Yes, that fits my urban vs non-urban thesis.  The anomaly is that even in the liberal cities, Vermont is relatively sparsely populated. The theory usually goes that the density of cities encourages lefty thinking, but Vermont shows that there may not be an absolute threshold density which "triggers" this political change once surpassed; it may be a function of cities themselves.

Having said that, even in redder areas of Vermont there's anomalies, like the aforementioned environmentalist streak and an apparent demand for "socially conscious" business practices.  It's reinforced whenever I visit the Ben & Jerry's factory, or talk to boutique shopkeepers in Montpelier who sell handmade soaps but wish more industry would revitalize the local economy.

As Mendel pointed out, VT used to vote GOP.  I think it's out of reach in the near future, but not permanently.

The resolute utilitarian might start in on the kind of "expected value of life" numbers we crassly use for official calculations.  Moot if you posit that moral calculations would cancel out to exactly zero, but that gets you into preference utilitarianism...

A longer, more complex argument needs to be made against this version.  Briefly:  even if utility is based entirely on the preferences of the people involved, those preferences are not expressible in standardized, communicable terms. For purposes of interpersonal comparison, utility is unknowable. Comparison is, to use an economics term, an incalculable problem; thus, you can not create a consistent system of laws which encompasses such individual utility.

As you say, they might be just fine with an inconsistent system of government, which gives discretionary power to some powerful party they like.  But they can't claim consistency, coherence, or objective justice.

I've also seen them before, but Google mocks my attempts to footnote.  If I recall correctly, the largest contributions to the imbalance were:

(1) payouts for using and maintaining federal land, because the feds own large amounts of land in red states

(2) Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements, which are hardly trivial, but its entwinement with our health care system practically forces states to use it.

I don't like the givers vs takers argument, because the hallmark characteristic of government intervention is unknown, unintended outcomes.  Voters who enact policies can't control how programs ultimately morph and re-distribute the proverbial slices of pie.

Your actions violated your neighbor's existing property right.  Your right to liberty entitles you to collect, homestead, or improve un-owned resources; but once you "mix" your labor with a resource, you own the resource as an extension of your personal sovereignty.  The question of utility never gets involved.

Now, there may be some situation where violating another's property might be morally permissible; for example, the starving beggar stealing a loaf of bread in order to survive.  (No, I don't want to re-argue this particular example.)  Morals are slightly different from the rights humans may insist upon.  So while taking the bread may be morally defensible, it was still a violation of the owner's rights, and the thief should be willing to bear the consequences.

Actually, you can build most of the natural law framework using logic, reason, and a single assumption:  an inalienable, individual right to life.

Judge Napolitano once surprised a Mises University class and started grilling the students about the foundation of their rights.  Starting at 20:59, he made the point that there is both a secular and a religious argument for natural rights; and in a secular democracy, it is imperative that we be able to make both cases.

I usually make a complicated argument that all morality systems eventually fall into two** paths:  either they reference a source of morals external to humanity itself, or they boil down into utilitarianism.  God is the usual external source for the first; the "greater good", or "human dignity", is the usual facade for the second.

(**A third common option is completely subjective personal preference--"well I just feel this is how things should be"--but this is usually unexamined utilitarianism, mixed with emotional value judgements.)

Excellent post!

One thing to add:  "inalienable" also means non-transferable, meaning that the holder of an inalienable right can not transfer it to a second party.  So you can not form a government by "giving" your right to liberty away to an external entity.  This doesn't matter to the natural law vs utilitarianism conflict, but it matters when outlining which coercive actions a government can take to enforce such rights.

Well, a few generations ago, the Democrats were a party worth voting for!

The trends have more to do with re-alignment of party platforms than changes in how dense population centers voted.  Remember, rural electrification used to be the pet project of big-government liberals, while the intellectual core of conservatism used to be found in large cities.  

There was an EconTalk podcast a while ago (I forget which one) where the guest noted that, when industrial labor was crammed into denser living arrangements, they coalesced into a viable power base for the left to pursue.  As low income subsidies and unionization took over lefty politics, suburban flight of the "merchant class" (to borrow an even older term) shifted the locus of the right's political focus.

...Also, Vermont is a weird exception on many things.  For example, they're huge environmentalists to the point of economic stagnation, but their gun laws are looser than in Texas.  I wouldn't bet money on its political alignment on future maps.

I distinctly remember my 4th grade History curriculum.  The teacher projected a map of the US east coast on the wall, and we learned the origins, charters, "home country", and religion of each of the original 13 colonies.  Some were founded by individual iconoclasts; some by large groups; some by corporations; some by philosophical movements.

