Ever since the first “2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Special Measures Act”, no. 11 of 2006 was passed, and FIFA began calling for volunteers for the Confederations Cup rather than employing people like civilised companies do, the whole World Cup thing has left a sour taste in my mouth. It’s annoying to watch your government hijacked, and your country and its people exploited, by people who think they’re too good for the rules by which the rest of us play.

So here’s an idea: Boycott FIFA.

One Mike “Mish” Shedlock posted a pretty shattering take-down of Ben Bernanke’s latest blubbering about the housing market and the credit crunch. It’s hard to believe that a central banker in the US so completely fails to grasp basic economics. I’ve written before about the issue of central banking and inflationary monetary policy, and its culpability for the economic woes in the US and the world. That inflation is a deliberate policy of increasing the money supply, via low central-bank interest rates, and that a rising price level is merely an effect of inflation, which is to be expected when you increase the amount of currency in circulation, competing for the same amount of goods and services. (See here and here, for example, or spend an evening to read the Ludwig von Mises lecture notes I linked to here). But unlike Alan Greenspan, who simply worms his way out of accusations over his interest rate policy, Bernanke doesn’t even understand what inflation is, or how interest rates cause it. If he doesn’t grasp such elementary principles of central banking, why does he have the job?

The best quip is this:

This would be funny if it wasn’t pitiful. “A rough stabilization of commodity prices, even at high levels, would result in a relatively rapid moderation of inflation.” Translation: Inflation will stop once prices stop going up. Was that supposed to be a revelation? That was pathetic even for someone who thinks inflation is about prices.

That must be pretty embarrassing, if you’re the chairman of the US Federal Reserve. I entirely agree with Mish’s conclusion, too:

I have a simple solution for this madness: Want To Fix The Fed? Get Rid Of It.

That’s exactly the solution. If government price controls are a problem, causing either shortages (in the case of price caps) or surpluses (in the case of price floors), whoever thought it would be a good idea for the government to control the price of money and credit? That causes surpluses and shortages too, popularly known as “booms and busts”, or “the business cycle”. Except that business doesn’t cause it, but merely suffers the effects.

Last night, I found a neatly printed-out and stapled copy of Beware the Alchemists, by Ludwig von Mises. Detritus of good intentions some time past.

Transcribed by Bettina Bien Greaves from notes taken during a lecture tour in the 1960, the style is somewhat clunky, somewhat simplistic, somewhat imprecise, and somewhat repetitive. But though she says Mises didn’t like being quoted for that reason, I found his informal style a strength, not a weakness. Mises was the 20th century intellectual giant of the Austrian School of economics. He wrote his first major work as early as 1912, and died in 1973. Reading this, however, brings the old man alive again. You can picture speaking in somewhat clumsy English, patiently explaining the blindingly obvious, throwing up his hands with an exasperated sigh or sardonic grin as he points out the economic blunders of one government after another.

Beware the Alchemists is surprisingly accessible. It takes what appears to be a complex topic, encrusted with 100 years of Keynesian pollution and toxic government waste, and turns it into something simple and intuitive. I wish I had learned what I understand today about interest rates, monetary policy and inflation from this text. I wish I had been around in the 1960s to attend these New York lectures, so that I could have spent the four decades since going, “See? He told ya so.”

Today’s food price crisis? The oil price? The credit crisis? The weak dollar? St Alan “this was an accident waiting to happen” Greenspan? Mises explained all of these many years ago. And Greenspan, for all his claims to understand why Keynes was wrong (as a proponent of Hayek and Friedman’s Chicago School), not only waited for it to happen, but drove the bus to the scene of the accident.

Some quotations to pique your interest, perhaps:

The market is precisely the freedom of people to produce, to consume, to determine what has to be produced, in whatever quantity, in whatever quality, and to whomever these products are to go. Such a free system without a market is impossible; such a free system is the market.

We have the idea that the institutions of men are either (1) the market, exchange between individuals, or (2) the government, an institution which, in the minds of the many people, is something superior to the market and could exist in the absence of the market. The truth is that the government — that is the recourse to violence, necessarily the recourse to violence — cannot produce anything. Everything that is produced is produced by the activities of individuals and is used on the market in order to receive something in exchange for it.

