Category Archives: Independents

Hey There Republicans Fleeing Trump, Welcome to the Party

#NeverTrump

Welcome Republicans, and #NeverTrump

To disaffected Republicans coming to the Libertarian party… or to libertarianism and libertarians in general…

First…Welcome friends…

We’re really glad to have you here, and we’re looking forward to working with you, to get through this crazy time… Oh and #NeverTrump…

Heck, most of us were frankly wondering what took y’all so long to jump ship… the way things have been getting crazier and crazier over there the last… Oooh… let’s just say… the last while, or so…

Which brings us to point two…

Surprise!!!

LIBERTARIANS ARE NOT CONSERVATIVES OR REPUBLICANS!!!

Oh and they… WE… are also NOT liberals, leftists, “progressives”, or Democrats…

We are most certainly NOT “just conservatives who like sex and weed”, nor are we “just liberals who hate taxes, poor people, and political correctness”… though I have been called both in the same day.

Shocking I know, that there are more than two political positions, and bodies of thought, and philosophies; and how everything isn’t actually a (false) dichotomy, us or them… or a two way horse race etc… etc…

Yes… there are people that agree with you… actually are likely further to the notional “right” than you are, about economics, and individual rights and liberties, and even the constitution…

… and some of them smoke weed… or are gay… or atheists… or all of the above… or don’t care if anyone else is or does whatever they want so long as nobody’s getting hurt who isn’t paying extra…

Heck, some of the folks over here probably look and sound a lot like democrats to some of you… or even socialists…

… we all have our kooks after all…

… which reminds me… if you think right and left wing conspiracy nuts are bad… trust me, libertarian conspiracy nuts are worse… don’t worry, just ignore them, and back away slowly… we all do…

… Oh, and hey, some of the folks over here even totally agree with you in principle about the gays, and the marriage, and the weird genders, and the drugs, and sex, and all that…

..They just don’t believe that it’s their job to police other peoples personal choices, and it’s especially not their job to get the state to do it for them.

We’re not crazy, we’re not immoral or unethical… in fact, in my experience, we’re a lot more conscientious, aware, and understanding of our morals and our ethics than most, because we have to be…

… We just don’t believe ALL the same things that you believe…

Most particularly, we don’t believe it is moral or ethical, nor is it generally efficient or effective; to initiate coercive force against someone… including and especially, the coercive force of the state… to make them do what we want them to…

…Even if we KNOW that we’re right, and we KNOW that what we want is better for them, for us, and for society as a whole… We just don’t have the right to do so, unless they are violating the rights of others.

This basic principle… in some form or another… is the absolute core of libertarianism. It is our most closely held principle of interaction with others…

….and while we may… in fact we quite regularly and vigorously do…argue over exactly what it means, and exactly how to follow it…

…We’re not going to give it up, or forget about it, or weaken it, or make special exceptions; just because someone else… or EVERYONE else for that matter… thinks we should, or would be more comfortable, or would like us better, if we did.

So no… Your advice… or in some cases rude, arrogant, condescending, and aggressive demands…

…that libertarians be more conservative and align more with Republican ideas about drug policy, and personal liberty, and social issues, and military spending… just as an example or three…

… It’s not going to get you anywhere.

You’re the ones who couldn’t deal with your corrupt, your ignorant, and your angry, and created the douchealoompa…

We’re absolutely happy to have you… and to welcome you, and help you understand what we believe and why, and how we can work together to help try to avert disaster… and maybe even get some good done together while we’re at it…

…But we’re not going to change our firmly held principles, in order to pander to you or court you…

If we were ever going to do that, we would have done it a long time ago…

We haven’t… and we won’t. Even if it means losing… again… just like every other time…

But… Here’s the great thing about being a libertarian…

We don’t believe in forcing our ideas on anyone else…

…So, you’re entirely free to believe that drugs and sex are bad and wrong, and anything else you like…

You just cant use the state… or the party… to try to make other people behave according to your beliefs or preferences.

