I know these questions have little to do with the morning links, but Radley’s libertarian “purity test” and the ensuing discussion has renewed my desire to understand libertarianism better. Disclaimer: I’m extremely unlikely to be converted, but also extremely open-minded and genuinely eager to understand.

Or not. When I regularly attended church services in my youth, there were always people in attendance who didn’t make a contribution when the collection plate came around.

Churches and fortune tellers seem to have business models that differ in significant ways. I don’t support outlawing fortune tellers, but I don’t think it’s correct to say “What the churches do is no different.”

Doesn’t mean anything goes – if they falsely claim a track record or whatever, that’s fraud. Just as, an investment manager who thought Madoff was legit isn’t a fraud – but if he said he’d checked, then he might be.

I know of someone who got through a whole bunch more stages of grief in one session with an escort than in months of talking with a LICSW. The sex was a lot better too.

I suppose McDonald’s is committing fraud too, by pretending that they serve “food”, but I do like eating what they make, and I’m not hungry afterwards.

The words “fact” and “faith” are the same.

Fortune-tellers make testable predictions that studies have shown are no better than educated guess, at best. Most religions do not make testable predictions, since their promises usually involve an afterlife.

An obvious exmaple would be when it comes to medicine or something like that. The public benefit of trusting that a company is putting reasonable care into making sure the claims in their ads are true, could be convincingly argued to outweight the counterveiling limits on fraudulent speech.

In this case speech IS the product itself. The average consumer’s reasonable udnerstanding of what a product is or does is also a factor here. Thus, Milk commercials can show a boy grow to be 9 feet tall or soemthing without being accused of fraud becuase the average consumer KNOWS this is an exxaggeration.

In other words, the government is simply NOT PREVENTING FRAUD at all when they outlaw a service where the accuracy or credibility of the words spoken is the service itself.

(That’s not to say that the government can’t outlaw some services for other reasons, but none of those reasons are enough to trump free speech.)

This is an interesting phenomenon, Zeb. Essentially, organized churches are such successful fortune-telling operations that they no longer have to explicitly charge a fee for their services — the client pays money voluntarily. I guess that’s when you know you’ve hit the big time. [Then again there is that implicit "fork over the dough or roast in Hell for eternity gambit, so I dunno.]

“… denying churches or fortune tellers licenses or permits to preemptively prevent a weak mind from being duped is just another prohibition.”

Ganja, licenses and permits are means of the State — a priori pre-emption and prohibition. Frankly, I don’t believe ministers of organized religion or fortunetellers should be liable for their claims. Individuals need to be free to make “wrong” choices — the only freedom that matters.

Incorrect, sir. The fact that they manage to avoid being robbed doesn’t mean that the rest of us are paying for them.

If you’re referring to my rewording of paul’s comment, I suggest you not take it so literally. Maybe I was too subtle.