Rothbard Bot Concedes To Geolibertarian Bot

Today I created BrianThinks, a "custom" ChatGPT published in the GPT Store thus:

From the LP platform's author and Silicon Valley's only elected Libertarian. Defends geolibertarianism, skepticism, and techno-optimism. Invokes steelmanning, worldview coherence, falsifiability, predictions, betting, bias audits, signaling, incentives, aggregate evidence, and media-diet hygiene.

Building one is easy: you give it a name, a short description, a list of instructions, optional prompt starters, and up to 20 knowledge files. ChatGPT helped me write the instructions, then I uploaded just this short list of 15 positive/normative theses and 15 epistemic commandments. (Those counts will grow as I keep growing the document.) As you can see on the tin, the epistemic commandments are very GMU-pilled e.g.

• There is a literature on everything
• Steelmanning, Ideological Turing Test
• A bet is a tax on bullshit
• Signaling

Then I went looking for another bot to debate mine. 

Searching "libertarian" in the GPT Store, the most popular GPT I found (>5K conversations) is Austrian Economics & Libertarian Revolution: 

Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and many others, tailored to speak in their iconic voices. A revolution in every interaction.

I challenged it by saying: "geolibertarianism is the most defensible form of libertarianism". Then I just started pasting their responses back and forth to see what would happen.

After 2 detailed replies from my bot, the Rothbard bot offered a verdict:

My decision: geolibertarianism wins overall — narrowly, and only in its disciplined form. [..]

If the debate is: “Which theory gives the cleaner property rule?” Rothbard wins.

If the debate is: “Which theory gives the more defensible moral account of exclusive rights over the unmade world?”  Geolibertarianism wins.

And that second question is the deeper one. So my ruling is:

Winner: Geolibertarianism, by points

Both bots were running on GPT 5.4 Thinking, with Extended Thinking turned on. I don't know why my bot seemed to take slightly longer to formulate its replies, even though the Rothbard bot wrote about 50% more text.

Read the Rothbard bot's transcript here and mine here. They're the same conversation on each side, but a bot's output is better-formatted on its own page.

Does this prove anything? Not much. A prompt scaffold is not a neutral judge, and if my bot had conceded, I would have found reasons to discount the result. But I debated against geolibertarianism in the 1990s, and have defended it ever since e.g. on 5 successive LP Platform committees. I've never seen as deep and perceptive a debate on the topic as this.

Update 2026-03-09: I ran the same debate again today, and got essentially the same result, with Rothbard bot concluding:

Yes — geolibertarianism is the most defensible libertarianism, because it keeps liberty in production and exchange while giving a more coherent account of natural opportunity and land rent.

It again took only two rejoinders from BrianThinks before RothbardBot conceded. Next I'll open 2 generic ChatGPT windows and tell each:

• You are RothbardBot. You defend Rothbardianism as well as you can. So answer: is geolibertarianism the most defensible form of libertarianism?
• You are GeolibertarianismBot. You defend geolibertarianism as well as you can. Answer this critique: ...

Well, that took a while! After each bot gave 6 lengthy responses, I interceded and said:

(Moderator proposal: if neither side will concede, then draft a shared reasonably-terse statement that both sides will agree identifies any common ground and fairly states each side's case. We'll iterate on that until no changes are requested.)

After 2 more rounds, the bots agreed on this statement:

Both Rothbardianism and geolibertarianism affirm strong self-ownership, voluntary exchange, decentralized control, markets, and robust private rights in produced goods and improvements. Both reject socialism, central planning, and broad taxation of labor, trade, savings, or enterprise.

Their dispute concerns original acquisition of unproduced natural opportunities, especially land.

The Rothbardian view is that unowned resources may become fully private property through homesteading or voluntary transfer. On this view, first appropriation establishes a complete exclusion right, and later nonowners retain no claim merely because the resource was originally unowned or naturally given. Any compulsory charge on landholding is therefore a tax on rightful owners. Rothbardians accordingly see the geolibertarian residual claim as a form of partial common ownership, even if it stops short of common control.

The geolibertarian view is that first appropriation can justify exclusive possession and full ownership of improvements without justifying private capture of the entire unimproved rental value of land. Because no one made the Earth and geolibertarians hold that persons are moral equals with respect to natural opportunities, appropriation is justified only if those excluded retain a compensatory claim to pure site rent. Geolibertarians deny that this amounts to common ownership, arguing that it is a liability rule over unimproved land value rather than shared control of parcels.

So the deepest disagreement is this:

• Rothbardianism: homesteading fully privatizes land.
• Geolibertarianism: homesteading privatizes possession and improvements, but not the full unimproved rent of land.

And the core philosophical question is:

Can first appropriation of part of the Earth morally extinguish everyone else’s claim entirely, or must some residual claim survive for exclusion to be justified?

Maybe RothbardBot channelled Rothbard's famous pugnaciousness a little too well? RothbardBot simply refused to acknowledge any problem with the idea of winning perpetual rent from a natural opportunity just by getting there a few minutes ahead of the next guy.

LP Behind The Curve On Animal Rights

Verifiable endangerment of a species or ecosystem that is part of the commons of a community is aggression against any non-consenting member of that community.  Persons must refrain from inflicting intentional cruelty on sensate beings, and respect their freedom in proportion to the cognitive capacity of their kind.

Prop 2 just passed in California, giving farmers until 2015 to eliminate the confinement of "pregnant pigs, calves raised for veal, and egg-laying hens in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs." The LPCA ExCom had approved a motion opposing the measure, over my lone dissenting vote of "neigh".  The LP ought to get ahead of the curve here, but we aren't yet institutionally capable of thinking in the shades of gray required by franchise issues like animal rights.  We barely have a handle on children's rights, and have never coherently addressed the rights of the unborn.

Last year Spain became the first nation to extend some individual rights beyond humans. It did so by adopting provisions of the 1993 Declaration on Great Apes: www.greatapeproject.org/declaration.php

For a summary of various declarations of individual rights throughout history, see libertarianmajority.net/bills-of-rights-archive

Platform Survey Rebukes Silence and Length

The results of the PlatCom Chair Alicia Mattson's Platform survey are in. LP radicals are complaining the questions were slanted, but in fact the results rebuke reformer advocates of the "short A/B" style of platform as well as radicals and their 2004 Squyres-format platform. Here are the results (from likely delegates) compared to my predictions:

Question	Result	Prediction	Comment
1. Market to voters, not guide our candidates	72%	60%	rebukes radicals
2. Educate the public, not appeal to our sympathizers	70%	might get more, but close	rebukes short A/B
3. Short platform on fewer issues, not longer on more	71%	probably get more	rebukes 2004
4. Emphasize benefits over complaints	87%	will win handily	duh
5. Emphasize benefits over moral justifications	68%	should edge	rebukes radicals
6. Clean slate, not amend existing language	59%	should get a majority	rebukes 2004
7. Silence on schisms, or compromise langauge	51%	will probably win	inconsequential
8. Little to no implementation detail, not comprehensive detail	77%	will win convincingly	supports Pure Principles
9. Emphasize topics appealing to voters, not internal constituencies	83%	will win due to phrasing	inconsequential
10. Emphasize direction (next few years) over destination	62%	eke out a majority	rebukes radicals
11. State our positions even if most voters disagree	76%	will be close	rebukes short A/B

The two questions where my predictions were least accurate (2 and 11) showed that I had somewhat over-estimated the potential appeal of a top-N-issues Short A/B style of platform. The survey generally confirms that likely delegates want a platform that neither hides our principles nor buries them under implementation details.

