This is basically to point out that we are richer now, a distinct point from libertarian freedom, as I discuss below.

"I still don't get why anyone would ever think the 1880s were great for anyone. I don't think libertopia; I think typhus."
Arnold Kling was quite explicit about that, and I think Caplan would agree with him. Over time we tend to get wealthier, but libetarianism is not the same thing as wealth. Someone in a first world prison today may in some respects be said to be materially better off than a free person in the third world (or in the past of a country that would later become part of the first world), but we can still say the free person is more free in a libertarian sense. Similarly, I can complain about Bush violating the constitution by redefining the limits of power granted to the executive even if I like the fact that we have youtube now.

"The first is that the written law making marriage restrictive was no more enforced back then than it is now."

This is simply untrue.

The power to enforce it was delegated by the state to the husband. If the husband *chose* not to enforce it, he was only prosecuted if he started being open and political about it. But if he chose to enforce it, the state would generally assist him, even as late as the Gilded Age. If the wife chose not to comply, the state would assist him. This sort of stuff didn't really start to seriously break down until the 1920s, *after* women got the vote.

Also, the gendered division of labor was horribly inefficient, as it repeatedly allocated people to jobs they were not suited for, whether they liked it or not. Man who wants to raise children? No chance. Woman who wants to do practically anything else, except for secretarial work? No chance, unless ferociously rich and powerful. Don't underestimate the anti-libertarian effects of formal job-market segregation, which was only ended in the *1970s*.

Do some damn research.

This is just an odd response to Bryan. You (through Howley) quote relate a Gilded Age woman's recounting of a man's argument about women's experiences. So long as we're giving biography and personal experience some pride of place in this argument, let's be clear about whose biography and experience are at issue.

And unfortunately that man's argument on many points simply isn't very good, though so much is mixed together in the controversy and de Cleyre's essay that it's sometimes hard to ease out the various strands. To the extent that Moses Harman was arguing that women lacked the right or power to own property on their own, he was not referring to the laws of his own jurisdiction, where women had had the right to own property and to keep their earnings.

Interestingly, the libertarian conception of freedom that Caplan argues for is similar to the one that it appears that Harman and de Cleyre supported (though Harman and de Cleyre also supported other positions which might be read to be in tension with Caplan-style libertarianism).

In the end, I think that Caplan is right on the particular case--women's rights had advanced sufficiently by the Gilded Age that the remaining legal impediments to equal liberty were not substantial and the cultural impediments, while significant, were already contested and thus likely not binding in the sense that Wilkinson is concerned about. We shouldn't pretend that marital rape was not an issue, but we also shouldn't pretend that its abolition (beginning in the 1970s) was necessary for liberty. And, unfortunately, I believe that Wilkinson is right on the larger point, which is that libertarianism requires a comprehensive doctrine to be meaningful.

Um, you're basically wrong. Look up the dates of the Married Women's Property Acts and you'll find that indeed Moses Harman spent much of his life in jurisdictions where women didn't have the right to keep their earnings. You're an ignorant idiot -- the legal history shows that coverture was enforced, it was astoundingly hard to get divorced even if you had been coerced into marriage, the right to public assembly and protest were denied, et cetera. When you can be arrested for talking out of turn, you have very little liberty.

Your last paragraph, for me, can go down as more evidence for the existence of incommensurability.

I still don't get why anyone would ever think the 1880s were great for anyone. I don't think libertopia; I think typhus.

Bryan's argument that women's freedom wasn't restricted by an inability to contract because they could just ask their husbands to do it for them and then complain a lot if he didn't go along with it is one of the most ridiculous things I've read in a long time.

Hi Will,

I was wondering what your thoughts were on the role of the state and/or private actors in ensuring that all individuals obtained the developmental prerequisites for autonomous choice. Is this a legitimate function of government from a libertarian perspective?

Here's a fascinating and instructive passage on gilded age libertarian Moses Harman by Wendy McElroy:

"Harman and [George Bernard] Shaw had an intellectual bond. They shared the same opinion of 19th century traditional marriage: namely, they believed such marriages were defined by laws and customs that enslaved women, who were stripped thereby of the right to their own wages, custody of their children, and the legal ability to defend themselves against sexual attack by their husbands. As an alternative, they favored 'free love' unions in which there was no state interference into the voluntary sexual contracts of couples.

As a personal matter, Harman believed in monogamy. He conducted his life accordingly and without scandal. But as a point of social theory, he demanded that all voluntary sexual arrangements be legally tolerated and that women be treated as full equal partners. His insistence upon speaking out for 'true' marriage and the rights of women led to his many years of legal persecution under the Comstock Act (1873), which forbade circulating obscene information -- such as birth control advice -- through the mails."