Yes… it can get frustrating… incredibly infuriatingly frustrating at times… Even heartbreaking… as we watch people do bad and stupid things to themselves and we can’t stop them…

…but it’s quite satisfying… it’s worth it… when nobody else can force YOU to conform to THEIR beliefs and preferences either…

I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

Sympathy for Paranoia

The moon landing was faked by the U.S. government for propaganda purposes to win the Cold War. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 was actually an inside job as a pretext to go to war. Space aliens landed in Roswell, NM but the government has been covering it up. The Sandy Hook massacre was faked to increase support for new gun control laws; the “victims” were actually actors who are all alive and well today. The Illuminati is the secret entity which actually governs the whole world…

The natural response to these statements is to say “these people are mad barking moonbats” and to keep ourselves as distant as possible from the people making them. Those of us in the liberty movement who want to be taken seriously are very quick to renounce anyone who is within six degrees of Alex Jones or anyone else who states any of the above. It’s difficult enough to be taken seriously about legalizing drugs, the non-aggression principle, free markets, and freedom of association; the last thing we need is to be lumped in with “those people.”

While it is very important to defend the “brand” of the liberty movement, it’s also important to recognize the reasons why people believe some rather nutty things.

[W]hen I say virtually everyone is capable of paranoid thinking, I really do mean virtually everyone, including you, me, and the founding fathers. As the sixties scare about the radical Right demonstrates, it is even possible to be paranoid about paranoids. – Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, (p. 24) (Read my book review here)

Once one learns about some of the activities governments been proven to have been involved in, some conspiracy theories no longer seem as outlandish. I used to refer to conspiracy theories and wacky beliefs as “black helicopter” stories and I’m fairly certain that others used the same terminology. Once I learned that black unmarked helicopters were used in the assault by the FBI on the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX,(Napolitano, p.110) I stopped calling such ideas “black helicopter.”

Not everything that sounds crazy is.
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What Does Last Night’s Big Win For The GOP Mean?

ballot-box

The GOP gave Democrats a major ass-whipping across the country. As for writing, the GOP took the majority in the U.S. Senate and gained 7 seats, with a likely gain in Alaska and Louisiana going to a December runoff where the GOP is favored. The GOP also won 14 seats in the House as of writing to expand their majority there. Finally, where the GOP made unexpected gains was in the governor’s races where instead of losing governorships as expected, they gained 3.

Here’s what I think this big night means to the GOP.

1) A Clear Repudiation Of Barack Obama

The American people gave their verdict on President Obama and “hope and change” and they were not pleased. All Republicans had to do was play it safe and make “Obama sucks” their whole message and it worked. It was not only enough to drag good candidates such as Cory Gardner who defeated Mark Uterus, I mean, Udall in Colorado after Mark Uterus ran probably one of the most offensive reelection campaigns in memory. However, the real test of a wave is if it’s good enough to drag mediocre candidates across the finish line and it was. The mediocre Thom Tillis was dragged over the finish line as he defeated Kay Hagan in North Carolina.

2) The Governor’s Races Were The Surprises

Raise your hand if you had Republicans winning the governorship of Maryland and by almost ten points? That’s what happened last night when Larry Hogan defeated Anthony Brown in a stunning upset. Also, while this isn’t as big of an upset, Bruce Rauner defeated Pat Quinn, who is one of the worst governors in the country, in Illinois. Republicans also won in Massachussetts. Paul LePage survived in Maine, while Rick Scott won the battle of the scumbags in Florida. Sam Brownback also survived his reelection challenge in Kansas. Scott Walker won again in Wisconsin. Also, Wendy Davis was crushed in her bid to become governor of Texas.

