"Your [sic] being downvoted",,, hilarious: you're showing the world that you can't write an English sentence - which is hilarious given your prior waffle about "the precise meaning and consequences of [] words".

Pretend it was a typo (which just happened to be the "you're/your" issue, which is second to "then/than", with "loose/lose" in third, as a marker of a bad second-rate education).

Make sure you go back and cover your tracks: you can edit your comments to remove glaring indications of a lack of really fundamental literacy. Already screencapped it anyhow.

That's worth an upvote, for the pleasure it has brought me today.

Oh please... what sad, sophomoric nonsense. "Down-votes" are for children: In my entire life on the internet (beginning in 1993) I've never down-voted anything in my whole life - anywhere - because down-votes are for self-indulgent babies who are obsessed with having some miniscule, irrelevant punitive capacity. It's the ultimate expression of weakness.

Key point: if you have never read Coase - a fundamental (arguably the fundamental) contribution to the literature on nuisance-abatement in economics and the law - then you're starting from a handicap so great that you can't even participate sensibly in a discussion of the concept, because (here's the thing...) it starts with Coase. It would be like involving yourself in an argument about optimal control, then bridling at being expected to have heard of calculus.

You brought the Coase issue into play it by implicitly asserting that that the "willingness-to-pay-to-abate" idea was mine - showing that you were gapingly ignorant of a massive literature in Economics that bears directly on the point.

While we're being middle-school debaters, I will point out that your paraphrase should properly have been "Letting people do as they will as long as they are not imposing costs on others" (don't mis-paraphrase my paraphrase: it's either sloppy or dishonest - or both).

But let's look at that statement: what bit of that would preclude the right to hire gangs to do violence to a peaceful individual? The bit about imposing costs maybe?

And nonsense like "That's your argument, but you don't even know it" is simply ludicrous - it's such a hackneyed device that it's almost not worth responding to.

Let's just say that right through to Masters level I had no difficulty in making clear what my arguments were (I dropped out of my PhD once my scholarship ran out), and nothing has changed in the interim. Maybe you're just so much smarter than the folks who graded me, and thus have spotted flaws that they missed. All while never having had to stoop to read Coase. Astounding hubris.

Another thing: the people of Iran do not contribute willingly to the funding of their state. That was not even a straw man argument - it was more like the ashes of a particularly sad already-burned straw man, that was made by a kid from the short bus.

Now some Iranians might be perfectly willing to fund State terror (just as some Americans are happy to fund drone strikes on Yemeni children) - ask yourself what budget there would be for the 'religious police' in Iran if the payment of taxes was entirely voluntary. The whole thing about a State is that it specifically denies expression of individual preference on issues of importance to the ruling clique: war, state ideology, internal policing, and revenue-collection.

I am amused that you used Iran as the boogie-man du jour, given that Iran actually has no purpose-specific "religious police". The Saudi mutaween are far more famous, and their brief is specifically and solely to enforce Shari'a. The Iranian government has VEVAK (internal security forces, who do not police religious issues) and the Basij - the Basij does some enforcement of dress codes, but apart from that they're nowhere near the level of oppression as in Saudi Arabia, and do not exist specifically to enforce religious doctrine (unike the mutaween).