Strikingly, similar claims are made by Men’s Rights Activists today. Fathers who owe alimony or child support payments have their wages garnished and accounts frozen, even if the children were the product of a union in which the woman lied about having taken birth control or her desire to have an abortion in the case of pregnancy or give up her baby for adoption once carried to term. The standard in family law courts – “in the best interest of the child” – presumes that a child is best situated with its mother and men who want to see their kids are often deprived of the right. It may be true that visitation rights are at times granted, but that rarely prevents bitter mothers from poisoning the minds of their kids against the father, who is off premises most of the time. Nor does it prevent mothers from lying in court about the harmful impact contact with the father will have on the child, as often happens. And although few men complain of sexual attack by their wives, the notion that men are equal partners in marriages is suspect. Many men complain that their wives do not initiate sex and the burden of always pushing for sex in a union in which both partners work and share domestic chores is taxing. This is a further burden if sex drives are incompatible, a common problem. This burden mostly falls upon men and cannot reasonably be dismissed as an inequality irrelevant to marital unions. In short, many men lack control over their wages, lack control over reproductive decisions, lack custody of their children, and are unequal partners in marriage. But I don’t hear you crying out for men’s rights. Instead, you’re taunting java programmers for no apparent reason.

Will, let's say Bryan accepts everything you say. He could still conclude that Gilded Age women had more capabilities and the power to exercise them, your sad facts notwithstanding. The question before the house is whether or not some set of people is more or less free now versus then. You've done a great job emphasizing the vices of the past, but you've failed to (1) compare those vices to the virtues of the same period and then (2) weigh that composite against the vices and virtues faced by same subset today.

For example, I'm surprised you haven't brought up open immigration. How do you weight this desideratum? And then how does it weigh on the balance of now versus then? Did this help women in the Gilded Age? How do current immigration restrictions hurt women around the globe today? Is open immigration coupled with patriarchy better than restricted immigration without patriarchy? (world wide)

There's no sign you're taking any of this into account. Instead you're merely gathering evidence. Important evidence, to be sure, but it's role in the larger argument is incomplete.

You want us to sum the desirability of women's liberties in 1880 and 2010 and compare scores? Thats impossible to do with any integrity, especially with other people's liberties - I can't know one way or another what you'd do with the freedom to enter into contracts in your own right, versus the ability to employ immigrants. Its an unknowable.

Rather you can put liberties in some kind of lexical order of importance a la Rawls where if you don't have something high on the list, nothing lower on the list can make up for it. Most people, even most libertarians, would put bodily intregity high on that list, and ownership of property, freedom of contract and access to the law somewhere a little lower and absence of taxes and employment regulations somewhere quite low down, if at all.

Bryan wants to argue that somehow you can be more free in the absence of all the political rights listed above because taxes are lower and employment regulations laxer. We don't need to invent LibertyScore 2000 to figure out what this is completely ridiculous.

A lexical ordering is by definition a weighting of the various constituents of liberty. So what you assume in your first paragraph undermines what you say in your second. You can't place one element lexically above another unless you assign a value or, yes, a score to it. On what grounds do you propose your lexical ordering? Sounds like you prefer expressed preferences. Either way, you've got your own Liberty Score 2000, so tu quoque.

Moreover, you misconstrue Bryan's arguments. He does not say these rights are absent. He doesn't say women lacked the right to bodily integrity, but that's okay, because they didn't have to pay taxes. Instead, he challenging the facts of the matter.

I disagree with Caplan because I believe positive freedom matters. I disagree with Wilkinson because he likes dramatic examples, rather than holistic comparisons. The fact is millions of women would like to work in the U.S. But out current laws prevent them. These women are less free in a very important way than the millions who came to the U.S. in the 1880s. You have to make these kinds of comparisons. THey're going to be rough, because a lot of values seem incommensurable, but we make these trade-offs all the time.

A lexical ordering does not require assigning a score to any of them. People in Iran are less free than people in the USA. I like rabbit more than chicken. How much do I like chicken? How free are the people in Iran? I dunno, and I don't know if those values can be meaningfully constructed or not. But you can have an exclusively ordinal system.

"Where is the data that suggests these mores and laws *actually* made women less free?"

Good God.

Good god, I didn't major in women's studies? Do you know how to program a java virtual machine?

You don't need to major in women's studies to pick up a book and listen to what the history of American women is telling you. Or better yet, why dont' you use your "superior" computer skills and look up some history resources on-line.

Which book, specifically, tells me, e.g., whether or not cohabitation laws were enforced?

(BTW, I hope Kerry knows I was joking. I've long forgotten how to program java virtual machines! :-)

what part of this don't you understand:

"most women could not choose in a meaningful sense to opt out of an institution of marriage that denied women the right to independently own property, make independent economic decisions, or to not be raped."

