Sent the "Destination Liberty" minority report

Rob, I just sent the PDF you gave me today, along with the following cover letter language I saw from you tonight, to the list of delegates to whom the Chair recently sent the Committee's current recommendations (adopted in February).  495 of the 870 delegates had email addresses, and I have received bounces so far for 35 of them.  I sent it as eight separate emails from 11:58PM to 12:23AM, and only once managed to bump into Comcast's per-message recipient limit.  However, it didn't seem to trigger any restraints on my ability to send, and I included the six over-limit addresses in the next batch. I received four out-of-the-office autoreplies at various times, so it appears that the messages actually went out.

 

If any other group of four or more on the Committee has any minority report(s) that you want emailed out, feel free to send the Secretary your cover letter directly, instead of letting him notice it on Third Party Watch.  :-)

 

Brian

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Holtz [mailto:brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 11:58 PM
Subject: Destination Liberty: Platform minority reports

Dear Denver delegate(s),

 

Yesterday the Platform Committee and I were informed for the first time that a four-person subcommittee working on an alternative platform approach has a text that they declare is distributable as a set of minority reports to the Committee's current recommendations.  At mid-day today I received the attached formalization of the subcommittee's work, and tonight I received a cover letter from the subcommittee Chair introducing their draft.  The portions of that letter describing their minority planks is below.

 

Brian Holtz

Secretary, LPUS Platform Committee

 

---

An Open Letter to All Libertarian Convention Delegates:

You recently received a mailing from the Chair of the 2008 Libertarian Platform Committee, Alicia Mattson, describing a draft platform supported by a majority of the Platform Committee.

There is also an official minority report of the Committee, signed by four of the Platform Committee members (Daniel Grow, Henry Haller, Vicki Kirkland, and Rob Power), as required by the Party’s Bylaws to make it official.

Our version of the platform, which keeps the 2004/2006 format of the planks, but significantly reduces the length and number of planks without removing any of the ideas and wisdom of three decades of Libertarian conventions, is available at:

http://www.PlatformUpdate.com

Our minority report is also known as the “Destination Liberty” platform, and we created it as a best effort to accomplish what the www.Restore04.com petition asked us to do. Despite not having the support of the majority of the Platform Committee, we believe our version of the platform has broad-based support in the Party, and we think it’s very important that you, the Delegates, get to see it, read it, and analyze it before arriving in Denver for the Convention. As an official minority report, it will be given to you as one of your choices during the platform sessions of the convention, so it is vital that you have time to read it in advance.

Please consider our Destination Liberty version of the platform as a more reasonable middle ground between the various factions in the Libertarian Party. We appreciate your support.

Sincerely,

2008 Libertarian Platform Committee Members:
Daniel Grow
Henry Haller
Vicki Kirkland
Rob Power

Video: Restore84

When I thought of this idea, I couldn't not do it. :-) Enjoy.

For Further Reading

• Bill Evers appointed Asst Secretary of Education
• Garris: The Triumphant Return from Iraq of The Once-Great Libertarian
• Rothbard on the New York Presidential nominating convention

Video: Apr 11 LPCA rally on Sacramento capitol steps

The LPCA held a candidates' rally on the steps of the capitol in Sacramento on April 11.  Four of us LPCA candidates spoke, as well as the winning candidate of our LPCA convention's presidential straw poll -- Wayne Allyn Root.  Here is a 6-minute highlight video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2008853124966219090&hl=en 

 

Here is the entire 15-minute video of Root's speech:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4606870192930638051&hl=en 

 

We had an audience of about 40 in attendance on a hot Friday afternoon, with even more people coming and going for tours of the capitol.  We were very pleased that all the hard work of the organizers, especially Joy Waymire, paid off handsomely.

Kubby Distances Himself From Ruwart's Anarchism

http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/05/09/believing-in-liberty-another-view/

 

I applaud Steve Kubby for continuing to engage in the important debate over the Libertarian Party's principles.  I appreciate Tom Knapp's erudite lesson on the strict etymological sense of "radical", but I agree with David Nolan that the five top-tier candidates can be ranked according to the conventional size-of-government sense of "radicalism", viz: Ruwart Kubby Phillies Root Barr.  (Gravel's positions on FairTax and voucherized universal federal funding for healthcare and education make it hard to say he's as radical as even Root is.)

