Category Archives: Libertarian

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It appears that the Republican National Committees (RNC) censure of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), along with its declaration that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was legitimate political discourse, has created a problem for Republican lawmakers as they try to position the party for the midterms and the 2024 election. Coming as the statement did, just after former President Trump said that Pence had the power to overturn the election and, that if reelected, Trump would pardon those who attacked the Capitol, it has put the Republican Party openly on the side of overturning our democracy.

Trump loyalists have been insisting that the rioters were political prisoners, and clearly the RNC was speaking for them. This wing of the party got a boost this evening when, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the libertarian whose wealthForbesestimates to be about $2.6 billion, announced that he is stepping down from the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to focus on electing Trump-aligned candidates in 2022. Thiel famously wrote in 2009 that he no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible, and deplored the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women after 1920.

It also got a boost today when the Supreme Court halted a lower courts order saying that a redistricting map in Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by getting rid of a Black majority district. Alabamas population is 27 percent Black, which should translate to 2 congressional seats, but by the practice of packing and crackingthat is, packing large numbers of Black voters into one district and spreading them thinly across all the othersonly one district will likely have a shot at electing a Black representative. The vote for letting the new maps stand was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the liberals against the new right-wing majority, in control thanks to the three justices added by Trump.

But the backlash against the RNCs statement suggests that most Americans see the deadly attack on our democracy for what it was, and Republican lawmakers are now trying to deflect from the RNCs statement.

RNC chair Ronna McDaniel said that media quotes from the resolution are a lie and says the committee did not mean it to be taken as it has been. But other Republicans seemed to understand that the RNC has firmly dragged the Republican Party into Trumps war on our democracy.

National Reviewcalled the statement both morally repellent and politically self-destructive, and worried that it will be used against hundreds of elected Republicans who were not consulted in its drafting and do not endorse its sentiment. If indeed the RNC simply misworded their statement, the editors said, its wording is political malpractice of the highest order coming from people whose entire job is politics.

Sunday, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who seems to entertain hopes for 2024, said onABCsThis Weekthat January 6 was a riot incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own wordsoverturn the election.

But others, like Senator Todd Young (R-IN), seem to be trying to split the baby. Young told Christiane Amanpour that those saying the attack was legitimate political discourse are a fringe group, although the RNC is quite literally the official machinery of the Republican Party. Young is up for reelection in 2022. He is also from Indiana, as is former Vice President Mike Pence, who seems to be positioning himself to take over the party as Trumps legal woes knock him out of the running for 2024.

On Friday, Pence told the Federalist Society that Trump was wrong to say that he, Pence, had the power to overturn the election. But he did not say that Biden won the election fairly. Then, on Sunday, Pences former Chief of Staff Marc Short, seemed to try to let Trump off the hook for his pressure on Pence, telling Chuck Todd onMeet the Pressthat the former president had many bad advisers who were basically snake oil salesmen giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do.

They seem to be trying to keep Trumps voters while easing the former president himself offstage, hoping that voters will forget that the Republican leadership stood by Trump until he openly talked of overturning the election.

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, seems unlikely to stand by as the country moves on, as theNational Revieweditors indicated they were hoping. As he said in his closing at Trumps first impeachment trial: history will not be kind to Donald Trump. If you find that the House has proved its case, and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history.

The other big news of the past day is that it turns out that Trump and his team mishandled presidential records, suggesting that we will never get the full story of what happened in that White House.

By law, presidential records and federal records belong to the U.S. government. An administration must preserve every piece of official business. Some of the documents that the Trump team delivered to the January 6 committee had been ripped up and taped back together, some were in pieces, and some, apparently, were shredded and destroyed. Legal commentator Asha Rangappa noted that Trumps impeachments mean that such shredding could have amounted to an obstruction of justice.

Today we learned that the National Archives and Records Administration had to retrieve 15 boxes of material from Trumps Florida residence Mar-a-Lago, including correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the letter that former president Barack Obama left for Trump (which would have brought a pretty penny if it were sold). Trump aides say they are trying to determine what other records need to be returned.

Former Republican Kurt Bardella noted, if this had happened during a Democratic Administration while Republicans were in the majority, I guarantee you [the Oversight Committee] would be launching a massive investigation into this and writing subpoenas right now to any and every W[hite] H[ouse] official that was involved in this.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the story to raise money for her progressive organization, Onward Together. She linked to the story as she urged people to take a sip from your new mug as you read the news. With the tweet was the picture of a mug with her image and the caption But Her Emails.