Basically: read any book on the history of American women in the late 19th century, it will you tell you what was going on as evidenced in the quote above.

I could do that, and I have enough knowledge of history to know that women in the 19th century were not freer than now.
By the way, you don't need women studies, just focus on history. It will help.

Like *all* of history? Or is there a few references you can point me to?

Are we talking here about *all* history? Or are we referencing a particular period in time?

Here couple links:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wmarriage.htm
http://www.wic.org/misc/history.htm

I do not find them exhaustive or comprehensive. But they represent really one simple idea:
whenever a human being has undue power/control over another human, s/he tends to overuse or abuse it.

Well, that is as long as you accept this simple idea that a woman is a human being. You see people in the 19th century just come to this wonderful notion.

Did you just attempt to intimidate me with your superior computer programming skills?

You must've mistakenly posted to Hacker News.

Also, your attempt to shut Bryan up are weak sauce, dude. From a reformed libertarian generally amenable to your libraltarianism, your personal attacks on the econlog crew are off-putting. They suggest a lack of depth of your argument.

Is your project just about winning over liberals via rhetorical enemy of my enemy-ism or is it about converting libertarians with, you know, actual arguments?

As someone who has a long history of not really getting along with Will, I have to say that this comment is the weakest of weak sauces. Can you quote a a specific line that constitutes a personal attack? I'm asking quite seriously. I can't see anything in this post or the ones that precede it as outside of legitimate conversation. (Although, it's true, on that issue I am generally regarded as someone whose opinion is not to be trusted.)

I think it's pretty obvious why people insist on calling these personal attacks: because accusations of bigotry are the nuclear bomb of our discourse, any argument that floats in the same sea as those arguments are seen as inherently personal. But Will is not calling anyone a supporter of the oppression of women or a supporter of the de facto slavery state of post-war America. He is arguing, quite tactfully, against people who think that it is possible for a time to be a "golden age of liberty" before womens suffrage and a time during which freed slaves were systematically and explicitly targeted by the white power structure. I know that these are emotionally charged issues, but to read an emotional or personal attack into them simply because they touch on live wires of political conversation represents a truly poor precedent, I think. Should Will not argue against such things because of the possibility that you might construe that argument as being an accusation of bigotry, or because you might take it as an ad hominem?

You're right. See above comment.

This post argues: (a) there are developmental conditions for autonomy that Bryan's conception of voluntary choice and contract requires, and that (b) these conditions were generally absent for most women in the late 19th century, and thus (left implied) (c) most women could not choose in a meaningful sense to opt out of an institution of marriage that denied women the right to independently own property, make independent economic decisions, or to not be raped. I'd definitely say this is an argument. I'd even say it is a good argument. You disagree? Why?

What part of this post constitutes a personal attack on Bryan?

My project is to tell the truth as I see it, Will. When I thought Arnold was suggesting that my project is what you are suggesting (which I don't think is a personal attack), he called me an asshole (which is I think is a personal attack.) What's the deal? Anyway, I'll cool it if you'll cool it.

Well, you're right. You didn't make a personal attack on Bryan. For some reason, I haven't liked your tone in these posts. Peanut gallery stuff, move along.

At this point, we have two competing hypotheses: women were free even though the de jure laws suggest otherwise and women were not free because the de jure laws were de facto laws. We have an idea of what data can be used to pick the winner. Somebody should collect those data!

Will Ambrosini, as a woman who knows history, and lived part of my life in a patriarchal society... Please, go read a history book. Study history before you get upset with somebody dismissing really bad arguments!

The burden of proof is on somebody who invents at the beginning of the 21st century an argument that she had more freedom in the 19th century (without simple rights) than now (when she does indeed has rights).

You've answered Bryan's call for data with an anecdote. Where is the data that suggests these mores and laws *actually* made women less free?

My history books are filled with stories of women doing things de Cleyre’s passage said they couldn't do. There's examples in my own family's oral traditions. Should we trade anecdotes?

I'm not suggesting the accepted historical stories aren't true, I just want data that supports those hypotheses.

Yes. And I've read of American slaves traveling to Europe to negotiate with aristocrats and returning with a good deal for his master. I guess that calls into question the whole assumption that a system that treated blacks as property really left them less free than free men? We should trade anecdotes. You collect your families oral histories and I will open the women's studies textbook. What other kind of data would make you happy?

Bryan asked for very specific data: marital rape prosecutions, historical cohabitation prosecutions, "I want evidence that more than a handful of husbands in this situation turned to the law to extract their wives' obedience", fornication prosecutions, etc. He even made bullet points.

Bryan made a set of sweeping assertions that allowed him to ignore sets of laws, and demanded that people disprove his default position that the existance of certain laws didn't matter. In some cases, the immaterialist of these laws would be a reasonable default position, but not here. It's Bryan's job to back up his assertions, which he's not done. I find his habit of waving his hand and dismissing problematic facts to be rather telling.

