This Guardian headline begins to answer the question:

Looting fuelled by social exclusion:  Young looters from poor estates have nothing to lose and no reason to obey social norms, say experts.

My initial reaction to the riots is a simpler version of the same answer:  Food and money. People with reasonable amounts of food and money don't riot. A writer who lives in the area of the riots, Darcus Howe, claims that racial prejudice by police also led to the riots. Howe said his grandson has been stopped and searched by police countless times, just for being black.

Are the people justified in looting and rioting? On the face of it, it seems like marching into a Wal-Mart and grabbing from a soulless corporation is a victimless crime. However, here are a few points to the contrary:

1. The rioters were not discriminating. They burned down local businesses along with looting major chains.

It was a decisive victory for Washington insiders against the more principled progressive members of the Senate. Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced his three choices for the first-ever "super" committee that will draw up a plan for resolving the nation's fiscal situation. Those Senate Democrats are Patty Murray (WA), Max Baucus (MT) and John Kerry (MA). All three have decades-long careers in Washington, all three voted for the PATRIOT Act, and yes, all three voted for increased spending in the Iraq war.

Reid is certainly not interested in Senator Bernie Sanders (VT), who blames much of the nation's fiscal problems on the Federal Reserve. Reid also ignored Senator Jeff Merkley (OR) who assumed office in 2009 and opposed the corporate banking bailouts that were allegedly designed to repair the U.S. economy.

On September 24th and 25th of this year there will be a conference at Harvard University that will mark the beginning of an attempt to draft a new constitution for the United States.

Conconcon, as it is being called, is designed to lay the groundwork for the writing of a new U.S. Constitution that some groups feel is long overdue.

If this conference is successful then we will see, in the near future, a multi-partisan constitutional convention that will draft a completely new constitution for the country.

Constitutional law expert Michael McConnell of Stanford University says that such a thing is  possible.  “It would probably be a result of a constitutional convention and not an act of congress,” he said in an interview Tuesday.

Under Article V of the Constitution, a new constitution could be proposed as an amendment to the current one. Two thirds of Congress and three quarters of the states would have to ratify it and then it would replace the current constitution and all amendments. Professor McConnell didn't seem to think that it was likely to happen, but it is a novel idea and it will be interesting to see what happens with it in the next year.

As I’m sure all single libertarians with a Y chromosome are fully aware, the libertarian movement fails to woo the ladies. Knowing how sexy our ideas are, you may wonder, “why are all the ladies head over heels for those not-so-liberal Democrats?” Well, regardless of how intelligent, morally consistent, and just plain awesome libertarian ideas are, we are not so good with the romance. That is, we are not so good with the politics.

That isn’t to say that all libertarians are awkward intellectual white guys whose primary relationships are with books and blogs -- y’all know who you are* -- but first impressions and the internet are very powerful things.

I once read a forum that posed the question: "Why doesn’t [liberty-inclined candidate] have a larger female base?" The sexist, condescending responses that followed were alienating, even to me, so it isn’t too difficult to deduce how a woman mildly sympathetic to our ideas might feel about the movement once they read something like that. While I’m sure that no YALer would claim that our deficit of ladies is due to their lack of intelligence and a desire to murder babies, that doesn’t change the reality that it was posted and is affiliated with our movement.

So even before we attempt to court potential supporters, we are pinned with the reputation of misogynistic -- and often, racist and elitist -- sleazeball, simply because some angsty, closeted creeper calling himself a friend of liberty said some terrible things on the indelible medium of the internet. It may not be fair, but guess what? It doesn’t matter. If you want your potential liberty supporter to even consider you and your poetic musings on liberty, you’re going to have to compensate for someone else’s mistakes. You have to open the car door, take off your hat when you walk inside, and stand as she gets up from the table. You have to be a perfect damn gentleman (or gentlewoman, as the case may be).