Atheism Outlives All Gods

I just put a fresh copy of my favorite atheist bumper sticker on my car. The previous one from http://makestickers.com lasted about three years, so I used them again for printing it.

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.