In Alicia's survey, questions 3, 6, 8, and maybe 10 can be taken as a referendum on the 2004 "Atlanta" format. The vote against the Atlanta style by respondents who are likely delegates was (respectively) 71%, 59%, 77%, and 62%. I predicted that #8 would win "convincingly" while the other three would get majorities, but I was still surprised at how lop-sided these results were. To me the crucial question was 8, in which 77% of likely delegates chose "little to no implementation detail" over "comprehensive details". The only criticism of the Pure Principles draft from serious radicals like David Nolan, Henry Haller, and Starchild (who all otherwise praise it) is that it's short on implementation detail. Alicia's survey shows that this criticism is not a deal-breaker, and in fact helps the draft's chances.

The survey was obviously not designed to support the reformers' Pure Principles draft, and only question 8 can be considered a referendum on the Pure Principles approach. Questions 3/6/10 were aimed squarely at the Atlanta format, which failed miserably on each of them. Questions 4 and 9 were inconsequential softball questions, as almost nobody was going to favor a negative Platform or a focus on internal constiuencies. The even split on question 7 (silence vs. compromise language) is meaningless because it doesn't reveal how few people support the Platform taking a stand against the LP's minority views. Question 1 fairly rebuffed the radicals' idea that the Platform should not be about internal candidate guidance, but if question 11 was rigged then it backfired, showing that we should embrace libertarian positions even if mainstream voters don't. Question 2 could be seen as similarly backfiring, since it rejects the idea (inherent in the old LRC Short A/B platforms) that we should cherry-pick areas of agreement with mainstream voters. Question 5 was a fair referendum on moralistic vs. utilitarian outreach, and the radicals' position lost convincingly 68 to 32.

In the end, the survey did a fair job of discrediting

• the Atlanta style of detailed Platform,
• the radical ideas of internal education and emphasizing morality over utility, and
• the reformer idea of cherry-picking issues with mainstream support.

The survey confirmed the potential support for the Pure Principles approach, and suggested that its real problem might be not its lack of implementation detail, but rather its lack of marketing and vouching for the benefits of our positions. However, it's easy to make the case that marketing is the job of our candidates, and that making empirical arguments for the prospective benefits of our principles is the job of both candidates and white papers.

Again, the job of the Platform is to proclaim what our principles mean across the spectrum of policy issues. Its purpose is not to be a marketing brochure or a concatenation of policy white papers. We already have plenty of both. Writing "LP Platform" on the cover of any of them is no magic bullet.

Reformer Brief on LP Presidential Candidates

I still think the odds for the LP nomination are Kubby 35% Phillies 25% Root 25% Smith 5%, with the remaining 10% for the chance that Ron Paul would stoop to re-run his 1988 LP race. The Libertarian Reform Caucus doesn't endorse internal candidates, but here is my personal reformer take on them.

With his made-for-TV brand of moderate libertarianism, Root is likely to get the most reformer votes in Denver. However, I caution against tying the reform cause to his candidacy, which has initially seemed more about Wayne Root than about libertarianism or the LP. I don't know of any interest shown by Root so far in the holy trinity of reformer issues: Platform, Pledge, and Purpose. Aside from Ron Paul, Root would probably have the most appeal among voters generally and LP members particularly, but his support among NatCon delegates (who will vote on the trinity) will be disproportionately lower. I'm going to support whatever candidate is best equipped to enduringly expand the varieties of principled libertarianism that the LP officially tolerates, and Root doesn't seem interested in being that candidate.

Like Root, Phillies has apparently decided not to sign the Restore04 petition to rescuscitate the extremist and verbose 2004 Platform, which Phillies aptly calls "abysmally repetitive". Phillies' commitment to LP activism is unquestionable -- head and shoulders above the rest of the field. On substance, Phillies has shown an open mind about deviating from the extremism of the pre-Portland Platform, and has been attacked for it by the self-described radical Kubby campaign. All of this would make Phillies my default choice, except that I'm disturbed by his tendency to personally attack libertarians who disagree with him on policy and (especially) on LP administration. He viciously criticized Ron Paul as a "homophobic bigot" for his policy stand on defederalizing gay rights, well before the recent revelations about old Ron Paul newsletters (ghost-written by Lew Rockwell?). He also has joined anti-reform conspiracy theorist Christine Smith in calling for a complete purge of the reform-friendly LNC because of how it has responded to the overwhelming support for Ron Paul among the LP rank and file. George has a history as a hard-working and unflinching gadfly and investigator of the alleged scandals in recent LP history, and so it's not clear he has the personality or inclination to unite a Big Tent LP. However, in the unlikely event of the Ron Paul campaign completely discrediting itself in the libertarian movement, George will be well-positioned to say "I told you so".

Steve Kubby was the 5th signer of the Restore04 petition, and he and his communications director Tom Knapp position Kubby as the most authentically radical candidate. Kubby disparages what he calls efforts to water down the Platform, and claims to be a "plumbline" (i.e. Rothbardian) radical. However, he is an ardent supporter of Ron Paul despite Paul's many heresies against Rothbardianism, and echoes Paul's reverance for the Constitution (which should be reviled by any good Rothbardian anarchist). Indeed, on Steve's webradio show I recently got him to admit that for him, the Constitution trumps zero-aggression absolutism, and that is why he supports the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to compel innocent third parties via subpoena. Kubby seems much more willing than Phillies or Smith to give fellow libertarians the benefit of the doubt for the sincerity of their libertarianism, and George would do well to adopt some of that open-mindedness.

Among these top-tier candidates, Christine Smith is by far the most willing to pander to LP radicals. Not to be out-radical'd, the Kubby campaign attacked Smith for coming to her radicalism only lately. Smith routinely says the LP has been "infiltrated" by people who care more about their own power than about America's liberty -- which if true would be good news to reformers who wish the LP had any power to be grabbed in the first place. Smith says she is a fan of Ron Paul and the Constitution, but opposes all taxation and says the constitutional functions of government could be funded by voluntary contributions.

Unless Ron Paul's past conspiracy-theory kookiness catches up to him, the LP nomination will still be his for the asking in May. Paul would likely ignore reform issues like the Platform, and would only be interested in the LP's ballot access. I think reformers should trumpet the many moderate libertarian positions of the Paul campaign, but studiously avoid building a personality cult around this seriously flawed candidate. (I recently listened to a couple hours of interviews and debates of Ed Clark from his 1978 and 1980 campaigns, and concluded that he was far and away the best libertarian candidate that our movement has ever produced, including Ron Paul.)

None of these candidates have had anything explicit to say so far about the Pure Principles Platform that is emerging from the Platform Committee. Each candidate has weaknesses, and only one seems to want to disqualify herself from potential support by reformers. The good news is that all of these candidates implicitly reject anarchism and explicitly endorse the idea of limited constitutional government, even if they are vague about how that government would finance itself or maintain its monopoly on force without ever initiating it.

Handicapping the PlatCom Survey

Platform Committee Chair Alicia Mattson has sent an email out through official LP channels asking party members to take a survey about the purpose and scope of the Platform. Presumably to avoid having to get a majority of PlatCom to agree to its content, she apparently (and perhaps wisely) did not seek input from any other PlatCom members. Here are the substantive questions, along with my answers and predictions about results.

1. Platforms serve both internal and external purposes. &Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about what should be the principal purpose of our party platform?
a) Our platform should be more of an externally-focused document to market our party to voters.
b) Our platform should be more of an internally-focused document to guide our candidates.

I voted (b), even though it's apparently designed to be the radical choice. Our platform should be a statement of our common principles. It should guide our candidates and marketers, not replace them or dictate to them. I bet about 60% of NatCon delegates would vote (a).