 

I also agree that Kubby contrasting Ruwart's anarchism against his own Constitution-respecting minarchism is the smartest move available to Steve at this point.  His radical base is unlikely to question him too closely on e.g. how the state can maintain a monopoly on justice without initiating force, or how he can claim to be "plumbline" while supporting the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to subpoena witnesses.  If Kubby were to clearly underscore the latter example of intellectual independence from ZAPsolutist "plumbline" orthodoxy -- an independence that this essay does not actually proclaim -- then he would have nearly as solid a claim as Phillies to being a unity candidate.

 

Kubby's move is smart not only with respect to the current field of candidates, but also in how it avoids a break from a little-known historical pattern. All the evidence I have suggests that, ever since the Platform was radicalized in 1974, Ruwart would be the first LP presidential candidate to have a written record that is more radical than the Platform she ran on.  (Anyone who thinks the Children's Rights plank is coming back in Denver is nuts.)

In fact, it's doubtful that any post-Dallas candidate besides Bergland has had a written record equally as radical as the Platform he ran on.  Of the the nine LP presidential tickets, at least seven were headed by men who conceded (then or later) that coercive taxation will be necessary indefinitely -- rejecting the pre-Portland Platform's call for abolition of all taxation and immediate non-enforcement of tax laws.  Andre Marrou may merely have opposed "excessive taxation", which would make it 8 out of 9.  And while David Bergland was a Rothbardian radical when nominated in 1984, by 2000 he was managing the campaign of Harry Browne, who wrote at the time that "until we find a way to finance government without taxes or a way to assure our safety without any government, some form of taxation will be necessary".  So it might actually be 9 out of 9.

It would have been easy for Ruwart to immunize herself from concerns about her being more radical than the Platform she'll be given to run with.  She could have said she was running to be ONLY the chief spokesperson and salesman for consensus libertarianism, and explicitly disavowed any claim to represent the best and most authentic form of libertarianism.  But she could not resist  making something very like this claim, probably because of the presence in the race of some candidates who even a big-tenter like me would call ersatz libertarians or libertarians-in-training.  So she said in some interviews:

MR) The person who should lead our party should be someone who of course knows the philosophy. Now, I've listened to some of the other candidates and it's clear to me that they haven't quite gotten the whole picture yet.  That's OK, they will one day. But they don't want to be running as President when they really can't see the full picture [...]  I would like to talk a little bit about the danger to our party, because you know there's going to be a temptation here, I'm afraid, and the temptation is that if someone comes with a lot of past history, if they're a well-known name, the tendency is going to be perhaps consider that it would be better to embrace someone like that who really may not be yet fully attuned to the Libertarian philosophy  [...]  if we have someone who really doesn't have the full picture yet, who is in a leadership position in the Party, I think that could take us down the wrong road.  And that's something that I think all the delegates need to consider when they look at the candidates.  Because we're not just talking about who is the best spokesperson for liberty (MR

Then she went on offense yesterday and basically said that Libertarians don't "believe in liberty" if they don't agree with her that the state should have the same role in policing aggression against minors as it does in policing the adult possession of firearms and psychotropic substances -- i.e. none.  That's a pretty audacious signal to send to the delegates she's asking to nominate her.

She is thus apparently making her nomination campaign a referendum on the purity of her zero-government libertarianism, and that makes it easy -- and very big-tent -- to prefer Kubby's positioning over her divisive more-libertarian-than-thou candidacy.

P.S. I can't quite discern what in Root's essay made Steve think Root was "publicly attacking another candidate as an 'anarchist'".  While I disagree with anarchism even more strongly that Steve does, I can't agree at all that to merely call a self-described anarchist an "anarchist" constitutes an "attack".  (And if merely disagreeing with anarchism is such an "attack", then Kubby just committed the same infraction.)  The only unfair criticism of anarchism I see in Root's piece is the assertion that anarchists aren't libertarians.  Saying that a revered Libertarian like Ruwart isn't a libertarian is akin to Ruwart pronouncing that she is the one candidate who best "sees the full picture".  However, while it's one thing to say that a particular competing candidate is a philosophical outlier, it's quite another to tacitly proclaim one's own libertarianism as the plumbline against which all other candidates (and delegates?) should be measured.

