Should it be legal for women to be topless in public?

[Beet]

Does anyone else realize that this is completely irrelevant?

[Beet]

Gee I thought you were all libertarian... Geuss I find otherwise.

Here's the funny thing about these types--

Their rhetoric is libertarian.
Their positions are conservative.
When the political party they support controls government, its policies are authoritarian and corporatist.

Reality and mirage comes full circle. It's actually quite a graceful arc.

[Beet]

You can not derive from libertarianism a right to disturb other people.

Well how do you define "disturb"?

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Well for one, here you seem to be taking a position that is opposed to liberty. For the other, the arrangement of (divided) government when Clinton was in office arguably suited the side of liberty far more than the recent arrangement.

[Beet]

a lot of the young men here are probably convinenetly over-looking the fact that even if it WAS legal, not many women, especially not hot ones, would do it.

Thanks for your insight, Gustaf. This is what I meant when I asked whether anyone "realized this was irrelevant". Legal status means nothing when compared to social stigma.

For example, the speed limit officially being 35, you will see people driving on average at 45 because that's the social custom.

The Fourteenth amendment had prohibited deprivation of rights based on race, yet Jim Crow flourished for generations because the law didn't fit the social reality.

Birth control was illegal in Connecticut before Griswold, and cohabitation illegal in North Carolina more recently; yet their impact on reality was nil because of social custom.

Laws mean NOTHING if they don't conform to social custom, even when the law directly contradicts social custom. Social custom, culture, habit and tradition, is a far more powerful force than law. That's a profound result because politics, the study of the legitimate use of force, is supposed to be the branch of study that deals with power. And yet when we speak of politics we virtually invariably speak of laws and not social customs! So how much power do legislators really have? What's real politics? What's real power? I think it's worth considering.

Back to topic, in this case, legalizing being topless in public fails to create even that contradiction. It would change nothing-- absolutely nothing. For all we know it could already be legal in certain places (outside nude beaches).

[Beet]

Gee I thought you were all libertarian... Geuss I find otherwise.

Here's the funny thing about these types--

Their rhetoric is libertarian.
Their positions are conservative.
When the political party they support controls government, its policies are authoritarian and corporatist.

Reality and mirage comes full circle. It's actually quite a graceful arc.

I guess you don't understand that libertarians don't have to be anarchist?  Just because you suscribe to an ideology doesn't mean you have to be an extremist.  I guess I can safely assume that because you have a red avatar you should be close to opebo's ideology, else you are not a real liberal, right?

I never said libertarianism was anarchism, nor that it had to be extremist, or uphold its own principles in an absolute, priori sense. However, a lot of people who are strong conservatives for some reason claim to be libertarians, or talk as if they are libertarians. Interestingly, the GOP on many issues is increasingly neither.

[Beet]

I claim to be a libertarian conservative, in that I support some causes that would not traditionally be identified with 'conservatism,' however defined (legalization of drugs and prostitution, abolishing the FCC, and so forth).

I do not, however, believe one should be able to blast music all the time, while other people are trying to do other things, or let dead animals rot on his front yard, while other people have to smell it. There are a lot of gray areas, because what you do on your property is going to affect how others enjoy theirs.

Perhaps, yet part of being able to enjoy one's property is being able to use it as one sees fit, and the neighbor who forbids his neighbor from blasting loud music is being no less coercive upon the stereo-owner's property than the stereo-owner is on the book-reader.

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No doubt the GOP presidential arm was highly committed to small government, at least in the context of their times, under the leaderships of Harding, Coolidge, comparatively Hoover, Alf Landon, at the time of the 80th Congress, under Barry Goldwater, and under Ronald Reagan. At other times, such as under Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, I would argue the presidential arm has strayed away from that commitment, and that is where the party is now. The Congressional arm has also strayed away from commitment toward small government in the past ten years, especially in the past three or four years; as have many governors. That leaves pretty much nothing on the economic front. The most consistent GOP positions seem to be foreign policy neoconservatism and culture-war conservatism, including expansion of government rights on civil liberties.