It is important to remember that everything that is done, everything that man has done, everything that society does, is the result of such voluntary cooperation and agreements. Social cooperation among men — and this means the market — is what brings about civilization and it is what has brought about all the improvements in human conditions we are enjoying today.

Money is a market phenomenon. What does that mean? It means that money developed on the market, and that its development and its functioning have nothing to do with the government, the state, or with the violence exercised by governments.

The problem [that human action seeks to solve] is not to increase the quantity of money. The problem is to increase the quantity of those things which can be bought with money. And if you are increasing the quantity of money, and you are not increasing the quantity of things which can be bought with money, you are only increasing the prices which are paid for them. And in time, if the increase in money continues, the whole system becomes a system without any meaning… Prices are going up because there is an additional quantity of money, asking, searching for a not-increased quantity of commodities. And the newspapers or the theorists call the higher prices, “inflation.” But the inflation is not the higher prices; the inflation is the new money pumped into the market. It is this new money that then inflates the prices. And the government asks, “What happened? How should one man know? …” The government is very innocent. … And the governments try to find somebody who is responsible — but not the government. They consider the man who asks for higher prices responsible. But he must ask for higher prices because there are now more people wanting to buy his produce, you know. … Now we have the inflation.

Everything that is done by a government against the purchasing power of the monetary unit is, under present conditions, done against the middle classes and the working classes of the population. Only these people don’t know it. And this is the tragedy. The tragedy is that the unions and all these people are supporting a policy that makes all their savings valueless. And this is the great danger of the whole situation.

The book isn’t long. It’s an evening’s read. It’s an excellent way to spend the May Day holiday weekend, and is a lot easier than reading Mises’s magnum opus, Human Action (though the latter also comes highly recommended, for the philosophical grounding it gives economics).

An accessible introduction to elementary economics, as Mises offers in Beware the Alchemists, should be required reading for anyone hoping to serve in, vote for, or write about government. Sadly, those are the three occupations for which no qualification or experience is required at all.

The Free Market Foundation’s Jim Harris did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and found some interesting statistics:

Anthony Minnaar, a crime researcher at Unisa, has conducted a … survey. He finds that house robbers have committed on average between 80 and 105 crimes before being caught and convicted. And captured heist gang members have been involved in between 30 and 40 heists, of which there are between 300 and 400 a year. So there are probably between 20 000 and 30 000 criminals in South Africa involved in most of the crimes. That happy notion implies that the remaining roughly 48 million of us are not criminal. Not yet, anyway. It hardly seems impossible for a determined and focused police force to capture 20 000 – 30 000 criminals within a year or so of single-minded investigation. Thereafter, presumably some low-level mopping-up effort would keep the authorities on top of opportunists rushing in to refill those emptied job-opportunity niches.

That does indeed sound manageable, though it raises the rather depressing question of how on earth South Africa’s criminals manage to clean out 100 houses before getting caught.

More interesting, though, is Harris’s stab at a solution:

The market-like trick would be to incentivise the police with variable wages dependent on captures, convictions and crime levels. Better still, outsource the task and its rewards to the private sector for quicker and more effective profit-driven action.

In principle, I’m okay with the notion of incentive pay (especially if it counters the allure of bribery). I’m also okay with the notion of a private police force. There’s no reason why such a force can’t be subject to the law, including special laws designed to apply only to them. There’s every reason to believe such a force, if subject to free-market competition, can be more efficient and effective than a public monopoly. Besides, it’s not like the notion of private armed security is foreign to South Africans. They’d have no market for their services if the public police force were sufficiently effective.

I do, however, have some questions on the subject, on which free-market philosophers may be able to enlighten me.

First, if a pay incentive is offered for captures and convictions — whether to private or public police officers — does this not create a perverse incentive to invade privacy, plant evidence, beat up the guilty, harrass the innocent, and otherwise abuse the extraordinary rights a police officer has over individual liberty? How could such an unintended consequence be neutralised?

Second, if a private police force is established, how does one minimise the problem — already common in our public police forces — of focusing largely on cash-generating activities like enforcing minor traffic infringements on perfectly safe roads?

Third, if bribery and corruption are rife in our current public police force, what guarantee — other than trusting in the self-interest of shareholders — is there that the problem will be less severe in the case of a private police force?