House January 6 committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) says that the committee is planning to hold public hearings in April or May. They have been slowed down by the reluctance of the Trump team to cooperate.

Heather Cox Richardson is a Professor of History at Boston College. This post originally appeared on her Substack,Letters from an American.

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The Future of the GOP - publicseminar.org

(The Center Square) Nine Republicans have filed to run for Indianas 9thcongressional seat thats being vacated by Rep. Trey Hollingsworth, who announced in January he is not running for re-election.

The nine include Mike Sodrel, who represented the district in Congress for one term, from 2005 to 2007. Sodrel is the frontrunner for the nomination, says Jamey Noel, the 9thdistrict GOP chairman and also Clark County sheriff .

He ran when it wasnt cool to be a Republican in the 9thdistrict, Noel says. Mike really laid the groundwork. A lot of people have a ton of respect for Mike.

Sodrel ran in 2010 in an attempt to re-capture the seat, but lost the nomination to Todd Young, who went on to defeat Democrat Baron Hill in the general election.

Also running is state Sen. Erin Houchin, of Salem. Houchin ran for the nomination in 2016, finishing second to Hollingsworth in a five-person primary. She recently announced shes stepping down from her Senate seat to campaign for the nomination.

Also running is a State Rep. J. Michael Davisson, from Salem, who was appointed in October to fill the Statehouse seat left empty after the death of his father, former state Rep. Steve Davisson.

The newly redrawn 9thdistrict now takes in Bloomington and Monroe County one of only four counties in the state to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 but is otherwise a mostly rural district that runs along the Ohio River in the southeastern corner of the state, and to the Ohio border in the east, taking in New Albany and other towns that are part of the Louisville and Cincinnati metropolitan areas.

The primary election is May 3.

Other Republicans in the race include commercial real estate broker Jim Baker, from the New Albany area; Afghanistan war veteran Stu Barnes-Israel; Seymour-based defense professional Dan Heiwig; Indiana University-Southeast economics professor D. Eric Schansberg; Bill J. Thomas; and Brian Tibbs.

There are three running for the Democratic nomination IU employee Isak Nti Asare; Marine Corps veteran D. Liam Dorris; and high school math teacher Matthew Fyfe, who serves on the board of the local teachers union. All three are from Bloomington.

The 9th congressional district seat will be the only open seat in Indiana this year. But its not the only one that has drawn the interest of Republicans.

The 1st district, which takes in the northwest corner of the state and includes Hammond and Gary, has attracted seven Republican candidates to challenge incumbent Democrat Rep. Frank J. Mrvan in November.

The district is one of only two in the state that have been reliably Democrat over the years. The other is the 7thcongressional district, which covers most of Indianapolis.

The Republicans competing for the 1stdistrict nomination are Jennifer Ruth-Green, Mark Leyva, Martin Lucas, Blair Milo, Nicholas Pappas, Ben Ruiz and Aaron Storer.

Dan Dernulc, the GOP county chairman in Lake County, just outside Chicago, referred to a recent news report that the national Republican Party may invest in the race this year.

Ive been chairman for nine years, involved in politics for 25, he says. I have never seen interest from the national party. If theyre going to be putting money and time into it, thats a great opportunity for us.

The new district lines are only slightly different than the current lines, with two townships in LaPorte County dropped and three added. Dernulc says he doesnt think the district is any more Republican.

I think its about the same, he said. The stars might be lining up because of the mood of the countryIts a long shot. Its a real long shot. Im just saying there could be an opportunity.

In the U.S. Senate race, Republican Todd Young could have a challenger this year. Danny Niederberger, an asset manager, also ran for the 5thcongressional district in 2020.

Niederberger announced online that he succeeded in getting the required 500 signatures in each of the congressional districts to qualify for the ballot. But those signatures now must be verified.

Three people are vying for the Democratic nomination to challenge Young, including Hammond mayor Thomas M. McDermott, Jr. The other two candidates are Haneefah Khaaliq and Valerie McCray.