3) The Initiatives Were A Mixed Bag For Liberty

Let’s get the bad news out of the way. Washington State approved mandatory background checks for all gun purchases. Maui approved mandatory GMO labeling. Florida rejected medical marijuana. Nebraska, South Dakota, and Arkansas voted to increase their state’s minimum wage to above the Federal level. Arkansas also rejected legalizing alcohol sales throughout the entire state. New Jersey expanded pretrail detention for criminal suspects and North Carolina weakened the right to trial by jury by allowing summary judgement. North Dakota rejected an initiative that eliminated the requirement the majority ownership stake in a pharmacy be owned by a pharmacist, which protects cronyism.

There were however some good news for liberty on the initiative front. Oregon and Washington D.C. legalized marijuana and Alaska is likely to do the same once the votes are certified. Tennessee banned their state government from imposing a state income tax. North Dakota banned the state from imposing taxes on the sale of real estate. Oregon defeated the “Top 2” primary system, so party affiliation still means something in that state. Massachussetts repealed a law that indexed gas taxes to inflation. Colorado defeated mandatory GMO labeling. Georgia passed an income tax rate cap which states that income tax rates cannot be raised past the current top rate. Colorado also passed a requirement that school board meetings having to do with collective bargaining must be open to the public. Finally, Alabama passed protections on the right to keep and bear arms.

4) Third Parties Are Still Not Here Yet

Last night was more disappointment for third party candidates. In most races, they failed to top 5%, if that. Unless the system changes, that won’t likely change. The two major parties act as coalitions and fufill the role that coalition governments play in other countries.

5) Now Is A Major Opportunity For The GOP

You can argue the GOP played it too safe this year. A more bold candidate than Ed Gillespie would’ve likely won in Virginia. Perhaps the GOP should’ve spent additional resources in New England.

Here’s what the GOP needs to do, they need start giving the American people reasons to vote for them in 2016. Start passing and forcing Obama to veto no-brainer bills on tax reform, spending cuts, healthcare reform, crony capitalism repeal, ending Common Core, etc. Also, the GOP must restrain the Ted Cruz types from picking unnecessary fights for publicity. They cannot let the Tea Party dominate messaging. Finally, Republicans must step up outreach towards minorities and young people, starting now.

All in all, I don’t expect much change to result from last night. After all, Barack Obama is still President. Republicans, if they’re smart, can start laying the groundwork for victory in 2016 though.

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.

Screw the Parties! Vote Your Heart, Not With FUD

Indepedent-woters-on-the-rise

So far today, we have posts from Matt Souders and Sarah Baker as to why voting a certain party affiliation is a better idea for libertarians. They’re well reasoned, well backed up, and ultimately, I believe, short sighted.

I have a different idea: forget the letters next to the names. Forget “tactical” voting. If libertarians, as a movement, want to make real change, they need to vote independently, without any care for party affiliation. In some cases, they should even write in a vote for someone off the main ballots.

The Trojan Horse

As a libertarian, I’m used to being toyed with. Republicans want my vote to fix the economy. Democrats want my vote to address social issues (translation: “lol smoke weed erryday y’all”) and to keep us from going to war. And every time we’ve gone one way or the other, we’ve gotten burned.

The Tea Party was started largely as a protest against goverment overspending, and candidates were elected to office – including in a massive wave in 2010 – to address that. Unfortunately, once they got into office, spending didn’t go down appreciably in many cases. Instead, they spent all their time implementing what I derisively call “Jesus Laws”: socially conservative laws put in to please white, middle-aged and older Christian voters. If you hate abortion, you love the Tea Party, but otherwise, I’d argue they’ve done more harm than good.

Of course, the Tea Party burns today as a fight against the mainstream Republicans who have run the party for so long and who have contributed to so many of our problems, including our blown up debt. Men like John McCain and Peter King are anathema to these people for their desire to wage war for any reason and being “squishy” on spending. The ironic thing, from the perspective of the Tea Party, is that they keep invoking the name of Reagan, who was the catalyst for the big-spending Republican Party.