As I said, in principle I like the idea. It’s not like our current police force is very effective, or immune to the lure of easy money, either of which would make a good case for retaining the status quo. However, one would have to not only prevent abuse of a police force’s extraordinary powers, but sufficiently reassure those who are instinctively skeptical of private firms and free markets. A legislative framework that achieves these goals will have to be fleshed out considerably if the concept of a private (or private-like) police force is to get any traction.

Prompted by Wessel van Rensburg’s comment on another post, I dug through my archives to find a story I wrote for CIO Africa in September 2004, on Somalia’s telecommunications industry. It is not available online, but I have permission to quote it here in full:

Absent rules, luxuriant growth
Somalia’s telecom sector: a case study in anarchocapitalism
By Ivo Vegter

“A wild rose roofs the ruined shed / And that and summer well agree.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Day Dream

The most unlikely places throw up the most unlikely tales. Though Somalia has had no government for over a decade – or rather, because of this – international call rates are the lowest in Africa, most of the country has telephone coverage, and you can get an Internet account in a day.

When Somalia’s former ruler, General Muhammad Siyad Barre, was ousted in January 1991, the country rapidly degenerated into turmoil. The country has been fought over by secessionist factions and warlords ever since. A shortlived attempt at US intervention led to a famous withdrawal, and more recent peace negotiations in neighbouring Djibouti have spluttered fitfully without achieving much by way of either peace or effective government.

Before the collapse of the Barre regime, there had been 8 500 fixed lines, most of which were in the capital, Mogadishu. Even that meagre public switched telephone network was destroyed, leaving the country entirely bereft of telecommunications of any description.

Yet, when Walter Brown, an African telecommunications expert with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), was asked by the Ugandan delegation to a 1999 conference on rural telecoms about the best way to introduce a mobile phone operator, he suggested talking to the Somali delegation. At the time, the Somalis had a deal on the table for a tenth of what the Ugandans could extract from likely equipment vendors.

Speaking to CIO Africa at Johannesburg’s Kind of Blue, the jazz restaurant to which he has since retired, Brown says, “My presentation to the ITU conference said that technology lends itself to a private sector approach, by moving away from circuit-switched telecoms to packet-switching even in rural areas. It can be done cheaply, using any bearer you wish – radio, powerline, satelite, copper, fibre – and you can deal with any vendor you like.”

He recalls: “I made many friends, but made enemies of large industry players who needed to dump circuit-switching technology somewhere. Many delegates said the environment didn’t allow them to speak out.”

Not so the Somali delegation, which had no government to answer to, no vendors to mollify, and no legacy systems to consider.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the small industrial sector has been looted for scrap metal – among the country’s chief exports – and there is no formal banking sector. Yet despite this seeming anarchy, Somalia’s service sector has managed to survive and grow.

“Telecommunication firms provide wireless services in most major cities and offer the lowest international call rates on the continent,” it states.

Accurate statistics are hard to come by in a situation as fluid and chaotic as Somalia.

While the ITU estimated there to be about 10 000 main lines in operation at the end of 2000, the latest World Factbook figures, which date to 2002, estimate that there are 100 000 main telephone lines, 35 000 mobile phones, and 89 000 Internet users.

Writing in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) magazine, Choices, reporter Finbarr O’Reilly quotes Abdi Karim Mohamed Eid, manager of private telecommunications company Telesom, as saying, “If you add up the other companies, there may be around 20 000 Internet subscribers in [the northern region of] Somaliland. That’s much more than we anticipated initially and it’s a remarkable achievement given that there is no backing from the international community. This is solely done by the Somali business community. We are really proud of that.”

According to O’Reilly, 87% of the country now has telephone service, and some operators claim to be able to install fixed lines withing two days of applying, and establish Internet accounts within 24 hours. His figures of 105 000 fixed and 39 000 mobile lines back up the CIA’s numbers. An older report from the Somali Telecom Association (STA) state that 47 out of 74 towns have telephone service. And international call rates are as low as $1 per minute.

“It was clear supply and demand,” says Brown. “There was a need, and it got supplied. The service is reliable, because operators know if there is no service, there is no money. And you can get service within days of applying.”

The STA was formed at the behest of the UNDP and the ITU, in order to address the problem that to reach all people will telephones in Somalia, people had to subscribe to at least three different networks.