Ruwart: More Libertarian Than Thou

Starchild wrote:

SC) those things haven't been major issues in the past (SC

All the evidence I have suggests that, ever since the Platform was radicalized in 1974, Ruwart would be the first LP presidential candidate to have a written record that is more radical than that of the Platform she ran on.  (If you think the Children's Rights plank is coming back in Denver, you're nuts.)

In fact, it's doubtful that any post-Dallas candidate besides Bergland has had a written record equally as radical as the Platform he ran on.  Of the the nine LP presidential tickets, at least seven were headed by men who conceded (then or later) that coercive taxation will be necessary indefinitely -- rejecting the pre-Portland Platform's call for abolition of all taxation and immediate non-enforcement of tax laws.  Andre Marrou may merely have opposed "excessive taxation", which would make it 8 out of 9.  And while David Bergland was a Rothbardian radical when nominated in 1984, by 2000 he was managing the campaign of Harry Browne, who wrote at the time that "until we find a way to finance government without taxes or a way to assure our safety without any government, some form of taxation will be necessary".  So it might actually be 9 out of 9.

SC) It seems to me that some people are suddenly trying to make hay out of a minor passage in Mary's book as a way to not only sabotage her campaign, but to try to make it politically incorrect to be an anarchist in the LP.   (SC

Yes, some are, and that's wrong.  However, my goal is different.  I want to make it politically incorrect to be an avowedly anarchist LP presidential candidate who says

MR) The person who should lead our party should be someone who of course knows the philosophy. Now, I've listened to some of the other candidates and it's clear to me that they haven't quite gotten the whole picture yet.  That's OK, they will one day. But they don't want to be running as President when they really can't see the full picture [...]

I would like to talk a little bit about the danger to our party, because you know there's going to be a temptation here, I'm afraid, and the temptation is that if someone comes with a lot of past history, if they're a well-known name, the tendency is going to be perhaps consider that it would be better to embrace someone like that who really may not be yet fully attuned to the Libertarian philosophy instead of a candidate that really can explain to the American people what we truly are all about. And the reason this is important is not just for our presidential candidate, but after the election our presidential candidate is the de facto leader of the party. And so if we have someone who really doesn't have the full picture yet, who is in a leadership position in the Party, I think that could take us down the wrong road.  And that's something that I think all the delegates need to consider when they look at the candidates.  Because we're not just talking about who is the best spokesperson for liberty and who can attract the most media attention, we're also talking about who is going to take the Party in the direction we want to go. (MR

I'll say it again: if Ruwart were running to be ONLY the chief spokesperson and salesman for consensus libertarianism, and would explicitly disavow her apparent claim to represent the best and most authentic form of libertarianism, then she would be my #3 choice behind some ordering of Phillies and Root.  Her skill at presenting watered-down feel-good gauzy libertarianism are SO good that I'm willing to not make her alleged purity be an issue if she is.

But instead of doing this, she went on offense yesterday and basically said that delegates don't "believe in liberty" if they don't agree with her that the state should have the same role in policing aggression against minors as it does in policing the adult possession of firearms and psychotropic substances -- i.e. none.

She is thus apparently making her nomination campaign a referendum on the purity of her libertarianism, and that makes it easy -- and very big-tent -- to oppose her divisive more-libertarian-than-thou candidacy.

Ruwart On The Ideological Danger To The LP

May 31, 2008, 15m30s into Mary Ruwart's appearance on the Steve Kubby show:

 

Mary Ruwart: I would like to talk a little bit about the danger to our party, Steve, because you know there's going to be a temptation here, I'm afraid, and the temptation is that if someone comes with a lot of past history, if they're a well-known name, the tendency is going to be perhaps consider that it would be better to embrace someone like that who really may not be yet fully attuned to the Libertarian philosophy instead of a candidate that really can explain to the American people what we truly are all about. And the reason this is important is not just for our presidential candidate, but after the election our presidential candidate is the de facto leader of the party. And so if we have someone who really doesn't have the full picture yet, who is in a leadership position in the Party, I think that could take us down the wrong road.  And that's something that I think all the delegates need to consider when they look at the candidates.  Because we're not just talking about who is the best spokesperson for liberty and who can attract the most media attention, we're also talking about who is going to take the Party in the direction we want to go.