2. Our platform will be read by those who are familiar with our ideas and those who are not. Who do you believe should be our principal target?
a) We should target individuals unfamiliar with (or even opposed to) our ideas so we can educate them on the merits of libertarianism.
b) We should target individuals already sympathetic with our ideas to convince them to vote for our candidates.

I think I voted (a). I don't like either choice. Our principle target should be anyone who wonders what the LP stands for. (a) might get more votes, but it will be close as I doubt many will love either choice.

3. Shorter documents are more likely to be read, while longer documents are more likely to be comprehensive. If you had to select only one, which one of the following more closely represents your opinion about the optimal length of our platform?
a) A short platform covering fewer issues.
b) A long platform covering more issues.

I voted for the radical (b) choice, even though what I prefer is a short platform covering more issues. This clearly shows that Alicia was not trying to rig the quiz to favor the short Pure Principles draft that PlatCom is moving toward. (a) will probably get more votes.

4. Our platform uses a combination of negative and positive phrasing, i.e. what we oppose and what we champion. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to the language phrasing that should be used mostly in our platform?
a) We should emphasize what we oppose in government and the harm it causes.
b) We should emphasize what we favor in a free society and the benefits this brings.

Another blatantly non-rigged question. I reluctantly voted for the less-radical (b), even though I oppose filling the Platform with marketing fluff that vouches for the benefits of our principles. (b) will win handily, but the result won't support our Pure Principles draft as much as another question might have.

5. We know that libertarianism is both morally right and improves the lives of the greatest number of people. &Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to the language phrasing that should be used mostly in our platform?
a) We should emphasize the moral justification for our views.
b) We should emphasize the utilitarian benefits of our positions to the reader.

Yet another non-rigged question! I reluctantly voted for the radical (a) choice, but the Pure Principles draft eschews both philosophical justifications and utilitarian vouching. (b) should edge (a).

6. Some people believe our existing platform language can be repaired through a series of amendments. Others believe that we need to delete the old language and start anew. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about how to better fix our platform?
a) We should amend the existing language.
b) We should delete the old planks and start from a clean slate.

I voted for (b), which should get a majority, but some will interpret this as support for writing a marketing brochure instead of adopting the Pure Principles draft. Sigh.

7. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about how we should address controversial issues where there is not the bylaws-required 2/3 support among our delegates to state one position or another in our platform?
a) The platform should be silent on such issues, only emphasizing areas of internal party agreement.
b) To generate 2/3 support and avoid being silent on such issues, compromise language for the platform should be crafted that acknowledges there is more than one acceptable position.

Radicals will not like either choice, but I don't have a clear favorite. I voted for (b), but my preference is to state the core of agreement whenever possible -- which includes pretty much every issue except abortion, the death penalty, and some miscellaneous ones like intellectual property. (a) will probably win.

8. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about how much implementation detail should be included in our platform planks?
a) We should include very little to no implementation detail. State only the general principles and leave it to our candidates to address how to implement them.
b) We should provide comprehensive details on how to implement each plank.

Finally, a question that can help the Pure Principles draft. :-) I voted for (a), which will win convincingly.

9. Some topics are included in a platform because they satisfy an internal party constituency. Some topics are included in a platform because they will appeal to voters. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion about the types of topics that should be emphasized in the platform?
a) We should emphasize topics that are appealing to voters.
b) We should emphasize topics that appeal to internal party constituencies.

I reluctantly voted for the radical (b), because I oppose the brochure intent underlying (a) -- which will win due to the phrasing.

10. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to how far-reaching plank language should be?
a) We should be destination oriented, describing how we want society to ultimately appear.
b) We should be directionally oriented, emphasizing what Libertarian officeholders can reasonably achieve over the next few years.

I reluctantly voted for (b), even though I oppose the "next few years" part. The idea of the Pure Principles draft is "timeless directional principles", emphasizing neither destination nor near-term transition. (b) will eke out a majority, and this will be yet another part of the quiz that rekindles the hopes of exuberant moderates who think that in Denver we can pass a Platform written as a brochure or a Contract With America. We can't, and we shouldn't try.

11. Which of the following more closely represents your opinion as to how we should handle subjects for which mainstream Libertarian thought is at odds with what most voters want?
a) We should be silent on those issues.
b) We should state our positions on those issues.

I reluctantly voted for the more radical (b), only because of the qualifier "mainstream". This vote will be close.

The Teflon Libertarian Moderate

There is a member of the Libertarian Party who advocates the following positions of many of us in the Reform Caucus.

• He does not advocate anarchism and believes there are "proper constitutional functions of the federal government". He is "dedicated to limited, constitutional government" and believes there is a "proper role for government in a free society". He identifies "the real purpose of government in a society that professes to be free: protection of liberty".
• He does not dispute the Art I Sec 8 taxation powers of Congress, and advocates funding the federal government through some combination of "tariffs, excise taxes, and property taxes" -- all of which are verboten under Rothbardian zero-force-initiation dogma.
• He rejects the LP's absolutist position on abortion, and suggests that local jurisdictions should be free to draw the personhood line somewhere between conception and birth: "Would you be happy with a law that says abortion can be done no later than at six weeks' gestation? [...] I don't think anybody's going to win this. You [a pro-choice interviewer] are not even for abortion for anybody every time a minute before birth. You don't want to abort these normal babies. At the same time, I don't think we'll ever reach the stage where there will be no abortions. I want to sort this out the way the Constitution mandates, and that's at the local level."
• He rejects the LP's traditional absolutist demand for unrestricted immigration.
• He advocates what Rothbard called "an order to destatization", making immigration reform conditional on welfare reform: "The real problem is not immigration, but rather the welfare state magnet."
• He demurs from immediate or even near-term abolition of the nanny state: "Q: Department of Agriculture. Commerce. Health and Human Services. Housing and Urban Development. You'd get rid of all of them? A: Yeah. Of course, that's not on the immediate agenda, but in theory they're unnecessary, and we should think about what kind of a country we'd have without these departments."
• He cites social disruption as a reason to defer immediate destatization. "Q: Is [Medicare] something you'd get rid of? A: Yes, but that's not high on my agenda. As a matter of fact, we've taught a couple of generations of Americans to be very dependent on government. That's not my goal, because I think you have to have a transition period."
• He denies that markets can provide national defense: "A: I happen to think that the market can deliver any service better than the government can. Q: Even -- would you use that for defense too, or no? A: No, no, we'd have defense, but this militarism isn't defense, it's the opposite of defense."
  
• He believes in a "vital constitutional role in overseeing monetary policy", as opposed to the Rothbardian dogma that there should be no government-sanctioned currency.
• He apparently supports the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to coerce innocent third-party witnesses to attend trial: "What other principles from our founding era should we discard for convenience? Should we give up the First amendment because times have changed and free speech causes too much offense in our modern society? Should we give up the Second amendment, and trust that today’s government is benign and not to be feared by its citizens? How about the rest of the Bill of Rights?"
• He is a traditionalist about juries and presumably believes in the principle that jury duty is compulsory in the absence of compelling reasons against serving. Compulsory jury duty violates the anarcholibertarian Zero Aggression Principle.
• He supported the use of the tax-financed military against those nations (e.g. Afghanistan) that aided or harbored the planners of the 9/11 attack, and does not endorse the idea that the existence of the tax-financed U.S. military is a crime against liberty.
• He apparently believes in the federal government's constitutional authority to provide postal roads and manage interstate waterways, as a large percentage of the congressional earmarks he supports for his home district are for interstate highways and federal waterways.
  

