Cowicide, the best thing about Spam was that it replaced “Libertarians vs. Socialists” as the argument that all Usenet discussions eventually devolved into. As a Libertarian, I believed that we were right and y’all were wrong, but that didn’t mean I wanted to rehash the same old tired arguments yet again, especially with newbies from both sides who hadn’t really thought in any depth about what their positions meant.
“Global Warming Is A Hoax” isn’t a Libertarian position - it’s a Corporatist position that the folks in the energy production and consumption businesses have been trying to sell us, so that Congress doesn’t regulate their businesses and interfere with their profits, and if a century from now it means that Manhattan is flooded and billions and billions of dollars of once-valuable real estate and farmland are worthless, they’ll be safely dead anyway. (By the way, the propaganda groups that are selling that position are having a two-for-one special along with “Don’t trust scientists about evolution” - it’s a useful hook to attract some voting blocks, but the real payload is "Don’t trust scientists about Global Warming.)
“Government Shouldn’t Regulate Businesses” is one position taken by many Libertarians, but “Businesses that damage other people’s property should have to pay for it, and if you can’t afford it, you shouldn’t be in that business” is another. (Our most popular position on the topic is probably “What, me worry?”, but that’s every political group’s position on too many topics.)