“With no government, no regulator, and no policy, they formed interconnect agreements,” says Brown. “Vendors didn’t take them seriously, until they started making money. Now companies like MCI help broker deals for Somali operators. Tariffs are set according to supply and demand, and are the cheapest in Africa.”

He adds: “They did well, and were able to advise Uganda to get rid of their oversight yokes.”

Not that complete anarchy is necessarily a good thing, of course. Though nobody imposes taxes on telephone calls, protects incumbent monopolies, demands exorbitant licence fees or imposes counter-intuitive technology restrictions, nobody collects refuse, supplies reliable electricity or provides adequate security either.

But Somalia’s experience with free-market telecommunications shows that the continent’s penchant for regulation, red tape and big government is not the solution to local development challenges.

It adds a new dimension to the existing weight of evidence that argues the benefits of telecommunication for the developing world.

“Consider the ITU study on the transport sector in Yemen,” explains Brown, “where simply providing communication long highways cut the costs of trucking companies by as much as 80%. Or the study in Sri Lanka, where farmers improved their income by 70% simply using a public telephone box.”

Somalia is a case study for the truth Brown learnt in a career spent at telecoms operations ranging from Zimbabwe’s PTC to the Iridium satellite venture to the ITU: “Oversight should not manage. It should lead, encourage and incentivise.”

Left free to innovate, an entrepreneurial people will find ways to succeed despite the most adverse of circumstances. Development goals foisted upon them by supranational organisations merely sound lofty. Liberalisation plans managed by government merely sound responsible. What makes the difference, in the end, is mere supply and demand.

2004 (c) CIO Africa, BDFM Publishers

Listening to CNN hail some recent economic pessimism as an “It’s the economy stupid” moment like the one which swept Bill Clinton to power in 1992, it not only sounded like a Democrat stump speech, but prompted me to give the US economy some thought. The proximate cause of the current low economic confidence is, no doubt, the mortgages problem. “Credit crunch”, “subprime crisis”, it’s all over the papers.

What I’m wondering is what this has to do with the current president, and how a different president with different policies would have done (or rather, would do) things differently.

To simplify somewhat (but not much): after the dot-com bubble burst two things happened. Both were designed to ease the pain and soften the landing. Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates, and kept them at record lows for a long time. George Bush proposed a raft of tax cuts. So Greenspan made debt look attractive, by making the real interest rate (nominal rate minus inflation) negative, prompting a rush of zero-rate deals offered by banks. Bush, by contrast, took less money from people’s incomes, leaving more in their pockets for spending or investment.

Lots of people took the debt deals, with or without the elementary understanding that zero interest rates couldn’t possibly last, whether or not they could now afford it. Since then, interest rates have risen, but taxes have not.

So who’s the villain in this piece? The Fed chairman, who independently determines interest rates, or the president, who doesn’t? Granted, it’s always nice to blame your bank when you’re in trouble, or your spouse, or your kids, or your government, but it’s not always accurate. St Alan, not the devil in the White House, was most responsible for today’s credit crisis. Unlike the president’s remedy, the Fed’s medicine was at best a temporary salve. Greenspan is already gone, but his successor, Ben Bernanke, has as much power in controlling the price of money. Price controls don’t work anywhere else, so why would it work in the credit market?

And if you think the problem is larger than bad credit, and point, say, to the ever-weakening dollar, one can again point to the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy. If you’re printing money to keep consumer spending up, your currency is going to devalue. Ask Bob Mugabe.

Since Bernanke isn’t up for re-election, and the Federal Reserve isn’t up for a renewal of its charter, why would these issues even feature in a presidential election campaign? They have little, or nothing, to do with the current president. (Just like Congress’s profligate spending has nothing to do with the president if he doesn’t even have a line-item veto.) If I were an American voter, I’d be thanking the president for doing what he could do — cut taxes — and considering any candidate who looks skeptical enough of the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy to try to do something about it.

Why would CNN be telling us they’re critical election issues for Campaign 2008? This is misdirection, and partisan misdirection at that.

No sooner had a judge carved huge holes in the famous one-click-checkout patent which Amazon.com swindled out of the US Patent and Trademark Office, than the very same idiots at the very same mental institution awards it a patent on another amazing new thing: putting search terms into a URL.

The novelty, it appears, is that the entire contents of the section which follows the first single slash is a search term, instead of referring first to a file, and then placing the search term after a question-mark character. The application was made in March 2004, so it took the patent researchers over three years to even comprehend the enormity of this invention.