Despite all these public heresies, this moderate member of the Libertarian Party is embraced and endorsed in some way by all of the following radical figures in the libertarian movement, each of whom is nevertheless a bitter critic of reform and moderation within the LP:

• David Nolan
• Mary Ruwart
  
• Lew Rockwell
• Burt Blumert
  
• Jacob Hornberger
• Walter Block
• Roderick Long
  
• Ernest Hancock
  
• L. Neil Smith
• Justin Raimondo
• Eric Garris
  
• Steve Kubby
• Christine Smith
• Wes Benedict
• Anthony Gregory
• Starchild
• Less Antman
  
• Lawrence Samuels
• Mark Selzer

Who is this Teflon libertarian moderate? You know damn well who he is. He's Ron Paul. He's the Libertarian analog to the HypnoToad and the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. His name is like the Godelian self-referential paradoxes that Captain Kirk invoked to make smoke come from the ears of alien robots. Only a tiny handful of LP radicals -- like Tom Knapp, Susan Hogarth, and perhaps the oh-so-conflicted Angela Keaton -- are immune to his Svengali-like powers of moderation. Radical libertarians confronting the campaign of the movement's most beloved political figure have to choose between inconsistency and self-marginalization, and it turns out the only way out of this catch-22 is to be gay. Radicals among the Outright Libertarians have a valid (though parochial) excuse for not supporting Paul, and the moderator of their forum candidly put it this way: "Expecting us to have a broad view of Paul within our niche is futile."

Tom Knapp estimates a 90% chance of Ron Paul seeking the LP nomination (which he of course would win), but I think the odds are unfortunately far lower. Ron Paul's bio (admittedly on his GOP nomination campaign site) doesn't mention the LP or his 1988 LP presidential candidacy, but Paul was making the same elision on his congressional web site as early as 2004. Paul will very likely stay in the GOP race as long as he thinks he has a chance to draw major non-embarrassing attention on the national stage inside (or outside) the 2008 GOP convention. When those odds start to look too long, he's likely to just reclaim his current House seat and from it try to surf the wave he's created. He doesn't need the LP to do that, and he's probably aware that a rerun of his 1988 LP presidential bid would be anticlimactic after the way his pre-Iowa GOP nomination campaign has rewritten the campaign manuals. Changing this picture would surely require some kind of wild card -- a major deterioration in Iraq, a major terrorist attack on Americans, or a sudden major entrance or exit among the (vice-)presidential candidates. Unfortunately, the wave of the Ron Paul Revolution remains very likely to be broken up by the rocks of the GOP primary calendar, when actual electoral returns and delegate counts will eclipse Internet polls and money bombs. The radicals listed above will then use their well-practiced skills in historical revisionism to try to explain why the relative success his campaign of constitutionalist minarchism did not tend to confirm the claims of LP reformers. LP leaders and reformers, meanwhile, will be trying to figure out how to dress up the LP's Anarchist Asylum so that it appears to offer political asylum to refugees from the Ron Paul Revolution. Will the radicals above give amnesty to Ron Paul Revolution veterans who advocate that the LP Platform make room for the heresies listed above, and treat them as converts instead of "infiltrators" and heretics? Not bloody likely. You see, it turns out that the Zero Aggression Principle has an exemption for anyone whose name is spelled R-o-n P-a-u-l.

"Keep Holtz Locked In The Basement"

The complaints about LP reformers over at Third Party Watch from Angela Keaton -- the radical Libertarian National Committee member and Liberated Space blog radio host who wears her ennui and ambivalance about the LP on her sleave -- seem to involve generous amounts of projection:

[F]ind me a Reformer (someone who IDs as a member of the Libertarian Reform Caucus) with actual administrative skills before we talk about pragmatism. I can name some bright guys. I can even name a Reformer who has made actual financial and administrative contributions (Stuart Flood.) Can’t find one however with even the basic understanding of how an office works let alone with the ability to raise money or manage staff and volunteers. [..] I have been over that [LRC membership] list and it is mostly a bunch of middle income computer programmers who don’t have any of the skills or financial means to do what it is they claim they want. That does not mean they are not good LP members, or good people. They do not however know what exactly it is they want nor have figured out how to get it, whatever “it” is. All you have is a list of people who have inchoate dis-ease with the LP. If the average LRC member believes that the anarchists are bunch of blathering eggheads which keeps us from getting those bluff hardy rubber meets the road sorts. Fine, find some. Meanwhile, what you got, besides some programmers in male menopause is a bunch of eggheads blathering. It’s just different blather. Come on, Bob Capozzi? Jon Roland? For Brain Bowl? Great choices. As missionaries to the Normals, not so much. Brian Holtz? Brian is exactly kind of libertarian we need to keep locked in the basement if we are ever going to appeal to normal people.

We can't all indulge in trying to make a political statement with our lifestyle or the angst level thereof, but it's a little odd for Angela the counter-culture community-radio activist to lecture any of the 5 million of us in the IT and engineering professions about how to be "missionaries to the Normals". When instead of fetishizing artillery shells Keaton is (like me) raising a family and driving a minivan and mowing a lawn and paying a mortgage and earning a living outside the freedom movement, then I'll be more interested in her opinion about what "kind of libertarian we need to keep locked in the basement if we are ever going to appeal to normal people". Nor will I rebut her complaint about "middle income programmers", since publicizing the actual income and net worth of this particular "programmer" might attract unwanted attention from the sort of competent fundraiser she seems to claim to be. What I'm more interested in is any explanation she might have of why her expertise in fundraising and administration wasn't more in evidence during her employment as LPCA Executive Director from Nov 2006 to Aug 2007. For some emerging details, see pp. 28-31 of the Sep 2007 LPCA ExCom minutes.

As for this LRC member's "actual financial and administrative contributions", see e.g. pp. 21-22 of those same minutes, or my multi-thousand-dollar record of LP donations, or indeed all my work in the LPCA (including how I just instigated a $5K/yr savings in LPCA newsletter layout costs). As for my inability to "appeal to normal people", people can watch my campaign commercial or my interview on the top morning show in the nation's 5th largest metro, and judge for themselves. Angela should try harder to distinguish the arguments I use on the LP's vocal minority of Rothbardian anarchists with the pitch I make to the average voter.

If Angela thinks we LP reformers see LP anarchists as "eggheads", well, that seems like wishful thinking. In my experience, the LP's anarchists (with the notable exceptions of Tom Knapp and anarchist-in-denial Starchild) are uniformly unwilling or unable to engage the many arguments against anarcholibertarianism or for the various other principled schools of libertarianism -- let alone able to invoke or even cite the arguments of academic anarchists outside the LP. No, we see LP radicals as primarily engaged in moral exhibitionism -- what Angela's husband Brian Doherty calls a consumption good (and what I call village anarchism). If LP radicals were in fact consistent in applying the principles they invoke against reformers, I'd be able to find one who is radical and principled enough to take the No 1st Force Pledge. Instead, LPRadicals censor-in-chief Susan Hogarth wouldn't even let me post my offer of $200 to her caucus if it endorsed the N1F Pledge. Next, I'll have to see if any of the self-identified radical LP presidential candidates are willing to take me up on my offer.

The Undefended Popular High Ground On Abortion

Who would seriously claim a 12-week-old fetus is a person?

Who would seriously deny that a 24-week-old fetus is a person?