Democrats, of course, have always been the big spenders, but at least they will care about social liberties and not going to war, right? Not so fast. The same Barack Obama who was so anti-Iraq War in 2003, and who ran on being against it in 2008 – arguably winning on that front – has since engaged us in multiple illegal wars in Syria and Libya, and is engaging in illegal actions in Iraq once again as a fight against the Islamic State. Civil liberties? Hah, ask the conservative groups targeted by the IRS, and the reporters and whistleblowers being targeted by the government in the war on leaks. All of this from a man who campaigned against the very things he now stands for. For Pesci’s sake, it took Joe Biden’s diharrea of the mouth to get the President to come around on gay marriage.

The underlying point is that the people campaigning to reform the system often get co-opted by it, and being a part of a major party hurts that. The party simply doesn’t help outliers, and trying to take the party from within is going to prove to be a very hard road – one that could take a generation – for liberty-minded people on either side of the divide. Candidates become different people once they’ve been voted into office; their responsibility to their constituents largely ends at that point, as shown by the extraordinary retention rate in Congress. Once in office, the peoples’ use is finished, and they are summarily discarded.

The Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt of the Two Party System

We’ve heard it before: “A vote for X is a vote for Y”. This often comes about when libertarians – either in primaries, or in general elections where they’re petitioning candidates or running on a big-L Libertarian ticket – represent a threat to the status quo. Most recently was the case of Robert Sarvis, who many argue cost Ken Cuccinelli the governor’s mansion in Virginia by drawing 6.5% of the vote, well above Terry McAuliffe’s margin of victory.

This is a good thing, which is not something I say because I personally find Cuccinelli repulsive; that would be the case if Sarvis or anyone else took things to the other extreme and cost a Democrat an election. Anything that upsets the two-party apple cart is a positive development. The system needs a few shocks. If that means some weak candidates of either party have to get voted out, so be it.

One of the most common refrains we hear is that Republican or Democrat, it doesn’t matter because it’s just two heads of the same dragon. Outside influences – of all shapes and sizes – are like a knight fighting that dragon. The odds are against him, and it’s very likely he’ll be burnt to a crisp by their fire, but even dragons get tired from constantly fighting off outside threats. Also, the more third parties get involved, the more powerful their influence with the media. The best part of Robert Sarvis drawing “only” 6.5% of the vote in Virginia is that it caused a lot of writers to drop a lot of ink/pixels noting how upsetting a force his candidacy was. Even Gary Johnson’s largely Quixotic bid for the Presidency, which drew 1% of the vote, was good for bringing positive attention to libertarian causes. It’s a slow trudge, but the more attention it gets, the better.

Besides, the other half is just as bad, right? So what if a Terry McAuliffe wins an election? Or even Barack Obama or George W. Bush? Liberals who hated Bush likely wouldn’t have loved Gore, and conservatives who deplore Obama wouldn’t be happy with McCain or Romney, either. If they’re saying they’re simply marginally more happy, they’ve already lost. Eating crumbs off the table still leaves a person malnourished.

The Libertarian Party: Our Unreliable Ally

After all this, it’s obvious that we should all rally around the Libertarian Party as our cause celebre, as Sarah argues in her post, right? Not so fast. A closer look shows they’re unreliable at best, and outright using the party at worst. For the most part, the Libertarian Party has been a sort of rehabilitation centre for C-list Republicans, the equivalent of a baseball player being demoted to the minor leagues to work on his swing before being promoted back to the big time.

I need to preface this with an admission: I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I’m not even ashamed of it. While I didn’t buy the “Hope and Change” nonsesne, I did at least concede at the time that he wasn’t Bush, and wasn’t a Republican. However, another major thing in his favour was that the Libertarians were putting forth an embarrassing ticket of Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root.

Bob Barr was elected to the House of Representatives as a Republican during the Newt Gingrich-led Republican Revolution. While in office, Barr was such a hard supporter of the War on Drugs that he was voted out of Congress… with support from the Libertarian Party he would eventually represent. He also supported the Defense of Marriage Act before he was against it, voted for the Patriot Act, and voted for the Iraq War. The LP went from destroying Barr’s career to building it back up again, only to watch him go back to being a Republican in 2011.