Asking for sociological data from an era that preceded modern sociology is a bit much. Surely, the burden of proof is on those who are asserting the superior liberty of women at a time when they could not vote. Will has been quite thorough in arguing about the many other ways in which the liberty of women was systematically denied, but I think just this, the lack of suffrage is enough. The right to vote is the right which protects other rights, because it enables one to formally contribute to the redress of grievances. Without the right to vote, women lacked not only the material ability to transcend the limitations on their liberty, but the ability to help pass policy and legislation which would provide them with the tools of such material ability. This is why suffrage must come first, because the right to vote has embedded within it the apparatus to win and defend other rights.

I'm not sure what you mean by sociological data, but I'm looking for evidence like that presented in "Time on the Cross" about slavery.

And burden of proof? This isn't a philosophical argument. Its cute to keep up the argument well after testable hypotheses have been developed, but its unnecessary. There is an empirical question that needs answering: were these laws enforced? I have a hard time believing no one has studied this question.

Worthless is too strong. Insufficient is more like it.

The more difficult question is what we *do* when we understand that insufficiency. Freedom of association means I have the right to shun people I don't like. Freedom of contract means I have the right to economically exclude people I disapprove of. Of course this allows for the possibility of coercive social norms. Where the rubber hits the road is what violations of freedom of association and freedom of contract we are willing to countenance to weed out social norms we deem noxious. Right?

"I think Bryan should see that what he has done is to offer to the historically well-informed a very powerful case that “libertarian freedom,” as he conceives it, is a worthless idea."

I might be wrong about this, but when I think of libertarianism as a political movement, it is Bryan's version that I identify with it. I have voted for LP candidates in the past, but I think that the case has been very forcefully made that Libertarianism, as it currently exists, is a worthless idea. Mr. Wilkinson at the very least should realize that others are going to take this post and meme to indicate that Mr. Wilkinson thinks that such Libertarianism is worthless. Perhaps that is what Mr. Wilkinson wants. I am honestly looking forward to his book when it comes out. I also hope that he and Brink Lindsey do not get sacked for holding heterodox views, as David Frum was recently excised from AEI. Some version of libertarianism needs to continue to exist for the good of the U.S. polity, but not an unreformed and clueless one. It is always problematic when people hold power over other people, whether or not the government is involved. That shouldn't be a difficult concept to grasp, although it does make doctrinal purity within a political movement more difficult.

I don't think most traditional liberty-as-non-coercion types agree with Bryan here, at least not those with a good grasp of history. As a matter of fact, women were kept in their place during this period through a systematic structure of legal, intra-family, and social coercion.

And the traditional libertarian notions of contract, upon which Bryan leans hard, depends on the ability of all parties to exercise robustly voluntary choice. Strangely, libertarians tend to have nothing much to say about the developmental preconditions for autonomous choice. I'm arguing that a soup-to-nuts patriarchal social order conditions women to find acceptable arrangements which they would readily reject were they allowed a less constrained set of options and encouraged to develop full-blooded capacities of agency. We know that they would because they do.

In modern times we have a comprehensive government education system that stretches from age five through early adulthood. We have our own set of culturing messaging from the media, academia, and family. This messaging tells women, "You will not live a fulfilled live unless you go to college and have an independent vocation."

No person, modern or ancient, exists outside of their culture and outside of societal pressure. The left-libertarian view - which is really just a straight left wing view - is that modern government cultural conditioning (through schools) is preferable to the cultural conditioning of the gilded age patriarchy.

Not sure what left-libertarians you've been talking to, but no left-libertarian I know of (myself included) would consider government schooling a good thing.
We rail against current government schooling and social conditioning as much as the societal conditioning of the past (and present).

Check out all-left.net and c4ss.org

You're making just the same move that Caplan does when you say that "we know that they would because they do." You can't criticize the reliance on revealed preferences and then rely on revealed preferences--once you make the move to comprehensive doctrine, you're stuck with comprehensive doctrine. Yes, today's revealed preferences are different from yesteryear's, but you need the argument from comprehensive doctrine to show they the option set isn't constrained in the same sense. (It won't suffice to count the options, because what we're concerned with is the quality of the choices available, measured against comprehensive doctrine).

It is the fact that libertarians tend not to think about the developmental preconditions for autonomous choice that leads me to think that most libertarians are de facto in Bryan's camp, even if they think they are liberty-as-non-coercion types. If you don't have a robust conception of autonomy, but just simply assume that all adults are autonomous, then you will be completely blind to many of the ways in which people coerce other people, and you will only be able to see the threat of violence as coercive. Which I think is roughly the position where most libertarians end up.

Bryan link who?

(I know who, but you don't mention or link it in your post.)