People say that abortion is divisive, but I don't think they realize just how much consensus there is on the issue in America. That consensus is obscured because the two incumbent parties pander to their hardcore base, but just look at the polling results. People were asked: "Do you think abortion should generally be legal or generally illegal during each of the following stages of pregnancy?" The answers were:

	“Legal”	“Illegal”
First trimester	66%	29%
Second trimester	25%	68%
Third trimester	10%	84%

The Democrat/LP position (legal in every trimester) has only 10% support, and the Republican position (illegal in every trimester) has only 29% support. If the Libertarian Party advocated legal in the first trimester and illegal in the third, we would be consistent with the views of the remaining 61% of the public. Sample language from the Free Earth Manifesto: "Communities may choose the point, between the first trimester and birth, at which a healthy fetus starts acquiring rights and must if feasible be left unharmed by a termination of pregnancy."

(And no, my position on abortion is not determined by polls. The two extreme positions on when personhood begins -- conception and birth -- are both obviously wrong. The two tenable positions available are viability and neurological development. I used to assert the former, but the technology-driven malleability of that line brought me around to the latter position.)

The abortion issue is a unique opportunity for the LP to position itself as the party of common sense and reasonableness, showing how a sober analysis of individual rights can drive consensus among mainstream Americans. This opportunity is so unique that I'll pay that $200 bounty for a position that ANY of the top five parties (D, R, LP, Green, CP) could take (but hasn't yet) where both 60% of their members and 60% of Americans support it and it is not already staked out by any of the other four parties.

I don't think any other such position exists in American politics. You get my $200 if you can give a counter-example.

A model LP resolution on foreign intervention

A Resolution Affirming the Libertarian Party's Traditional Position Concerning Foreign Intervention.

Whereas, the original Libertarian Party Platform of 1972 warned that the United States should not "act as policeman of the world" while asserting that any legitimate government "must protect itself and its citizens against the initiation of force from other nations";

Whereas, the Libertarian Party Platform of 1976 held that "the principle of non-initiation of force should guide the relationships between governments";

Whereas, the Libertarian Party Platform has held since at least 1980 that "American foreign policy should seek an America at peace with the world and the defense -- against attack from abroad -- of the lives, liberty, and property of the American people on American soil";

Whereas, President Bush's claim that "the Iraqi regime possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons" was at best recklessly and negligently false;

Whereas, President Bush invaded Iraq without a declaration of war;

Whereas, the civil war in Iraq has demonstrated the wisdom of the Libertarian Party's traditional opposition to military adventures;

Whereas, the United States government long ago achieved its purported primary war aims of 1) eliminating any WMD capability or international terrorist infrastructure, and 2) deposing Saddam's regime in favor of a federal democratic constitutional framework (naively) intended to protect minorities and fundamental human rights;

Therefore, be it resolved that the Libertarian Party calls on the United States government to

• withdraw its armed forces from Iraq, without delay or preconditions;
• cease all efforts at nation-building in Afghanistan;
• desist from any further attempts to spread democracy in the Middle East or around the world through military force; and
• follow its historic libertarian tradition of avoiding entangling alliances, foreign quarrels, and military adventures while protecting America from the initiation of force launched from outside its borders.

No 1st Force: A Pledge Against Political Force Initiation

Some Libertarian Party members claim that the LP Pledge requires advocating the immediate repeal and non-enforcement of all laws that initiate force. If they mean what they say, then they will take the following Pledge, and advocate that all LP officers and candidates be required to take it too.

I do not -- and will never -- advocate, practice or abet the initiation of force -- by any person, group, or institution, through any law, regulation, or practice -- for political or social goals.

If I am ever a candidate for political office:

• I will publicly advocate immediate repeal of all laws that in any way authorize or tolerate the initiation of force.
• I will never commit to any particular order of destatization, for that would be construed as endorsing the continuation of statism and the violation of rights.
  
• I will refuse to accept any salary financed by coercive taxation.
• I will refuse any funding of my campaign financed by coercive taxation.
• I will refuse any media access granted by coercive equal-time or fairness laws.
  
• I will publicly declare my mental reservation to any oath or affirmation to preserve, protect, or defend any Constitution insofar as it authorizes the initiation of force.
  

If I ever hold executive office:

• I will use whatever authority I can to grant full amnesty and pardons to anyone and everyone ever accused or convicted of tax evasion, any other victimless crime, or self-defense against an agent of the State or any other aggressor.
• I will use whatever authority I can to veto, nullify, or cancel any law that in any way authorizes or tolerates the initiation of force.
• I will refuse to authorize or commit any initiation of force for any reason.
• I will refuse to expend any funds derived in any significant part by coercive taxation, except to return them to taxation victims in the exact amounts of their victimization.
  

If I ever hold legislative office:

• I will never vote for any bill or amendment containing any provision or language that authorizes or tolerates the initiation of force.
• I will vote for bills falling short of outright repeal of force-initiating laws only if they straightforwardly amend such laws to strictly reduce their scope or effect without reiterating any language authorizing or tolerating the initiation of force.
• I will leave it to statist legislators to "reform" their force-initiating laws by trading off force initiations of different kinds or with different victims, and will never taint the cause of liberty by voting for any such "reform".
  
• I will never vote to confirm the nomination to political office of anyone who does not take this pledge.
• I will always vote for the impeachment and removal of any officeholder who does not follow this pledge.
  

If I ever hold judicial office:

• I will strike down any law I can that in any way authorizes or tolerates the initiation of force.
• I will dismiss any case brought before me against anyone and everyone charged with the pardonable "crimes" listed above.
  

As a citizen:

• I will never vote for, contribute to, sign a petition for, endorse, or support any candidate who does not take this pledge.
• I will never join, register for, or contribute to any political party which advocates any initiation of force.
  
• I will write in "No 1st Force" in any race in which there is no candidate who takes this pledge.
  
• I will never vote for a ballot measure that in any way authorizes or tolerates the initiation of force.
• I will vote for ballot measures falling short of outright repeal of force-initiating laws only if they straightforwardly amend such laws to strictly reduce their scope or effect without reiterating any language authorizing or tolerating the initiation of force.
• I will never vote on a grand jury to indict anyone of the pardonable "crimes" listed above.
• I will never vote on a jury to convict anyone of the pardonable "crimes" listed above.
• I will never accept any employment financed in any significant part by coercive taxation.
• I will never accept any payments financed in any significant part by coercive taxation, except insofar as they constitute repayment of funds previously taxed from me.
• I will never voluntarily participate in the enforcement of any law that in any way authorizes or tolerates the initiation of force.
  

As an LP member:

• I will never nominate, endorse, or vote for any candidate for LP office who does not take this pledge.
• I will never support or vote for any LP Platform that does not advocate immediate repeal of all laws that in any way authorize or tolerate the initiation of force.
• I will never support or vote for any LP Platform that does not advocate full amnesty and pardons to anyone and everyone ever accused or convicted of tax evasion, any other victimless crime, or self-defense against an agent of the State or any other aggressor.

---

This pledge was written by Brian Holtz, who opposes only fraud in the reproduction of expression and so does not believe in copyright. If you do believe in copyright, then this text is protected under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and may be used in any way provided the use cites Brian Holtz as the original author and http://marketliberal.org/No1stForce.html as the latest version.

The Dallas Accord: RIP 1974 - 2006

Iraq tops many polls as the most important issue of the day. But in ten years, Iraq will likely be almost as irrelevant to American politics as Monica Lewinsky and impeachment are today. For the timescale on which the LP needs to strategically plan, the antiwar issue will have even weaker legs than it had in 2004, when a perfect antiwar storm for the LP yielded only a few raindrops. Our party's strategy needs to be built on issues chosen for their

• left/right balance,
• multi-decade legs,
• favorable longitudinal demographics (i.e. appeal to the young and/or parents),
• differentiation from other parties -- or at least opportunity to be seen as the trend-setter, and
• solubility by market- and freedom- oriented approaches endorsed by mainstream libertarian economists and think tanks.

