Roy, essentially the difference is an outcropping of the difference in general between libertarians and the “liberal” statists. Statists look to centralized government to solve their problems; libertarians look to individuals to solve their own problems among themselves without having them compounded by intrusive state meddling. Thus, the statists’ approach to shutting down offensive ideas is to resort to the power of the state to force an opponent to shut up. The libertarian’s approach to shutting down offensive ideas is to persuade an opponent to the superiority of an idea ? and barring that, to make the opponent too embarrassed to continue to expound upon an untenable notion (reductio ad abstinentis).
Libertarians, in other words, expect the individual to bear the responsibility of shutting up when he’s been shown to be peddling manure.