True, it is mind-blowing. Imagine, being able to interpret the path specified in a URL to actually pass data to a web application? Imagine if it didn’t just have to indicate a file name, but could reference an object? The implications are staggering. The innovation is profound, the ambition soaring.

The time and investment that Amazon.com put into this must have been immense. Mean time, people in Amazon.real are starving. Someone should just give them some Amazon.com shares. Imagine being able to sue, by proxy, most of the people who have ever written anything for the web! Surely, anyone who admits knowledge of REST, or has ever hacked a 404 page to parse and act on the given URL, would be guilty as sin? The Amazonians (real and imaginary) would be rich!

I’m thinking maybe I’ll licence this brilliant idea. I don’t want to give too much away here, but just think what you could do on the command line, for example, if the string following a command could actually contain data, like options and parameters, to be parsed by the command you’re running? Or better yet, if the very same script could be called using two different names, and do different things, depending? Think about it. It would revolutionise computing! History books would talk about the mainframe era, the client-server era, the internet era, and the Amazon.ivo era. That would rock. (Anyone who wants to invest, please leave your name, number and proposed capital commitment as a comment. My people may call you, pending pre-qualification screening.)

There is legitimate debate among free market supporters about whether a patent is a justifiable application of property and contract rights, under which the owner of a trade secret agrees to disclose it in return for the temporary protection of that intellectual property (in which case the patent should, in fairness, last in perpetuity), or whether it is an articifial monopoly bestowed by government that has no place in a free market. The latter is perhaps theoretically more sound, but it also makes unlikely allies of private-property-rights libertarians and information-wants-to-be-free socialists. I tend to agree with the concept of patent protection, because if they are not granted the information won’t be free, but will remain secret. I think it’s worth rewarding people for disclosing trade secrets, so they become publicly available for innovators to build upon, without expropriating the rights of the original inventor to the fruits of their labour.

However, that does assume a working patent registration system, which makes sure trivial patents on non-secrets aren’t awarded to every Jack and his lawyer who bothers to turn up to the USPTO in Virginia. The one-click-checkout patent, obvious though it was, survived ten years of lawyering and judging and reviewing before it finally took a serious knock. Millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours were wasted on lawyers, judges and reviewers because of that single daft patent. And now they’ve got another one to play with. Someone should check this scheme for kickbacks and corruption, but even if it’s clean as a whistle, it’s evidence of a government’s awesome skill at burning cash.

Patent reform is sorely needed. It must be comprehensive, including but not limited to properly researching the prior art and non-obviousness criteria on an application, limiting the practice of patent ring-fencing, declining to issue patents on inventions that have long been in commercial use, or preventing patents on mere concepts that have not actually been developed and cannot be demonstrated. A good approximation to some of this is to abolish software patents altogether. It’s so broken, it may not be fixable.

And patent reform is needed before international patent harmonisation at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, I might add. Harmonising so everyone has the same broken system is hardly progress.

So someone please shut down the laughing stock that is the USPTO. Impeach them. Vote them out. Do whatever it is Americans do with tax-funded boondoggles. (Oh wait, scratch that. Do whatever Americans usually fail to do with tax-funded boondoggles.)

The bureaucratic clowns over in Virginia make anyone who supports patents in principle look like an idiot.

Dick Clark has an interesting view on Wikipedia’s philosophical underpinnings and its efficient allocation of resources over at the Mises Institute. It was prompted by a Reason magazine article on Jimmy Wales, its founder, in which he says: “One can’t understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding [libertarian economist F.A.] Hayek.”

Writes Clark:

But how does [Wikipedia’s] polycentric — even anarchic — system, composed of editors acting independently and for their own reasons, result in such an utterly useful resource? The answer goes back to the Hayekian inspiration for the project. Because editors receive both psychological satisfaction and material usefulness from their contributions, the project has grown to include safeguards that help guarantee that the development of the project will move in a positive direction — towards broad, accurate articles that depend on reliable, verifiable sources.

… Wikipedia’s reflection of market dynamics is most easily observed in what many people view as the project’s weakest areas: obscure articles that draw little traffic. In articles about … topics of limited interest, one will often find factual and typographical errors at a much higher rate than in high-traffic articles … . The much higher demand for information about the latter topics means that many more eyes will be combing those much-demanded articles for mistakes.