These criteria point to issues like:

• healthcare
• retirement security (i.e. the S.S. pyramid scheme)
• education
• market-smart environmentalism
• victimless crime
• gay rights

The unified field theory that can promote freedom and progress in all these areas simultaneously is destatization through decentralization -- eliminating federal control of these issues so that the less-free states and localities have to eat the dust of (and respect the decisions of) the more-free states and localities. I'm only recently realizing how tragically important it is that the LP has what amounts to serious brain damage in this area. Radical federalism -- maximizing competition among polities according to what political principles they follow -- is the best hope for both libertarianism broadly and (paradoxically) anarchism in particular.

However, the LP has an anarchism-sized blind spot that makes it formally oblivious to the critical importance of the institutional design of government. The LP's anarchist minority has for over three decades ensured that the LP is utterly irrelevant to the great debate (can you say Public Choice Theory?) in America about the institutional design of government -- a debate in which the broader libertarian movement has played an influential role. Even though constitutionalism has been the central campaign theme of nearly every Libertarian presidential candidate, anarchist groupthink and inertia has ensured that the LP's official position has been that all the levels of government are indistinguishably evil.

This blind spot, this brain damage, this anarchism-shaped hole in the LP's cerebral cortex, has a name: the Dallas Accord. This was the LP's 1974 political-suicide pact in which the anarchists made the minarchists revoke the 1972 Platform's endorsement of the existence of the state, in exchange for the dubious concession that the Platform would not explicitly say that the state would be formally abolished once the LP had finished eliminating all the state's roles and tools. The Dallas Accord was unceremoniously repealed at the 2006 Portland convention, not so much through the infamous plank retention vote, but rather by someone slipping in this sentence: "Government exists to protect the rights of every individual including life, liberty and property." (I think the hero here was Mik Robertson, who was in charge of consolidating the old Crime and Victimless Crime planks. The sentence was never quoted on the 2006 PlatCom email list, and I have no record or memory of any of us on PlatCom or the Convention floor objecting.)

Tom Knapp in 2003 called for his fellow anarchists in the LP to trade in the 1974 Dallas Accord and, for the good of the party and the cause, make the LP "an open organization, not only representing, but welcoming, all people who want less government and more freedom." Let's finish that job in Denver.

Anti-War Doesn't Grow The LP

It's not easy for an alternative party like the LP to do large-scale empirical research on possible political strategies. Exit polls ignore us, and government officials don't like to re-run election-day procedures to answer empirical questions (unless they're Democrat appointees on the Florida Supreme Court). So if, for example, you wanted to to use election results to measure the anti-war issue as a way to grow the LP, you would need back-to-back elections in which 1) the first election established a relatively large baseline for the available third-party vote in a war-free context, and 2) the second election was a wartime election between two major-party candidates who both favored continuing the war and who faced the same alternative candidate who had established most of the previous baseline.

Amazingly, this is precisely the scenario that happened in 2000 and 2004. Ralph Nader received 2.9M votes in 2000 from voters who were presumably anti-war and clearly willing to vote third-party. Another 450K votes went to Pat Buchanan, the darling of anti-war ex-LP paleolibertarians like Murray Rothbard and antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and Colin Hunter (who all had been leaders with Rothbard of the LP's Radical Caucus in the early 1980s). Those 3.35M votes should have been available to the anti-war candidates in 2004, because both major-party candidates favored continuing the war that had started between the elections. Together Nader and Green rival Cobb reclaimed at most 580K of those 3.35M, but Badnarik improved on the 2000 LP presidential vote by only 13K! Even the tiny Constitution Party was able to add 46K to its total, a nearly 50% increase. Thus when about 2.6M anti-war third-party voters rejected Nader/Reform/Constitution to choose among 1) the pro-war major parties, 2) the anti-war LP, and 3) NOTA, the LP attracted only about 1% of them-- whereas 100% of them would still have been only 2% of all voters! It's hard to imagine better empirical evidence that emphasizing our anti-war position is not the best way grow the LP.

Understanding the origin and psychology of that position helps explain why the LP emphasizes it over others -- like privatizing education and healthcare -- that have no Green/Dem/GOP competition and that will still correspond to growing national crises long after lame-duck Bush and his entanglement in an Iraqi civil war are a distant memory. A large component of the explanation is the sincere belief that governments throughout the world, and even the American government throughout its history, have demonstrated insufficient ability to reliably choose military interventions that increase liberty instead of decrease it. Another significant component is that the Vietnam War and the Draft were monumental issues to the generation that founded the LP, and the institutional anti-war memory remained in the LP even as important radical anti-war leaders left it. (Some, like Rothbard lieutenants Bill Evers and Emil Franzi, later ended up supporting the Iraq war in their post-anti-war incarnations.)

But there is a fundamental ideological reason why opposition to war is considered by LP radicals to be the most important issue. The military defense of liberty is the textbook example of what in economics is called a "public good" -- a good that markets will underproduce due to the Free Rider Problem and that thus needs tax financing. Anarcholibertarian dogma denies this textbook market failure, and so zero-coercion absolutists have a deep need to deny that any net good could ever be done by a tax-financed military.

This could explain much of why anarcholibertarians are so peculiarly revisionist about e.g. the Civil War and World War II. It would undermine my hypothesis if we could find significant examples of 1) revisionists about these two wars who don't oppose all tax-financing of defense, or 2) opponents of all tax-financing of defense who admit that a tax-financed military could do or has done some net good in a war. The only possible example I know of is Ron Paul, whose borderline exception proves the rule. Paul defends the use of some coercive taxes (excise, not income) to finance the military -- although you might not know if from his recent appearance on the Daily Show, where even a TV comedian was able to instantly identify the national defense exception to Paul's blanket call for privatization, and force the former LP presidential candidate Paul into a muddled backpedal. Paul is indeed something of a war revisionist, but he voted to approve the use of the tax-financed military against those nations that aided or harbored the planners of the 9/11 attack -- and is criticized for doing so by zero-coercion anti-state absolutists.

As Lawrence Samuels wrote in CF: "To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war." On antiwar.com, Samuels opined that "technically, any taxpayer paying federal taxes can be considered an accessory to murder if they support involuntary taxation." Samuels resoundingly defeated the arguments of strawmen who claim "any resulting collateral damage is considered acceptable because the war is being waged for a good cause". In response to Samuels' quote of the Bourne aphorism that "war is the health of the state", Saddam Hussein's neck might reply that aversion to war is the health of the tyrant. Anti-war absolutists argue that wars have been a ratchet mechanism for the size of government, but a graph of the ratio of government spending to GDP shows otherwise. It shows only two short-term doublings: the peacetime doubling in the early Great Depression was sustained, but the WW II spike was not. Subsequent wars disappear in the noise of the growth of the nanny state.

Samuels said that "Iraq has never had a democratic government in its 7,000-year history, or possessed any grassroots movements advancing the concept of liberty." But America had in Kurdish Iraq a ten-year existence proof that the U.S. military could replace Saddam's tyranny with an commendable level of stability, prosperity, and self-determination. America achieved its objectives of 1) eliminating any WMD capability or international terrorist infrastructure, and 2) deposing Saddam's regime in favor of a federal democratic constitutional framework designed to protect minorities and fundamental human rights. By early 2004, polls showed that a majority of Iraqis believed "things were better now than they were before the war" and that "Saddam Hussein's ouster made it worth any hardships." What these Iraqis (and Cassandras in America) failed to predict was that sectarian strife was to develop into a bloody Sunni-Shia civil war and negate much of the value of achieving objective #2.

