"Freedom" thread or something

Those are some good examples and accurate answers to the question. Now, for political purposes only, I wouldn’t really use the line “libertarianism – like in medieval Ireland!”  

Also, if even today Iceland is not precisely threatening China or India for the title of largest population on Earth, how many inhabitants could it have had in medieval times?

That is correct, but and that's why I jokingly said that, for political purposes, libertarians would do well not to use these examples as reference. 

I understand the want for a modern example, but I have two problems with this in practice:

1) The lack of an example is equated to a situation where a controlled experiment to produce one was attempted and failed. This is clearly not the case so the lack of a modern example really means nothing other than no nation currently organizes itself this way, a situation itself also colored by the way we define nation.

2) All examples must be governmental. There are plenty examples of self-organization on a large scale interacting with law and the enforcement of law, but they exist contained regions ruled by a government or as international associations whose groups are all ruled by a government.

One of my favourite philosophical bloggers, Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex, has posted a lengthy essay where he examines Robert Nozick's libertarian utopia in some rather odd directions. (the "Moldbug" and "Ozy" referred to are pseudonyms of bloggers with their own eccentric political philosophies)

Thought people here in this thread would find it worth reading.

Nope, I think if it actually was Nozick himself who wrote that it would have been linked more extensively.

I'm no Hayek scholar, but it seems like a very fair representation. I'm surprised to hear that his work is largely misinterpreted in the opinion of the authors. 

Well, if I go by the article, it partly implies that too.  "Excess savings above that which can be profitably invested in satisfying consumer demand in the near future are invested in lines of production satisfying demand in the farther future."   It correctly diagnoses that recessions may often be driven by an excess of optimism and enthusiasm directing investment towards ultimately unprofitable ventures.  After all, what causes demand to collapse is that the price isn't right (e.g. gets too expensive but businesses continue to invest even at unsustainable levels of cost).  Whereas calling into an excess of supply alone seems to imply that you could blow a demand balloon to get up to that level of supply and everything would be ok.  

Thanks for the videos, very informative.  I think the difference between mal investment and oversupply is nuanced.  He made a statement in the video there that "not everything is reversible".  So not all bad investment is going to somehow get utilised at a higher level of demand, which it seems is what Keynesians believe.  This is why ghost towns do exist and only get revived when they reinvent themselves by accommodating new industries instead of waiting for erstwhile ones to come back.  It is interesting that there is a sort of behavioural dynamic in the Austrian/Hayek approach (i.e bad decisions rather than just a mathematical mismatch of demand and supply levels), used to think it was pretty classical.

Don't run Doc, there's little activity here lately and some of us have started to devolve into statist monsters again  (at least to a degree)