Other statewide offices up this year include secretary of state, though nominees are chosen by state delegates state conventions held over the summer, not in primary elections. Two Republicans are challenging Holli Sullivan for the Republican nomination for secretary of state Diego Morales, a former staffer for Gov. Mike Pence; and Kyle Conrad, a former county clerk in Newton County who went on to work for Governmental Business Systems, a company that sells election equipment to Indiana counties.

Destiny Scott Wells, a Democrat, will run against the Republican nominee in November, along with the Libertarian candidate, Jeff Maurer.

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Nine Indiana Republicans file to run for Congress in the 9th district - The Center Square

Meet the teenage Nigel Farage. Its the absurdly late Seventies. He is a stalwart of Dulwich Colleges second XI cricket team, and a tittering purveyor of risqu racial banter. He likes snuff, golf, and brandishing a rolled-up umbrella at unsuspecting chums. He is advanced in his opinions, but delighted to play devils advocate for anyone elses.

Stumblingly, young Nige is starting to live out the two contradictory impulses that will frame his life. One: a conservatives respect for, and needy desire to be part of, institutions. Two: a libertarians outsider fantasy of bomb-tossing nonconformity. Yeah, the boy loves the club, but he quite fancies running a bulldozer through those front doors too. Luck will let him do both.

Nigel Farage, for all his talents, was lucky. He was time-and-place fortunate. His pampered enemies underestimated him, and thought him a punchline until the joke brought their house down. Many of them were no life experience professional political hermits like Danny Alexander or Ed Miliband. They raised no whirlwinds. Mostly, as David Foster Wallace put it, they werent enough like human beings even to hate. They were overpumped with focus-grouped shrewdness, not human instinct.

Farage was messily and chaotically human. He is, in that dreaded national formulation, a character. He has an anuran face, an aquatic aspect the ideally fishy tribune of an island where the moss is still damp and the rain is still thin.

In the 2010s he smashed through the Overton Window like a breeze block. First with Ukip, then with the Brexit Party. And even as he did so, he was being very badly behaved not that this ever made a scratch in his popular image as a plain-speaking common sense merchant. Fortune favours the charming miscreant sometimes. The rest was Britains exit from the European Union.

At least, thats the life that emerges from Michael Cricks new biography of Farage. One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage feels, quite simply, long. Five hundred beigely judicious pages read like 5,000. Cricks annoyingly pokey reportorial style a staple of Channel Four News for decades is absent here. Its a dull, reasonably objective attempt to tell the truth. There is voyeurism (we buy books like this to peep through the bedroom keyhole, dont we?) but not a single nose-turning jab of biographical GBH.

Crick comes perilously close to making Farage boring. He drowns him under mudslides of irrelevant detail. There are paceless accounts of infighting among Ukips National Executive Committee; a whole chapter about a dodgy party call centre in Kent; more information on Neil Hamiltons time as an MEP than even the most deranged politico could be expected to digest. Still, sanding away the trivia reveals two major themes: alcohol and luck. In Farages life they combine and recombine like clouds on a windy day.

His luck was personal and political. Ukips rise was only possible after the unexpected death of the wall-eyed billionaire tyrant James Goldsmith in 1997. His demise took his Referendum Party, Ukips lavishly financed rival, into the soil with him. Tony Blairs decision to approve a new proportional voting system for the UKs European parliamentary elections gave Ukip their first big breaks and Farages first media appearances proper in 1999.

Later on, Farage was sceptical about the need for a referendum. Ukips central policy was so outrageously unthinkable for most of Farages career that, in spite of his crashingly loud public idealism, it seems like he doubted whether it could ever happen. His electoral successes (not luck) eventually pushed David Cameron into promising a vote on exiting the EU in 2013 but it was Camerons unexpected majority in 2015 that made the referendum happen.

During the campaign, Farage had the lowest personal popularity rating of any of the major party leaders. Jeremy Corbyn was more popular. Farage did have political nous, though. Like Cummings, he understood that the old Left and Right labels were meaningless. We dont want to represent a wing, he said in 2004, but the heart and wishbone of the nation. He didnt think that English politics had changed since the 17th century. You are either a cavalier, a democrat, and a libertarian, or you are a doctrinaire, morally intolerant roundhead. He had identified one of the oldest, deepest, most durable divisions on the island. Spookily, the political map of the Brexit vote ended up resembling the regional distribution of support for the King, Court and Tories against Parliament, Merchants and Whigs in the Civil War. Except in 2016 the cavaliers won. Whoops.