With colonies established for commercial plantations, or religious sectarians, or radical pacifists, or utopian charitable expeditions, or military buffer zones... the surprise is not that deeply rooted divisions existed.  The incredible marvel is that they ever came together in the first place.

I'm inclined to agree.  But the people who need this message are our neighbors on the left, currently busy with a vehement denial that "American Exceptionalism" ever existed.

It'd be easier to divide us up between urban and non-urban (suburbs plus rural).  The red vs blue maps very closely track population density:

The exceptions are rare enough to count on one hand.  Florida is politically "purple" due to migration patterns, Texas has a strong history of individualism that outweighs the influence of its dense spots, and sparsely populated Vermont is as liberal as they come.  Everywhere else, the culture and politics is some obscure function of relative density, living arrangements, local history, and the influence of specific metropolises.

Not quite determinate, and of course correlation isn't causation, but if we are sticking to soft culture issues sometimes a coarsely grained visual is enough.

Will it cause a schism of contempt?  Well, over the last 3000 years of recorded human history, it always has.  The interests of city dwellers have always been in conflict against those outside the teeming cultural centers, whether suburban, rural, or provincial. (Ancien regime Paris, imperial Rome, and dynastic China are the classic case studies.)

The interesting question is what form this conflict will take.  But trying to predict that is a fool's errand.

Rubin gives good advice Obama is not temperamentally prepared to accept.  Throwing people overboard can not happen because that means Obama made a mistake hiring them in the first place.  

And that can't be the case, clearly, for he is Obama.

I'll second Rob's recommendation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods; even my friends who aren't horror/fantasy/comics readers loved that book.  Just about everything Gaiman writes is worth reading.

...with the possible exception of his short story Snow, Glass, Apples.  Not because it's bad (it's brilliant), but because you can never again enjoy the original Snow White story after reading it.

Bah!  Philistine!

In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the focussed attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.

"Charming, charming!" the D.H.C. repeated sentimentally.

...Then, turning to his students, "What I'm going to tell you now," he said, "may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible."

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

A look of astonished incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could not believe it.

"Even adolescents," the D.H.C. was saying, "even adolescents like yourselves …"

"Not possible!"

Stop being so anti-Progressive.  Embrace the Brave New World!

Note the real organizational rot in the Commissioner's answer.  He can't answer whether this stuff is inappropriate because he's looking at it from "outside the case".  

If you take him at his word, it means he believes that in the course of such investigations, there are cases where such invasiveness would be appropriate.  He assumes, as uncontroversial dogma, that the agency should take an imperial view of its power, that it has the basic prerogative to make whatever demands might satisfy some internal group of bureaucrats.

He doesn't find such abuse out of line. He merely lacks the background information to know whether a particular cabal of autocratic bureaucrats were being arbitrary with one odd looking question.  He can not contemplate a world where such a question is always inappropriate, period, because such a world places a hobbling constraint on his favored domain of power.

Prof Epstein is right that the novelty of the technology is not the issue for 3D printed guns.  But both professors are wrong about the ability to stop it.  There is no specific-use hardware to ban or regulate, nor can you monitor for suspicious data on the printer itself.  (Congress may eventually try, but they will fail just as badly as when they tried to regulate encryption.)

The problem space is very clear:  censoring or suppressing information, plain and simple.  If you want to talk about the morality, or predict the success, of such an effort, you need only look to the history of censorship of information.

Final nitpick:  Prof Yoo, the better analogy isn't the publishing of nuclear designs in the 1970s, it's the publishing of The Anarchist's Cookbook during the same decade, and its successor the Jolly Roger's Cookbook in the early days of the Internet. The mere attempt to suppress such information lead to widespread distribution of it, beyond the reach of any banning authority.  It even started a grassroots distributed editing effort, as various writers on proto-Internet BBSes began augmenting and updating the Cookbook's information on their own.

I'm not so worried about the data security; we're pretty good at cryptology. I am worried that this bandwidth use will get buried in the annual overhead reports, baked into our operational assumptions, that we won't realize it can be yanked out of our control until the bandwidth is badly needed.

It's one thing to scale back your military commitments.  It's quite another to fail to keep up with your military infrastructure.  That's "end of empire" stuff, a sign of collapse, when you stop investing in logistical support for outpost/border troops.  Nationally embarrassing defeats tend to happen more from thinly supported deployments, than from tactical brilliance on the other side.

Hayek's assertion of the price mechanism as the best organizer of mankind's efforts and localized knowledge, is one of the greatest contributions to modern economic debate. Most benefits and defenses of the free market flow from this foundational thought.

It also explains why he would be less willing to contemplate centrally planned infrastructure outlays.  While the need for such arrangements might be empirically, informally obvious, it is nearly impossible to create rational pricing models for infrastructure.