We continue with a coverage of turn-of-the-millennium Libertarian Politics, as taken from my book Funding Liberty (Third Millennium Press 3mpub.com, 2003).  Do those events matter?  We seem to be recycling the same not-necessarily-bad ideas with some of the same good Libertarians running things.

Did Project Archimedes succeed?

In one word: No.

The National Party never reached 50,000 members, let alone some larger number. With respect to Browne’s image of member-donors, most members that the Party did recruit never donated to the Browne campaign. The National Committee never adopted a formal numerical objective for the Project, so it’s hard to say exactly how badly the Project failed. David Bergland promised 100,000 members by July 2000. One can find Libertarian sources that mention recruiting 600,000, 200,000, 100,000, or at least 50,000 members, either by the start of 2000 or by the National convention in July 2000. No matter which objective you choose, Project Archimedes never came close.

In 1999 there was an abortive effort in some circles to count donors as well as members in the nominal total number of new recruits. In 2000, one largely stopped hearing suggestions that donors should be counted. It is perhaps not coincidental that while the number of members remained roughly constant in 2000, the count of members plus donors fell from 1999 to 2000.

Project Archimedes also had a financial objective. It was supposed to be self-financing. Dues and donations of the new members were to pay for fresh mailings in perpetuity. A revolving fund, an “endowment”, would provide the capital locked up at any time by freshly-mailed recruiting letters that had not yet generated memberships.

There is controversy about the financial outcome of Project Archimedes. Some supporters want to claim that the Project was financially successful. It was not. I quote from the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts e-mail list. Massachusetts libertarian activist (and co-founder of the gay/lesbian gun rights action group Pink Pistols) Doug Krick asked: “Does anyone know if the project cost the LP money in the long haul, or did it pay for itself?”

The answer was provided on 14 June 2000 by Mark Tuniewicz, Libertarian Party National Treasurer, writing (note signature block) in his official capacity as the Party’s Treasurer. Tuniewicz’s answer to Krick appeared on the Massachusetts Libertarian email list general@lpma.org, a list since silenced by the LPMA for publishing URLs leading to newspaper articles that were critical of LPMA candidates. Tuniewicz wrote:

“The fast answer is ‘it depends’. Certainly, the project has fallen below most people’s expectations.

Initially, Archimedes was supposed to more than pay for itself —-meaning that every mailing would more than recoup its cost based on the contributions and memberships from that mailing.

This was expanded to include an estimate of what we normally receive as an average contribution per member for the year following receipt of a new membership, the rationale being that those are additional revenues that we never would have had, so should be included as part of the mailing’s return calculation.

More recently, I think some are looking at TWO years worth of returns.

I think that there’s a point at which stretching out those incremental dollars becomes meaningless, though one could approach it on a discounted cash flow basis.

Right now, using the original definition, Archimedes mailings do not pay for themselves. [Emphasis added. GP] But has the project been useful? I think so. We would have been at a substantial membership decrease nationally if we didn’t do direct mail.

The moral of the story is: Archimedes in and of itself is not the answer. Direct mail is just one part of the equation for our success, and we do ourselves a favor by not overly focussing on just one approach.

Best

Mark Tuniewicz

National Treasurer
Libertarian Party”

As of the start of 2000, Project Archimedes was a double failure.

Failure one: National Party membership never reached even 50,000, let alone 100,000 or 200,000. Membership climbed from 27,000 in 1998 to 33,000 members in mid-1999. Membership growth then stopped.

Failure two: Project Archimedes was not self-financing. As witness the above letter from the National Treasurer, the new members did not pay for the cost of recruiting them, even counting the year’s income from those members. Perhaps with two years’ income a membership would pay for itself. But two years’ income from a member (including donations) is more than $100—the cost per member honestly estimated by Gene Cisewski in the 1998 debate.

The two failures were not independent. Project Archimedes did not pay for itself on a short time scale. To say it a different way, Project Archimedes locked up capital for a much longer time than originally anticipated. Perhaps that money would eventually be returned as donations and dues, but ‘eventually’ was a long way away. Meanwhile, that capital was gone, unavailable for funding more Archimedes mailings or any other more constructive Party activity. By locking up capital, Project Archimedes inflicted a million-dollar opportunity cost on the Party. The million dollars spent on Archimedes was not available to be spent on something better. Running Project Archimedes at full tilt required more money than the party had.