 

Steve Kubby: Well that's very well said. It's a good point.  In addition to that, it's very important for people to understand that Libertarians do not triangulate their positions off of polls or off of what the other parties are doing or saying. We have very clear principles, and once you master those basic principles it's fairly easy to determine what the Libertarian position is going to be on any given issue. But it takes a while to get those principles down and to understand "oh, well that also implies such-and-such".  A lot of times the connections are tenuous.

The Anti-Ruwart Conspiracy

Bill Woolsey gets it right, as usual.  Here's a look at the bigger picture:

 

Less Antman does an excellent job of trying to make this contretemps be about bright-line calendar-accident injustice, rather than the fundamental issue of children's rights.  It took Ruwart eight days to back off from her book's position that the rules should be age-blind, but once she endorsed a sliding rebuttable-presumption standard, there was no longer an interesting controversy here about "age of consent".  (She's still vulnerable for her mistaken claim that "desire" can be the only reason for a child to competently want to engage in sexual activity, but that's a technicality that most of her critics, and all of her supporters, will overlook.)  Even the question of whether the rules about consent should be established by legislation vs. markets doesn't make for a truly novel controversy among libertarians -- although this is surely the first time that a serious LP presidential contender had a written record on this extremely sensitive subtopic. 

 

No, the most intellectually interesting remainder of this controversy is the question of how children's rights are balanced against the rights of parents as guardians.  Ruwart's book clearly suggests that she sees parents having no rights whatsoever to constrain their children's choices, except by denying them e.g. transportation to the child's pornography photo shoots.  This is a topic that Ruwart and her supporters aren't touching with a ten-foot pole.  And with good reason, because it leads directly to an unanswered question I asked of Ruwart ten days ago: "Do you agree with Rothbard that it should not be a crime for parents to starve their children, or do you hold that the legal system should require a positive obligation of parents not to starve their children?"

 

In the context of abortion, Ruwart opines that the "predominant" Libertarian view is that "parents do not have a *duty* to support their offspring".  However, it's nowhere *near* "predominant" that Libertarians agree with Rothbard (and his new acolyte Alex Peak) that parents may starve their offspring (even if the parents post public notice that anyone may now "homestead" the guardianship rights to the kids -- I'm not making this stuff up).  She says her own personal belief is:

 

MR) Once the embryo is old enough to live outside the womb, the woman is still under no moral obligation to carry the child to term. She can invite people to her house, change her mind, and ask them to leave. She can invite an embryo to grow inside of her body, change her mind, and ask it to leave (MR

 

If there's an anti-Ruwart conspiracy, it's dropping the ball by not asking Ruwart whether parents have obligations to infants that they don't have to viable fetuses.  (Somebody needs to tell Dr. Ruwart that humans stop being called embryos after the 8th week of gestation, and that fetuses aren't viable until about 23 weeks.)  But of course there isn't an anti-Ruwart conspiracy, or else she'd also be grilled for her checkbook-justice theory of restitution ( http://libertarianintelligence.com/2008/05/checkbook-justice-in-ruwarchistan.html ) and for her published opposition to the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to subpoena witnesses.  (The Bill of Rights: void where prohibited by Ruwarchy.)

 

My only interest in the dark corners of Ruwart's anarchist worldview is that she is a Restore04 supporter explicitly running to be the ideological leader of the LP, and who has been uniquely touted by her supporters as a quarter-century paragon of "plumbline" ideological virtue.  But now we have so-called radicals like Less Antman and Tom Knapp tripping over themselves to angrily say that Ruwart is choosing not to "hold high the banner" of a growing list of her own "plumbline" principles.  Maybe Ruwart's campaign slogan should be "holding low the banner of plumbline libertarian principle".  :-)

 

These are valid reasons to either prefer or not prefer Ruwart as the LP presidential nominee, depending on your ideology.  She herself says that the nominee will be the de facto intellectual leader of the LP for the next four years, and that her record of libertarian principle is why she is best qualified among all the candidates.  Tom Knapp can wish all he wants that she never said it, by I've heard her say it in multiple interviews.

 

P.S.  Alex, it's still simply false that Murray Rothbard was a founder of the LP.  I've already pointed you to the old issues of Rothbard's Libertarian Forum where he criticizes the newly-formed LP.  Wikipedia is great, but it's not inerrant.