As for Root, I’ll let my colleague Doug Mataconis take this one. Root, by the way, rejoined the Republican Party in 2012.

The Libertarian Party is used to grifters. Even Ron Paul used the ticket in 1988 to run for President, before almost immediately switching back to the Republican Party after the 1988 election. When it’s not doing rehab, the Libertarian Party has a succinct problem with crackpots and kooks; Michael Badnarik, the 2004 candidate for President, is a 9/11 truther.

Individual Liberty at the Ballot Box

None of this is intended to persuade anyone to vote one way or the other. In fact, the whole point of this is to point out an obvious truth: our current system isn’t working, and those who allow themselves to be co-opted by larger forces almost always end up disappointed.

What I will call for, however, is a call to conscience. Individual votes are ultimately irrelevant so long as one is voting to their personal convictions, and a request for those who tactically vote – like those who would vote for Mitt Romney despite prefering Gary Johnson – to reconsider. If you think a candidate is a preferable candidate, vote for that candidate. If that candidate lost a primary, write him in. If you think Elmer Fudd is a better option, guess what? Write in Elmer Fudd! Why not? We know he supports the Second Amendment, at least.

The key is never to fall in line with big-party dogma, it’s to ensure that people are voting with their hearts, saying what they want, and in the process sending a very strong message that the status quo is not acceptable. If we can’t even show individual liberty in the ballot box, how can we hope to achieve it in the legislature?

Christopher Bowen covered the video games industry for eight years before moving onto politics and general interest. He is the Editor in Chief of Gaming Bus, and has worked for Diehard GameFan, Daily Games News, TalkingAboutGames.com and has freelanced elsewhere. He is a “liberaltarian” – a liberal libertarian. A network engineer by trade, he lives in Derby CT.

Liberty Rock: “Spike in My Veins” by Korn

This is a great, important, video. I hope you will enjoy this. I have some additional thoughts about this video and this subject posted here.

We are the ones taking all the pain
Falling on our faces
They don’t care anyway
Anyway, now
You’re the one that makes me feel like I’m alive
You’re the one that pushes me all the time
All the time, now

We are hard and grey
Always fate, to do what they say
Calling me deranged
Feeling power, I must take its place some way

Never gonna run away
Seeking out the path
But the pain always gets in the way
Slowly watch me die
I’m insane, so dangerous
Don’t you dare get in my way
Throwing in the towel
Got me strained, so betrayed
Get the fuck out of my way
Looking at my thoughts, I take my time
Pounding all these spikes in my veins

We are the ones reaching out in vain
Trying to solve our problems
They won’t go away, go away now
You’re the one that makes me feel like I’m alive
You’re the one that pushes me all the time
All the time, now

We are hard and grey
Always fate to do what they say
Calling me deranged
Feeling power, I must take its place some way

Never gonna run away
Seeking out my path
But the pain always gets in the way
Slowly watch me die
I’m insane, so dangerous
Don’t you dare get in my way
Throwing in the towel
Got me strained, so betrayed
Get the fuck out of my way
Looking at my thoughts, I take my time
Pounding all these spikes in my veins

Pounding all these spikes in my veins
Pounding all these spikes in my veins
Pounding all these spikes in my veins

Never gonna run away
Seeking out my path
But the pain always gets in the way
Slowly watch me die
I’m insane, so dangerous
Don’t you dare get in my way
Throwing in the towel
Got me strained, so betrayed
Get the fuck out of my way
Looking at my thoughts, I take my time
Pounding all these spikes in my veins

Pounding all these spikes in my veins
Pounding all these spikes in my veins
Pounding all these spikes in my veins
Pounding all these spikes in my veins
Pounding all these spikes in my veins
Looking at my thoughts, I take my time
Pounding all these spikes in my veins

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