The point is that people who voluntarily vote at least have some sort of coherent opinion, even if it's based on completely biased and one-sided input. People who don't bother voting are, I think, more likely to be swayed one way or the other by random sound bites they hear in political ads, or celebrity tweets, or talk show rants. Forcing them to vote, then, merely increases the statistical noise level, making the overall vote more unpredictable and less reflective of any underlying reality of political public opinion. That's what I mean by the winds of fad and fashion. The idea that they would generally represent a moderating influence sounds like wishful thinking to me.

And in case you've not noticed, neither fad nor fashion tend to be very conservative.

Forcing people to vote is like tethering our political future to a large sail, deployed into the winds of fad and fashion. People who feel they have a role in shaping political fashion naturally like this idea.

I always took Andy Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame" prediction to be more metaphorical than literal, since there really was no actual mechanism by which most people could become famous for fifteen minutes. Now there is.

The thing that scares me the most is how many Republicans are eager to keep the requirement of covering pre-existing conditions. I can understand liberals not caring if every insurance company in the country is driven to bankruptcy--then they get their vaunted single-payer system by default--but are Republicans really that stupid to think that the end result wouldn't be precisely that?

The solution is to repeal it in its entirety, while reassuring the country that the intent is to immediately begin to put together something to replace it. That short-circuits any immediate squawks about repealing this or that aspect that some people might like--they'll need to stifle their upset and wait to see what materializes gradually over the following months. But it also eliminates any bias in favor of what's already in the law, over what should be in it. Eventually, when something popular doesn't seem to re-materialize, any resentment will be diffused over a longer period of time, instead of rising all at once.

Maybe they know something I don't, but I've never been convinced that all the people who don't vote are "moderate". Heck, there have been elections I've skipped, and no one would mistake me for a middle-of-the-road squish.

I may be dead in twenty years, so I'm cursing it now, just in case.

Personally, I don't much like people who withdraw their loyalty to my country, but one of the most fundamental differences between a free country and a tyranny is that a free country doesn't try to punish you for leaving. Some places like North Korea simply won't let you leave, some like Cuba won't let you leave with your family, and some will let you take your family but you have to leave your property. Are we supposed to be thankful that Chuck Schumer only wants 30%? Does he have any idea how parodically leftist-dictatorish he appears?

I dunno, after spending a week in Mexico once, I had eaten so many tortillas that I wondered why they had never figured out yeast. Tortillas may be practical as a way of holding together a burrito, but they don't hold a candle to a good bread.

And I never really got refried beans, either. Here in L.A., I eat breakfast burritos three times a week, but they make them with black beans, which I'm told are also completely alien to Mexico.

The best thing about Mexican food, however, is one thing: cilantro. Plant some on my grave, and I'll be happy evermore.

I accept your stated purpose as truthful, but the "gay marriage" movement would never have gotten off the ground based on that. The political center of gravity of the movement is not libertarian, it is totalitarian, because it is about forcing people to abandon an utterly universal conception of marriage, and of gender itself, in favor of something unprecedented in human history. You may not feel that way, but that's the ideological neighborhood you've chosen to reside in.

Imagine a constitutional amendment guaranteeing gays marriage rights, but also guaranteeing that no individual, business or private entity would have to recognize such a marriage. How do you think the movement would react to that?

"The most pro-feminist strip club in the city" makes about as much sense as "the most pro-environmentalist Hummer dealer in the city".

Frankly, I have no idea why a feminist would want anything to do with a strip club, unless it's a lesbian strip club, or unless she wants to sell the drug of titillation to the males she so reviles. And frankly, I have no idea why anyone who wants to go to a strip club would be postively impressed to find it's pro-feminist.

Let's get back to first principles. The purpose of "gay marriage" is for the government to force everyone to act as though there is no meaningful difference between a heterosexual union and a homosexual union. While you may be able to find, here and there in human history, cultures in which the governing authority, whatever it was, "recognized" certain homosexual relationships in some sense, you cannot point to one in which the governing authority recognized marriage but insisted that gender was completely irrelevant to it--and forced that on everyone else.

This is an idea that could not have taken root in our own culture without the ground having been assiduously prepared by decades of feminist indoctrination. At some point, a person commits to the idea that all gender distinctions are wrong, and then begins the years long process of trying to force life to conform to that principle. "Gay marriage" is one step on that path, and it isn't stopping there. But if you don't begin with the feminist premiss, there isn't the slightest reason why one should feel obligated to see men and women as interchangeable, or homosexuality as the same as heterosexuality.

Manjoo has a pretty slippery idea of what someone owes his government in exchange for his success. His argument could be used to justify present tax rates, 50% tax rates, 70% tax rates, or 99% tax rates, and yet he provides no clue to when he would say, Enough.

Furthermore, Saverin earned millions while living under the U.S. Government, while I've earned vastly less under the same government. That would seem to suggest that the extra money that came his way had to do entirely with the differences between him and me, and nothing to do with the government.

If Saverin had received some gigantic hand-out from the government, one could regard his emigration as disloyal, but when the government seems to be getting greedier with each passing year, one might wish that loyalty were a two-way street.

One must face the utter universality of heterosexual marriage. I doubt one could come up with a single example from anthropology of a culture in which the governing authority refused to recognize and support heterosexual marriage in some way. For it not to do so would be as bizarre as for it not to recognize and support the concept of parenthood, or other blood relationships, or for it not to recognize property rights, or citizenship, or even authority itself. These are all permanently embedded in human nature.

Gay marriage is not. Different cultures treat homosexuality in different ways, ranging from positive support (e.g., Sparta) to stoning to death (e.g., Afghanistan). But I'm unaware of any culture in history that decided that gender, and therefore gender preference, is a completely irrelevant and meaningless characteristic. This is feminist totalitarianism, not libertarianism.

One might prefer a European court if one's crime was subject to the death penalty. Since the ECHR found this way, I can only speculate that the crimes in question are not capital.

I like the idea. But only if a woman who takes the credit, and then has an abortion, has to pay it all back. Fair's fair.