At the very least, we should try to civilize the arguing into reasonable debate, maybe by haveing each group form a committee or other sub-group. I can see a Libertarian Reformer Caucus, A Libertarian purity caucus, a Practical Libertarians caucus, ect… all of these being part of a larger Libertarian Party. Not sure how this would really work out, or if it would work at all, but we could allow each group to have its say on what the party should be without resorting to calling each other morons. That would not only cut down on the infighting, it could also bring those other groups that left back into the fold. Again, I’m not sure whether its feasable or not, but its an idea.

True. However, another big chunk does agree with our ideas but thinks that voting for a political party that advocates them is counterproductive in a winner-take-all system.

Another big chunk of people who tend to agree with us believe that participation in the voting system of any sort is counterproductive, or they just think the system is too rigged to bother.

Next to last there are many people who would consider voting for us but don’t want to actively participate in making the party politically effective by personally becoming involved or donating any money, and then wonder why the party is not doing more. Basically they expect other people to do get the work done and then are surprised that nobody has done it (or that not enough has been done).

Finally, there are many people who got involved in the party, got sick of it for one reason or another (too much infighting, too radical, not radical enough, too theoretical and highbrow, not theoretical and highbrow enough, too into practical politics, not into practical politics enough, too ineffective, etc, etc) and quit.

I suspect that even in schools which lean Austrian rather than Chicago/Monetarist, Rothbard isn’t the Big Kahuna among econ intellectuals. More likely he’s at most a footnoted mention in between Mises and Kirzner.

It’s not really the econ intellectuals I’m worried about, though—it’s the guy on the street. Friedman was (in print is) a good explainer.

One doesn’t really need to understand the Austrian business cycle or some monetarist theory about the velocity of currency circulation to grok a couple of important points that begin to lead one down a road that winds inevitably toward libertarian conclusions.

The other thing about Friedman is that his standing in the academic economics community is nearly that of Christ. As someone who was an economics student in college, I can assure you of one thing (albeit with a sample size of my own private college and conferences I attended at schools around the metro Chicago area including U of C), Friedman is a god. In the academic economics community, Friedman is seen as the most influential economist in history (velocity of money, monetary policy, and especially permanent income), even moreso than Keynes.

However, likewise, among the academic economics community, it’s not that people dislike Rothbard—he’s either unknown to some or ignored by others because he’s seen as having contributed nothing to economic theory.

Let me qualify by saying these aren’t my ideas, just what I have experienced from my time studying economics at a small sample from my private college and conferences in the area I’m from, and keep in mind I’m from Chicago

I’m not a big Rothbard fan for a number of reasons—but then I haven’t read him extensively or thoroughly. My surface impression is that there were a number of Rothbards crawling around inside the same one guy’s skin, all of them at odds with each other.

So far in this election cycle alone, I credit him posthumously with two political embarrassments for the libertarian movement, neither of them tied to any great underlying principles he might have stood for:

– His “paleo-racist” strategy as implemented by Ron Paul, which has hopefully only given the movement a black eye instead of a pair of broken legs. It could have been worse, but it wasn’t good.
– His “eternal and unquestionable centrality of foreign policy” litmus test, which gives Raimondo and Co. the excuse they need (tortured as it is) to go off leg-humping Barack Obama instead of supporting candidates who are anti-war AND good on OTHER issues as well, on the premise that anti-war plus “electability” trumps everything else. He’s probably rolling in his grave at the marriage of left-opportunism and right-sectarianism (deviations he explicitly condemned) being pursued in his name, but it was his idee fixe which made that marriage plausible.

In current movement affairs, Friedman comes off as the better man for the simple reason that HIS movement admirers concentrate on the GOOD ideas he had. I don’t know of anyone in the libertarian political movement currently advocating income tax withholding, or redistribution of wealth via the tax system, or even monetarism generally, in Friedman’s name.

The Rothbardians, on the other hand, seem fixated on following Rothbard’s ideas down the very worst possible implementation channels. “Hey, let’s get the cross-burning peckerwoods to finance our campaigns! Hey, let’s support an otherwise thoroughgoingly statist candidate because he says he’s against the war, even though he lied about that and screwed us last time he ran for office! Look, guys, this will be really cool!”