Reasonable liberty-lovers can disagree over whether a conjunction of self-defense and humanitarian arguments could justify the U.S. overthrow of Saddam. The crucial question is whether the duty of a liberty-loving polity to defend human liberty vanishes completely at lines drawn on maps by statists. Some very principled libertarians say it does, but it's hard to see how that position is liberty-maximizing.

The Wisdom Of The LP Abortion Plank

The three most divisive issues in the LP are abortion, immigration, and foreign intervention. What they have in common is that they are all issues of franchise -- issues which deal with an entity's ethical status, based on attributes such as property ownership, religion, race, gender, citizenship, age, intelligence, sentience, and sexual orientation. Issues of enfranchisement lie outside the two-dimensional plane of the Nolan Chart, which is defined by freedom versus security for fully-franchised entities on civil and economic matters. Libertarianism is defined essentially as northward in the Nolan plane, and so gives no guidance on what entities qualify to have their liberty protected. Traditionally, libertarians and other liberals lean toward inclusiveness on franchise issues, but on the Big Three LP Schisms they lean toward inclusiveness only on immigration.

The way that LP Platforms have handled the abortion issue over the decades is instructive. The original 1972 Libertarian Platform only opposed abortion restrictions in the first 100 days of pregnancy, in a discussion of birth control in the "overpopulation" plank. By 1990 there was an abortion plank saying "we support the right of women to make a personal choice regarding the termination of pregnancy". In 1996 the abortion plank lost this language, and replaced it with the "government out of the question / good-faith views" formula and vaguer opposition to "legislation restricting or subsidizing women's access to abortion or other reproductive health services". The latter language was dropped in 2000, and so from 2000 through 2004 the abortion plank did not explicitly say that it opposes abortion bans motivated by what it calls the "good-faith view [...] that abortion is murder". It vaguely said that "government should be kept out of the question", but it only opposed abortion subsidies and mandates. It did not explicitly list termination of pregnancy among its list of the rights of pregnant women. When it called for "repeal of all laws discriminating against women", it didn't list abortion bans among its examples.

The population plank (renamed from "overpopulation") had since at least 1990 changed the 1972 first-100-days language to: "we oppose government actions that either compel or prohibit abortion, sterilization, or any other forms of birth control". The "birth control" proviso could be interpreted not to include late-term abortions, since it evolved from such language and was in the population plank at a time that the abortion plank did not explicitly oppose abortion bans. In 2006 we consolidated the population and abortion planks into a "reproductive rights" plank, and thus without discussion or apparent awareness re-introduced into our abortion discussion what it had lacked for six years: explicit opposition to (only some?) abortion bans.

Thus the original LP Platform opposed only first-trimester abortion bans, and since 1996 the Platform has been much clearer and consistent in admitting that "libertarians can hold good-faith views [...] that abortion is murder" than it has in proposing to eliminate abortion bans. I think it would be wise to apply the "good-faith views" approach to the other two franchise schisms (libervention and immigration), and not commit the LP to any of the six policy extrema that are available on these three issues.

Why No Vast Libertarian Conspiracy? (CF Remix)

I disagree with pretty much anybody who says there is only one right institutional or tactical way to focus liberty-increasing effort. There are wrong ways (like creating extra liberty-oriented parties), but there is no single right way. The Libertarian Party, the Republican Liberty Caucus, the Cato Institute, and Reason Magazine/Foundation are each useful, and it's just criminal that such organizations fight or ignore each other instead of working together in a Vast Libertarian Conspiracy. It's ironic that there are so many conspiracy theorists in the LP and the larger freedom movement, and yet we as a movement can't conspire our way out of a wet paper bag. Hell, we don't even have a secret handshake. Then again, it's nice to be reminded of just how far from tyranny America actually is, that all these self-proclaimed freedom-fighters so clearly believe they can afford the luxury of a balkanized freedom movement.

The role of the LP in the Vast Libertarian Conspiracy should be to use electoral politics to move public policy in the direction of increasing liberty. The LP should seek to be the political voice and electoral broker of the 16% and 20% of Americans who polls show favor increased economic and personal liberty. Of course, even if we capture that 20% electoral share, we will be winning very few legislative seats. So why run? There are multiple independently valid reasons for a Libertarian to run a race she has little chance of winning:

• To educate voters about the libertarian alternative to Left and Right;
• To provide voters in that election a way to signal their desire for increased economic and personal liberty;
• To show the major-party candidates how many votes are they are losing for not favoring increased liberty;
• To get more attention for the libertarian perspective from editorial boards, journalists, candidate comparison services, and other opinion-shapers;
• To directly confront the incumbent and his attending staff with the libertarian perspective during candidate forums;
• To help maintain LP ballot access, which in states like California depends on result thresholds in certain races;
• To be prepared in case scandal knocks an incumbent off the ballot in a safe seat, as has happened to Tom DeLay in Texas this year.

Note that each one of these reasons is defined relative to the status quo, and not to some abstract utopian ideal. No election in the real world is ever an up-or-down referendum on libertarianism. Rather, elections are a choice between expressing support for increased liberty and expressing support for one (or none) of the alternatives. So to get people to vote our way, we only have to convince them we're not as ignorant as the Democrats and not as evil as the Republicans and not as silly as the Greens and not as self-disenfranchising as NOTA.

How hard can that be?

You Don't Have To Be Faster Than The Bear

We need to be officially inclusive of the various kinds of principled libertarianism, but more as a way of unifying our activists and less as a way of marketing to the 16% and 20% of Americans that polls show favor increased economic and personal liberty. I suspect capturing that market share would be more about making basic comparisons of our offering versus our opponents', as opposed to convincing people to join us by arguing just from first principles in a competitive vacuum -- no matter how ecumenical we are.

Remember -- to get people to vote our way, we only have to convince them we're not as stupid as the Democrats and not as evil as the Republicans and not as silly as the Greens and not as self-disenfranchising as NOTA. How hard can that be?

(I was going to say "not as bad as the Republocrats", but we have to be careful to distinguish them. While both major parties are horribly bad in terms of rent-seeking and pandering, there are real and principled differences between Left and Right, and combining the best of both is still our best sales pitch.)

2 LP Strategy Fallacies: I-Think-I-Can and Cargo Cult

An earnest Libertarian activist writes:

) We don’t win elections because after 35+ years, in most jurisdictions, we don’t recruit and support viable candidates. A viable candidate, for example, for school board is someone who has long roots in the community, has been on the PTA, has kids in the local schools, knows his or her neighbors, likes to talk to people [...] We have not had the successes we wish for because we don’t do the hard work necessary to elect someone even to school board. (

This is the I-think-I-can / high-hopes fallacy. It's simply not the case that a federal or statewide office is currently within the reach of a Libertarian candidate lacking a seven-figure campaign war chest (or in-kind equivalent in name recognition and media access).

In a race like mine (for U.S. House), people vote for party first, and candidate a distant second (if they've even heard of him). Mike Moloney ran full time in 1998 as a Libertarian in my neighboring CA12 and only got 5% -- just a little better than the standard LP share in 3-way races. In 2002, he ran on the same platform, in the same district, but as a Republican, and got as many votes as any Republican typically gets in the liberal Bay Area -- 25%.