Checkbook Justice In Ruwarchistan

Holy cow,  Mary Ruwart drinks the whole pitcher of kool-aid on retributive justice.  Now I'm really afraid of Ruwarchy.  I live two driveways down from Intel ex-CEO Andy Grove, who has a net worth in the hundreds of millions.  His checkbook has a lot more Get Out Of Jail cards in it than mine does.   On the other hand, it's nice to know that my earning power and modest wealth mean that I would serve much shorter prison terms than most people for comparable crimes.   :-) 

 

I agree the justice system should be far more restitution-oriented, and should perhaps be purely restitution-oriented for property crimes.  However, I think there should be a fundamental punishment component in the response to crimes of violence, and I find abhorrent any notion that incarceration time for a crime of violence should ever depend on the wealth of the aggressor or the earning power of the victim.  Indeed, under Ruwart's logic, the only proper role for a prison is to help insure that the aggressor doesn't try to avoid paying restitution, and prisons could be dispensed with altogether for any criminal who could arrange insurance or bonding against him defaulting on his restitution obligation.

 

Ruwart's own words:

• Work prisons would be owned and operated by private firms with suitable expertise. Inmates could choose the facility that offered them the working conditions most conducive to the repayment of their debt. The ability of the prisoner to choose between competing institutions would provide incentive for the prisons to provide the most pleasant and productive conditions possible.
• Retaliatory force can become aggression if it goes beyond what is needed to accomplish these goals. Punishing aggressors makes us aggressors too.
• Justice does not consist of punishing the aggressor, but of making the victim whole.
• In a libertarian society, a murderer with a large restitutional judgment would probably spend the rest of their life working it off, probably in prison.
• Libertarian verdicts would direct those responsible for causing harm to someone to make things right again -- no more, no less.
• Justice would be based on compensation of the victim, rather than state-decreed punishment.
• Of course, aggressors can harm others in ways that cannot be totally undone. Monetary compensation to a person who has been raped or maimed, or to families whose loved ones have been killed, does not make things right again. In some cases, the victims, their family, or their insurance company might accept a monetary settlement as the best compensation available. The victims, their family, or their insurance company might insist that a repeat offender be imprisoned permanently so he or she could not strike again.
• "A thief must certainly make restitution, but if he has nothing, he must be sold to pay for his theft." Exodus 22:3
• Some people in our society may still think that aggression serves them. They might manifest this belief by stealing, defrauding, raping, or killing their neighbors. The most compassionate act we can perform is to allow aggressors to reap as they sow, to experience the consequences of their actions, to right their wrongs. In this way, these individuals undo the harm they have done to themselves as well as to others. We have no need to punish such individuals, only to heal them and those they have harmed.
• Libertarians believe in compensation of the victim, not punishment. However, a murderer might be put to death if that was the compensation that the family wanted most. Because of the finality of this compensation, guilt would most likely need to be unequivocal.
• My personal belief is that a libertarian society might not outlaw capital "compensation," but execution would be rare.

Naming A Radical Libertarian Party

http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/04/30/lp-photoshop-of-the-day-2/

 

Starchild, why would a radical state-force-abolitionist party want to use the name "Libertarian"?  That name has been thoroughly "watered down" by the ACLU, by constitutionalists like Ron Paul, and by statists from Cato, Reason, U of Chicago, etc -- as well as by an uninterrupted stream of non-abolitionist LP presidential candidates (or was Bergland an anarchist?).

 

If your new party wouldn't have the intellectual courage to call itself the obvious name (Anarchist Party), then you could use any of:

 

 Zero Aggression Party

 Non-Aggression Party

 Voluntary Party

 Non-Archist Party

 No First Force Party

 Non-Coercion Party

 Private Law Party

 Secession Party

 Anti-Politics Party

 Zero Government Party

 Anti-Statism Party

 

I even have a membership pledge/quiz already prepared for your new party:

http://libertarianmajority.net/no-1st-force-pledge

 

However, fair warning: I've yet to find anyone radical enough to score a perfect 30 on it.  But if you're running for LNC in Denver and you endorse the whole pledge, then your campaign will get $100 from me.  If you can't score a 30 on it, then fair warning again: those who do score a perfect 30 might someday bolt your party and form a *truly* radical freedom party, rejecting your "watered down"/"lite" radicalism.