Re: "You are presenting a false argument from a false dilemma. I did not say that all rights are absolute – but that fundamental rights are. The only legitimate reason to deny a fundamental right to one person is in restitution or punishment for his doing the same to another person."

Sounds like you contradicted yourself here. Fundamental rights are absolute [your comment #21: "If you have a fundamental right, it cannot legitimately be mitigated or regulated or diminished for any reason, whatever the intentions."], but now they can be denied as "restitution or punishment for his doing the same to another person."

You are presenting a false argument from a false dilemma. I did not say that all rights are absolute – but that fundamental rights are. The only legitimate reason to deny a fundamental right to one person is in restitution or punishment for his doing the same to another system. More on that in a moment.

My understanding of libertarianism is that anything goes between willing participants as long as force and/or fraud are not used. Under such an arrangement, and human nature being what it is, what happens when the eventual conflict arises? Who, and by what standard, decides if and when force and/or fraud have been present in a transaction? Who decides the standard? Who decides if it is reasonable? What happens if force and/or fraud indeed were the case? How does it get resolved and by whom? Does the guilty party get punished? I suppose one solution is just to let everyone extract his own revenge.

Your understanding of libertarianism is simplistic at best. You apparently have libertarianism confused with anarchism, a system in which no government exists and has no right to enforce any sort of authority. Libertarians believe that government is necessary to protect fundamental rights from being infringed by others – nothing more, nothing less. A government is confined in it's authority by the establishment of inalienable (a term you may recognize from the Declaration of Independence – as I mentioned, our founding fathers based our entire government on this idea of rights) fundamental rights. You make absolutely no distinction between fundamental natural right and legal privileges, which is why you do not understand this philosophy. This may help you to understand the difference. This defintion of classical liberalism (not libertarianism, mind you, but classical liberalism – the philosophy essentially defined by our founding fathers) addresses the compossiblity of rights, which I believe you are also failing to properly understand.

Your caricature of libertarianism certainly doesn't seem very well thought out, but actual libertarianism makes quite a bit more sense and could hardly be described as Utopian (that you would choose such a term to define libertarianism is a humorous betrayal of your lack of understanding of the philosophy). To answer your questions: when conflicts arise, one of the only legitimate purposes of government is to intervene on behalf of the wronged party, which they determine by examining the evidence against the rubric of the codified system of inalienable, fundemantal rights, and then to use force to punish the wrongdoer and/or ensure restitution to the wronged party. This is not nearly so complicated a system as you are making it into – it is, in fact, the system our founding fathers envisioned and then pursued for about 150 years until we decided, based upon reasoning like yours, that the law was subject to the whims and judgment of an all-powerful central government.

Re: “When you've reached that conclusion, you acknowledge and accept that you have no rights, so discussion is futile. Rights that are not absolute are not rights – they are privileges. … I think you have a different understanding of rights, the purpose of rights, and the purpose of government than the men who executed said revolution and established our American government.”

I know there are more extreme statements, but they would be difficult to find. Your understanding of “rights” is the one at odds with that of the Founding Fathers who wrote the following in the “Bill of Rights”:

“No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; …”

They obviously envisioned that in some limited circumstances, a person’s rights can be taken away, for if rights are absolute, you cannot enforce any law at all because punishment, by its very nature, is the denial of certain rights [e.g., imprisonment = loss of liberty, a fine = loss of property]. If rights were absolute, chaos will ensue, and we will all lose all of our rights.

Re: “If you honestly believe that the American Revolution was fought to establish a moral authority in the halls of government, the purpose of which is to arbitrarily assign and revoke privileges to the citizenry based on the judgment of lawmakers as if they were some elevated class of high priests …”

I have stated that morality is the quality of an act judged against a standard, and you have taken from that the absurd idea that I think politicians are the epitome and the very definition of morality. Talk about taking one data point and extrapolating a whole universe! You are still equating morality exclusively with sin. I have defined my concept of morality, but you haven’t said what yours is. My understanding of libertarianism is that anything goes between willing participants as long as force and/or fraud are not used. Under such an arrangement, and human nature being what it is, what happens when the eventual conflict arises? Who, and by what standard, decides if and when force and/or fraud have been present in a transaction? Who decides the standard? Who decides if it is reasonable? What happens if force and/or fraud indeed were the case? How does it get resolved and by whom? Does the guilty party get punished? I suppose one solution is just to let everyone extract his own revenge.

Like so many other Utopian schemes, libertarianism hasn’t been all that well thought through.

When you've reached that conclusion, you acknowledge and accept that you have no rights, so discussion is futile. Rights that are not absolute are not rights – they are privileges. Rights that can be revoked are not rights – they are privileges. Privileges are meted out by authorities. Rights are secured against authorities. If you honestly believe that the American Revolution was fought to establish a moral authority in the halls of government, the purpose of which is to arbitrarily assign and revoke privileges to the citizenry based on the judgment of lawmakers as if they were some elevated class of high priests, I think you have a different understanding of rights, the purpose of rights, and the purpose of government than the men who executed said revolution and established our American government.

Re: “If you have a fundamental right, it cannot legitimately be mitigated or regulated or diminished for any reason, whatever the intentions.”

“Legitimately” by whose standard? While I will agree that the law sometimes places unreasonable limits, “fundamental” rights are mitigated by society all the time – and rightfully so. Take your right to free speech. It is mitigated by laws against child porn. I might have a fundamental right to interstate travel, but I cannot unreasonably risk endangering others on the highway, so there are speed limits. I have the right to own a gun, but I cannot own a machine gun without much more severe restrictions than an ordinary rifle; I cannot discharge a firearm in a city. These are all mitigations of fundamental rights.

Pulling the thread on the prostitution hypothetical, I think you are arguing that immorality equals sin, and therefore, laws based on morality [i.e., sin] should be eliminated. But if we did that, we would have to eliminate all laws because morality isn’t just a religious concept; it is the quality of an act judged against a standard. I can choose Coke over Pepsi, an act that is morally neutral, but still containing a moral level nonetheless, albeit zero. Suppose laws against prostitution were eliminated as you claim they should be, and your local prostitutes decided [for whatever reason] to use the street in front of your house to parade their wares [the fundamental right of free speech] and pursue their fundamental free market rights of transactions. If that’s too far-fetched, what if they used the street in front of your place of employment, and their activity drove away business, and you lost your job as a result? Would you still claim that, “how some particular behavior impacts society should never be relevant to whether or not the prostitutes have a fundamental right to their behavior”?

“By the libertarian/classical liberal reasoning, the right is more important, and cannot be infringed.”

No right is absolute.

I don't agree with much of what you have said, which amounts to license, not freedom. If you want to leave religious beliefs out, all you have to do is watch "It's a Wonderful Life" to realize how much an individual life influences those around him, either positively or negatively.

Peace.