If I had to give a non-libertarian an introductory text and my choices were the book based on Friedman’s “Free to Choose” PBS series or Rothbard’s For a New Liberty, I’d go with Free to Choose, if for no other reason than that, comparative quality of the books aside, the empirical evidence says that reading Rothbard is more likely to put one up to a bunch of cockamamie bullshit than reading Friedman is.

Me: Are you sure about this, Tom? I was under the impression that EIC offsets FICA taxes. Sounds like good, bottom-up tax cutting to me, which you and I agree on. Given the choice between Friedman and Rothbard, I’d take Friedman all day long. Sure, we can damn Friedman for withholding, but he was far more influential and effective in developing free market ideas that were actually instituted than Rothbard, as I see it. Friedman took more chances than Rothbard, for Rothbard built up his odd construct and defended it with Leninist tactics. Sometimes, I do prefer Rothbard’s THEORY to Friedman’s, but I find Friedman a much more effective and integrated thinker.

disinter, pull your head out of your ass and start asking some real fucking questions.

Ask about the cockain.

As I see it, there are two groups out there, those who can get along with others and get the work done, and those who don’t. Both Radicals and Reformers have their share of people who talk and those who accomplish work.

While I was state party chair in California for six years – three consecutive terms – we elected more Libertarians to public office than all the previous years combined. There have been times when I considered myself a Radical and times when I considered myself a Reformer. Few people cared, as long as I got the job done. I doubt that I was suddenly more effective or less effective because of how I identified myself at the time.

It’s more important that we all work well together.

I make it a point to get along with both Brian Holtz and Angela Keaton, both of whom are on opposite sides of the Radical/Reformer divide. I even hired Angela Keaton as our state party’s Executive Director because I knew she would get the job done, even though she often disagrees with me and is kind of bitchy towards me sometimes. In any event, we focused on making progress and worked well together.

For example, Angela Keaton and I worked together compiling lists of elected Libertarians in the state. Many hours were required working with outside consultants and collecting data from many counties, most every one of them with a different data format.

(By the way, I’m encouraged to hear that the current chair and state committee are standing on our shoulders – just like I stood on the shoulders of those who preceded me – and are now reaching out to those elected Libertarians. I believe that has the potential to be enormously beneficial to our party.)

Bottom line: I don’t care if you are a Radical or a Reformer; I care about whether you can get along with others and if you can execute.

Please quit the sniping and the name calling. Let’s focus on where we agree so that we can continue to make progress. We Libertarians all have a lot more in common with each other than we have with those who are Democrats and Republicans.

I’m glad to hear that the PlatCom’s draft won’t “change your approach to Liberty”. The whole point of Platform reform is that the Platform shouldn’t be used as a cudgel to make Libertarians change their approach to Liberty. I shouldn’t use the Platform to make you a geolibertarian, and you shouldn’t use the Platform to make me a Rothbardian (or whatever else you might want to make me).

Jeff, the whole idea of the Pure Principles draft
(http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform) is to describe all and only the “common ground” you’re talking about. If our draft includes any details about “utopia”, or if it leaves out any significant piece of “common ground”, then I’d like to know about it ASAP, because there’s still time to fix it before Denver. The more eyes on it now, the fewer bugs to deal with in Denver.

Michael S., I will to a limited extent defend Tom’s characterization of reformers as internally-focused. Despite the lore about the Dallas Accord, the radicals had what was in effect their dream platform for 30 years, from 1974 to 2004. What did we get to show for it? Which kind of candidate—reformer or radical—was most likely to be motivated to run on such a Platform? That Platform kept me out of the LP all through the 1990s, and it took a once-in-a-lifetime total GOP control of Washington for me to realize that the Republicans would never put their small-government rhetoric into action.

You see, Tom, to me, it’s as if there are an array of parties that are all obviously wrong, and there is one party that is very close to right—except that it also advocates the bizarre policy that the letter ‘X’ be stricken from the English language. Given this situation, if I have to choose between trying to reform the anti-X party, or hitting the sidewalks to recruit for the anti-X party, I’ll choose reform a large fraction of the time. Because frankly, I’m sick of the sidewalk response that goes: “Aren’t you the party that opposes the letter X? What’s up with that?” I’m not saying our party has to go on record that the letter ‘X’ should never be stricken from the English language, or that anti-X isn’t an intellectually interesting position. I’m just saying that it seems to me that one of the best uses of my activism is to increase and broaden the appeal of this party, by getting it to admit that being pro-freedom doesn’t require one to be completely and formally anti-X. It just so happens that X here is not a letter, but The State.