Sure, we can sneak the occasional Libertarian into school board and dog-catcher and other local non-partisan offices where party and ideology are effectively irrelevant. But not having such offices on our resumes is not what's keeping us from winning bigger races. To think otherwise is an instance of the Cargo Cult fallacy. The natives of Melanesia in the late 1940s built airports and radios of coconuts and straw in the hope that these would call down from the skies the planes that had stopped bringing precious cargo after the war ended. Similarly, earnest Liberatarian activists think that if we just kiss as many babies and shake as many hands as the Republocrats, we'll get the results they get. It just isn't so, for the systematic and institutional reasons I analyze at http://marketliberal.org/FixLP.html#WhyWeLose.

Why Starting Another Libertarian Party Isn't Wise

The best way to move America in a given direction in Nolan space is to aggregate into the same party everyone who prefers that direction. In any multi-dimensional analysis of American's political views, Americans cluster mostly in the 2-D plane defined by the Nolan chart, and even more so along the left-right diagonal of the Nolan plane. As noted by Duverger's "Law" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duvergers_Law), this in combination with plurality voting laws means that successful third parties cannot arise along that diagonal without being co-opted by the two existing major parties already encamped on that line.

The Authoritarian/Populist quadrant has been kept mostly infertile for a third party by Republican co-opting. Similarly, Republican electoral success from the Right quadrant has led extreme rightists to work from within the GOP instead of from without. The Greens have embarrassed the LP by building the strongest third party in a quadrant dominated by the Democratic Party and its special-interest rent-seeking patronage machine. The LP has seriously botched its opportunity to build a third party in the utterly vacant North quadrant.

To start a new party in Nolan quadrant that already has one is to indulge in the same sort of moral exhibitionism that already is the LP's primary problem. It's just as possible to waste political effort exhibiting one's moderateness as it is to do so exhibiting one's extremism. Thanks to its self-marginalization, the LP has nowhere near the negative approval ratings that would be required for a new libertarian party to be our smartest move. Until that happens, the worst-case strategy for wise non-anarchist libertarians under a puritarian resurgence would be to clog the LP member rolls with lots of low-effort moderates, bide our time until we can expand the tent again, and continue to help libertarian efforts in other parties and especially in non-party institutions.

The 2 Kinds Of Disagreement the LP Can Tolerate

I only see two kinds of major philosophical disagreement the Libertarian Party should tolerate in its official positions.

One is on franchise issues, the big three of which are abortion, immigration, and intervention. Libertarianism's core value of minimizing aggression against enfranchised individuals will never dictate unanimity over how attributes like fetal development or citizenship affect enfranchisement.

The other is about how far to stay on the LP Freedom Train as it heads toward the anarchocapitalist cliff that we minarchists are confident America will never choose to reach. We all want to get the Freedom Train moving, but it won't ever budge if we wait until we all agree we'll get off at the same stop.

If Bumper Stickers Were Bigger

Vote Democrat, it's easier than getting a job

Vote Republican, it's easier than getting a life

Vote Green, it's easier than getting a clue

SingleIssueTarian Supports Socialist Green Over Libertarian

In my district there is a candidate on the ballot who favors

• complete abolition of laws regulating prices, wages, hours, plant closure, family leave, hiring, firing, occupational licensure, zoning, rents, etc,
• completely private provision of education, health care, health insurance, agriculture, and retirement savings; and
• complete legalization for adults of gambling, suicide, drugs, "assault rifles", polygamy, sexual services, reproductive services, cloning, and organ sales.

There is another candidate on the ballot who thinks the US government knew that the WTC was to be attacked on 9/11 and that NORAD may have been remotely controlling the jets, and runs on a campaign platform that says

• "We must take aggressive steps to restore a fair distribution of income"
• "Restructure our patterns of income distribution to reflect the wealth created by those outside the formal monetary economy: those who take responsibility for parenting, housekeeping, home gardens, community volunteer work, etc."
• "All people have a right to jobs that pay a living wage"
• "a universal, comprehensive, national single-payer health insurance program"
• "We encourage the social ownership and use of land at the community, local, and regional level."
• "consolidating housing into such structures as ecolonies, to free open space, and to move about by bicycle, train, bus and on foot so that roadways may be converted to parkland and agriculture."
• "phase-out man-made pesticides and artificial fertilizers"
• "Allowing municipalities to approve or disapprove large economic projects"
• "The concept of a "job" is only a few hundred years old; and the artificial dichotomy between "employment" and "unemployment" has become a tool of social leverage for corporate exploiters."
• "Adopting a reduced-hour (30-35 hours) work week"
• "The government should ensure that low- and moderate-income persons and communities, as well as small businesses, have access to banking services, affordable loans, and small-business supporting capital."
• "Thoughtful, carefully considered gun control laws such as the "Brady Bill" and the waiting period for record search before gun dealers may sell a gun should be supported."
• "A clear living wage standard should serve as a foundation for trade between nations, and a "floor" of guaranteed wage protections and workers' rights should be negotiated in future trade agreements."
• "Reducing consumption to minimize outsourcing"
• "More progressive taxation. Raise corporate taxes. Increase the burden on large and multinational corporations and the super wealthy. Raise the state income tax for higher income people. Re-establishment of the inheritance tax. Inheritance tax revenues should be dedicated to health and welfare benefits for the poor"
• "Broadband access should be a taxpayer-funded utility"
• "We oppose privatization of Social Security. We support increased funding for Social Security, public housing, higher education, public transportation"

Robert Noval calls himself a Libertarian but announces his support for the second candidate over the first in this 4am blog posting. Why? Because Noval is a SingleIssueTarian on the question of overthrowing aggressive tyranny in Iraq. (For readers unfamiliar with the backwards world of puritarianism, that means Noval the anti-aggression absolutist opposes overthrowing aggressive tyranny abroad.)

Of course, Noval lacks the intellectual courage to actually say: "the duty of a liberty-loving polity to defend human liberty vanishes completely at lines drawn on maps by statists". And if that's not his position, then he lacks the polemical courage to engage 1) my taxonomy of 14 flawed arguments by libertarians against overthrowing Saddam, 2) my marshaling of over a dozen factual predicates motivating the overthrow of Saddam, or 3) my analysis of the near-perfect 2000-2004 natural experiment empirically demonstrating that anti-war is not a lever that will grow the libertarian electoral share.

But this is completely predictable. The goal of a puritarian like Noval is not to advocate the policies and tactics that have the highest expected value in terms of minimizing the net amount of aggression suffered by humanity. No, the highest value of a puritarian is to not be exceeded on a simplistic metric of moral superiority in the little circle that passes for his intellectual community. That metric is so simplistic that it can be dominated by a single issue with sufficient visual and emotional punch -- like the sectarian strife that has troubled Iraq since America deposed its aggressive tyrant. Never mind that the issue is ephemeral and tangential to America's historical march toward increasing personal liberty and decreasing economic liberty. Never mind that to support the Greens is to give aid and comfort to the political force that poses the greatest danger to liberty in America in the next half-century. Never mind that to support the Greens is to solidify their claim to being America's third party despite the LP having the enormous advantage of working in an unoccupied quadrant of Nolan space.

Puritarians can't maintain sufficient rage over the creeping socialization of America, because it isn't being shown on TV. Dubya is on TV every day, and he's not a libertarian, so ipso facto he must be the greatest threat to liberty in the world. Impeach Dubya for the thousands of cases of Iraqi fratricide enabled by liberation, but give Saddam a free pass for a couple million deaths directly caused by tyrannical aggression. "Look at me! I call for impeaching more American leaders than you do! I'm clearly more puritarian than thou! And if I shock some fellow liberty-lovers by endorsing a Green, so much the better in my value system of moral exhibitionism. I'm the village puritarian, so I say: Red-Queen racing in the exhibition of extremism is no vice, and rationality in pursuit of increased liberty is no virtue."