Since Wikipedia is open to correction by anyone, it stands to reason that the articles attracting more potential editors will be of a higher quality. Rather than a failure, this is a great demonstration of Wikipedia’s efficient allocation of resources. The project, like any other, has a finite amount of productivity to apply to its various activities. It is a positive thing that those articles in greatest demand — those about topics of popular curiosity — would be the ones that are the most complete and reliable.

This explains the usefulness of much of Wikipedia, but doesn’t address the common criticism that Wikipedia cannot be cited as a source of any authority, or even as a source equivalent in authority to, say, Encyclopaedia Britannica. That is to a large extent a red herring, however, since an encyclopaedia is anyway not a citable source in any academic or journalistic work. What is to me a much greater problem with Wikipedia is the fact that it battles to consolidate opposing views on matters of opinion. Its utility declines dramatically, even with popular articles, on subjects such as politics or environmentalism, which are controversial or on which views are strongly polarised. It has a tendency to converge on a populist view on such topics, which isn’t particularly useful.

I like concise definitions that capture the essence of an idea, such as this one, written by Ilana Mercer:

Classical liberals (this writer) are distinguished in that the only rights they recognize are the individual’s right to life, liberty and property, and the pursuit of happiness. The sole role of a legitimate government is to protect only those liberties. Why life, liberty, and property, and not housing, food, education, health care, child benefits, emotional well-being, enriching employment, ad infinitum? Because the former impose no obligations on other free individuals; the latter enslave some in the service of others.

There’s a fascinating comparison to be made between computer scientists and libertarians. It is pretty old, originally having been posted to libernet in 1992 by Stuart Reges, but it remains very much worth reading and digesting. It explains a lot about how libertarians argue, and why the internet seems to be so libertarian. The piece was reposted here. Its original title appears to be Libertarian IQ. I’ll repost it at the end if you prefer your reading in something more colourful than 72-column monospaced text. Some highlights:

Just as programmers have a model of computation, libertarians have what I call a model of interaction. Just as a programmer can “play computer” by simulating how specific lines of code will change program state, a libertarian can “play society” by simulating how specific actions will change societal state. The libertarian model of interaction cuts across economic, political, cultural, and social issues. For just about any given law, for example, a libertarian can tell you exactly how such a law will affect society (minimum wage laws create unemployment by setting a lower-bound on entry-level wages, drug prohibition artificially inflates drug prices which leads to violent turf wars, etc.). As another example, for any given social goal, a libertarian will be able to tell you the problems generated by having government try to achieve that goal and will tell you how such a goal can be achieved in a libertarian society.I believe this is qualitatively different from other predictive models because of the breadth of the model and the focus on transitions (both of which are also true of programming). On newsgroups I often see questions … [that] … libertarians almost always quickly answer by saying, “I’ll tell you exactly what would happen…” And, surprisingly, the libertarians tend to give the same answer in most cases.

I think most people find this odd about libertarians. They understand how an economist might be able to predict the effect of a certain law on the economy or how a social scientist might be able to predict how drug legalization might affect the ghettos, but they don’t understand how somebody could predict all of these things, especially someone who has no formal training. Libertarians, on the other hand, don’t seem to understand how someone could fail to have such a model of interaction… The nonlibertarians have no comprehensive model of interaction, and as a result, they can’t communicate in a meaningful way with those who do. Their attention is always focused on misleading superficial problems rather than on the underlying causes of such problems.

Hat tip: Neil Blakey-Milner. The full text follows below:

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting editorial in the Wall Street Journal, by libertarian lawyer Randy Barnett, about the anti-war stance of internet-darling Ron Paul. Of the libertarian contender for the Republican nomination, he asks:

While the number of Americans who self-identify as “libertarian” remains small, a substantial proportion agree with the core stances of limited constitutional government in both the economic and social spheres–what is sometimes called “economic conservatism” and “social liberalism.” But if they watched the Republican presidential debate on May 15, many Americans might resist the libertarian label, because they now identify it with strident opposition to the war in Iraq, and perhaps even to the war against Islamic jihadists.
…
This raised the question: Does being a libertarian commit one to a particular stance toward the Iraq war? The simple answer is “no.”

It describes rather well my own views on the war in Iraq.