Michael W., I too would like the LP to get back in the business of producing quality outreach materials, but I definitely don’t think it should be done through the Platform process. I have an archive of outreach materials and activist tools at http://marketliberal.org/tools/, but I would also like to see the LP facilitate development and refinement of such materials by our members. In particular, I would love to see LPedia grow into a competitor of dKosopedia. I would love to see radicals and reformers compete in the quality and quantity of content they contribute to LPedia. That’s a contest where everybody wins.

jre, I’ll defend Friedman from criticism as having a net negative impact on human liberty, but I’m not a Friedmanite the way so many LP radicals are self-proclaimed “plumbline” Rothbardians. I don’t know of any libertarian thinker whom I wouldn’t criticize as either wrong or silent on some significant aspect of political theory—including me as of not very long ago. I would also suspect uncritical dogmatism in any libertarian who can’t truthfully assert the previous sentence. The thinker in whom I find least to criticize is geolibertarian Prof. Fred Foldvary, but I still have my differences with him.

DN) very vague and avoids committing us to specific positions [on issues like] Iraq, the drug war, the police state, the economy [and] everything from the right to keep and bear arms to our opposition to reinstituting the draft to our opposition to wage and price controls etc. (DN

The problem with his seven claims is that six of them are just flat wrong, as I document at http://libertarianintelligence.com/2008/02/platform-committee-meets-friday.html. On the seventh, Iraq, the Pure Principles Platform says exactly what is said by the 2004 Platform that Nolan wants to restore: nothing. The word “Iraq” wasn’t even in the 2004 Platform.

There were no “parliamentary tricks” used in Vegas to pass our draft. No PlatCom member voted against recommending that the Denver delegates delete all 15 planks from the 2006 Platform. With a quorum varying between 13 and 15 members, only 6 of 30 recommendations attracted more than one nay for adoption, and only 3 of them more than two. We had two more members who couldn’t attend but who would have voted for our draft. If there was a “parliamentary trick” in Vegas, it was the use of unlimited debating that made us need all of 21 hours over two days to adopt a draft that had largely already been written by a subcommittee. We spent a disproportionate fraction of our time on a series of barely-seconded proposals that ended up being defeated N-2 or even N-1.

We were painfully aware that the rules governing our committee did not allow us to set time limits on debate or even call the question. The rules allow any member to indefinitely defer a vote by offering any kind of non-dilatory debate, and allow any two members to offer arbitrary number of non-duplicative amendments. I have no problem with a minority wanting to get the committee on record as having considered competing proposals, but there’s really nothing other than social sanction that can let a supermajority write its report if a minority is determined to be obstructionist. Alicia was scrupulous (nearly to a fault) in always asking if there was more debate whenever the debate paused. We didn’t like those rules, but we followed them, because they are the rules this Party has chosen for us.

The design of the Platform rules seems to intend that a minority should make its case through 4-person minority reports, rather than through dilatory trench warfare against the majority’s efforts to write its own report. I’m not saying that delay is what was intended, or that ignoring the rules in order to seat the two alternates would have exacerbated these delays, but (from the perspective of the majority’s Platform repair efforts) it surely wouldn’t have helped. If the majority has misjudged what sort of Platform repair the Denver delegates will prefer, then the proper time and place to determine that is when the majority’s recommendations go head-to-head against any minority report(s).

Thanks. I’m doing so well my next MRI has been postponed until June.

Knapp,

[/qIf you say that the pledge is what’s keeping you out of the LP, what you’re really saying is that you don’t want to be in the LP, but feel like you need an excuse, and can’t find a good one.[/q]

I dont want to be in the LP - it I did I would not have left but I do feel strongly that the country needs a political party that represents the best of the founding fathers ideals while acknowledging we no longer live in their time.

I’m quite proud to say that I am not any sort of a libertarian. The word to me was not worth ‘reforming’ – it simply has got too much baggage with it. The Kingdom wasn’t worth fighting for, and the emperors were all running around with no clothes on complementing each other on their sense of fashion.

meanwhile, we lost more liberty in the last 4 years than in the previous 20, IMO.

This wasn’t meant to be an example of poor sentence construction, but it sure turned out that way. The only excuse I have is that I was talking to my wife.

What I think I meant to say was that with a number of planks in previous platforms it would have helped to have someone with knowledge of the subject and some skill in crafting a sentence write the plank.

MHW