Federal City vs. Chocolate City -- Washington, the District of Columbia, is the capital city of the wealthiest and most powerful nation (empire?) in the history of the known universe. It is a city that teems with entrepeneurs of expropriation, dandyfied lobbyists, scrubbed legislative aides from the hinterlands, scores of Lewinskys and Levys hyperventilating amidst the faux Roman grandeur of the Federal City at the thought of their proximity to power. But beyond the shadows of the monuments, there is a city where interns fear to tread. A city of hand dancing, go-go music, and, yes, black people. With only thinly veiled racism, the tourist guidebooks firmly steer innocents away from all but the whitest and most gentrified portions of the District.

The 2002 Let's Go DC guide warns us of the Darkest DC:

In 1942, DC doubled New York City's murder rate and, according to Newsweek, became the 'Murder Capital of the US.' Exactly 50 years later, the title was resurrected, thanks to widespread crack addiction and the increasing availability of assault weapons. The murder epidemic, while mostly an affair of drug dealers shooting one another, sometimes catches innocents in the crossfire. Most crime occurs in places that do not get many visitors, primarily the Northeast and Southeast neighborhoods, and east of 14th St. NW. Try to enter these regions only in a car, and always exercise extreme caution.

Now, it is true that DC retains the murder crown. However, the outrage of the Let's Go passage is in the flip manner in which it, in effect, excises 2/3 of the city, as if these areas are uniformly populated with Glock-wielding crack fiends, murdering each other indiscriminately among delapidated ruins. But this is, of course, bullshit. There is much worth seeing and doing in North- and Southeast, and one does not face certain death should one wander into the neighborhoods where MOST of DC's residents raise their families and live their lives. Thankfully, my future roommates have set out to rectify this injustice, and have produced a guide to the sites, sounds, and tastes of the DC beyond the the Mall and the two or three tony neighborhoods approved by skittish guide book authors. Their site is our-dc.com . Even if you've lived in DC for years, you are sure to discover something new.

But check it out soon. We're moving east of 14th Street, so, no doubt, we will all be dead in weeks.

Coercion: WTF? -- Here's a challenge for libertarians. What exactly is wrong with initiatory coercion, other than the fact that it strikes us as intuitively repugnant? For my part, I cannot find a satisfying answer. Other kinds of non-coercive psychological manipulation, such as those that occur in relationships gone sour, strike me as just as odious as bona fide coercion. Indeed, I'd rather do something under the threat of being puched in the nuts (or just punched in the nuts straightaway) than to be emotionally blackmailed by someone I love. So why is preventing and punishing the one considered the proper province of the state, while the other is considered a paradigm case of a purely private affair?

Furthermore, I'm not sure I even know what coercion IS anymore? An extremely diffuse structure of government threats is considered coercive (almost none of us are ever directly threatened by someone with the power to harm us). Yet a religious ideology, induced by childhood brainwashing and promising eternal pain in the case of rule-breaking, is NOT considered coercive. Why not? And what's so special about physical violation? Since I genuinely prefer to be kicked in the nuts over having my heart shattered by psychological manipulation, what's so special about nuts-kicking? If I kidnap your kid and threaten to break her kneecaps unless you give me a Toyota, then that's considered coercion. But if I date your daughter, and she falls so desperately in love with me that she will attempt suicide should I leave her, and then I tell you I will dump her unless you give me a Toyota, then that's not coercion. What gives?

I think I know what you'll say, but let's see if you suprise me.

And this brings us to positive vs. negative freedom. I'm no longer seeing the importance of the distinction. It seems to me the freedom worth caring about is positive. What we want is a bigger opportunity set--the ability to choose among more alternatives. If, in order to get a huge increase in abilities and possibilities for my future, I had to accept some small amount of structural coercion that would block off a much smaller set of abilities and possibilities, then I'd be quite glad for the coercion. In fact, the thing that seems wrong to me about coercion is just that it closes off a possible course of action that I should be free to choose. This is more salient than having courses of action closed off by, say, a set of tarrifs, but the result is the same. There's something I should have been able to choose to do, but, in some sense, can't. The negative/positive distinction strikes me as analogous to the killing and letting die distinction. Whether I kill someone, or let them die when I could have prevented it, someone ends up dead. Whether you forbid me under threat of prison from taking a drug, or regulate the pharmaceutical industry in such a way that they never produce it, then I end up without the drug. I don't really care WHY I can't have it. I just care that I can't. Just as Bob doesn't really care if you shot him in the head or starved him to death with your disastrous economic policies. Coercion, whatever it means, seems like just one way to prune that loveliest of abstract objects, the Tree of Future Timelines, and not obviously the most diagreeable way.

Now, I'm certain that one of the best ways to make our future as bushy as possible is to restrict coercion. And that's why I think restricting coercion, insofar as I've got a grip on what it IS, is a nice idea. But it's not obvious that the bushiest future emerges from the branch with the least coercion.