For years, Ukip suffered from the pandemonium of being a party staffed entirely by cavaliers. Crick (without any sense of humour) gives the impression that the whole trembling structure could come crashing down at any moment. But Farages luck holds. The early Ukip days are clogged with writs, squabbles, and changes to office locks. The dramatis personae are livestock auctioneers, umbrella makers, undertakers, investment brokers, hoteliers, Rowan Atkinsons brother, and a barrister described, in a simile that is too fun to be Cricks, as an escapee from a Joanna Trollope novel. Tiny factions of them argue obscurely in the bitter wilderness.

Like Shakespearean fools, they tell unspeakable truths and babblingly predict a future others cannot see. The first full-length account of the party, Mark Daniels Cranks and Gadflies, described the membership as idiots, paranoiacs, and conspiracy theorists. Daniels real name Mark Fitzgeorge-Parker was also Ukips press officer at the time. Farage admitted they were all bumbling amateurs.

Peak bumble came in 2010. Farage was in Buckingham on polling day, where he was going to fail to win a seat in Westminster, again. It was planned as a photo-opportunity, which would have been a very Farage way to die. A blue Wilga 35A plane rather like a tractor Farage thought would pull a Ukip banner and its leader into the air, then fly low over Buckingham and the surrounding area. I just hope the plane doesnt blow up and crash, Farage joked to the press at the airfield. Five attempts were required for the plane to pick up the banner. This quickly wrapped itself around the tail and rudder. Powerlessly, the plane began to drop from the forever English sky. Oh, fuck! said Farage.

He should have been buried. But he was pulled out bleeding from the sorrily pretzeled fuselage, and shakily tried to smoke a fag. This was the third time in his life hed escaped death. At this point, some Brexiteers will see the hand of God at work. Remainers will mutter about Satanic power. If Farage had died in 2010, would Brexit have happened? Crick poses the question, then refuses to play around with it.

Clearly, Farage inspired voters who felt their plain lives were being mocked, and their succulent English liberties stolen. His public persona, all ebullient disrespect for starchy insider taboos and flashy Thatcherkind good time roller, was immensely appealing when set against Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg. Unlike them, as his aide Gawain Towler said, Farage spoke fluent human.

He told voters that over two decades in Britain there had been a shocking widening of the class system, where the rich have got a lot richer and the poor are robbed of the opportunity to attain their best. He was right. At times he seemed to hold Englands spleen in his hands, happy to squeeze its juices at his favourite targets: Westminster and Brussels.

Anger wasnt going to be enough. Paradoxically, the better Farage did in the years before the referendum, the more support for his core mission dropped off. He only appealed to voters who already wanted to leave the EU; he alarmed soft-eurosceptics with his hard-edged rhetoric on migration and HIV; he energised pro-Europeans who saw him as an unholy mash-up of Wat Tyler and Adolf Hitler. As Dominic Cummings put it: Farage put off millions of (middle class in particular) voters who wanted to leave the EU but who were very clear in market research that a major obstacle to voting Leave was I dont want to vote for Farage, Im not like that. He made the Brexit vote possible, but if he had played the Boris Johnson role in the referendum, Leave would have lost.

Practically every page of One Party After Another opens with the clink of bottles. Acquaintances speak to Crick about Farage with the awe accorded to people who live larger and harder than the rest of us. Ann Widecombe recollects Farage rowdily leading Brexit Party MEPs in song. Another describes Farage picking up a small coffee table and pretending to play the bagpipes with it. His ability to get by on a few hours sleep, says Aaron Banks, even after his usual heavy nights, never ceases to amaze.

It sounds like fun, and sometimes it was. But there was a desperate edge to Farages gregariousness. The plane crash had left him in immense pain, and ended his golfing days. His personal life, a thicket of chaotic amatory escapades and unhappy marriages, was broken. Crick quotes one Brexit Party insider who was surprised to find that Farage was not actually very confident. Hes quite a tense person really, not at all relaxed.

Alcohol gave him fluency, and let him escape himself. The sad, casual cruelty of all those affairs was not exposed in full before the referendum. Depending on the publics mood, it may have ruined him. Or they may have been content, as they have been with Johnson, to ignore what Farage got up to on his night shifts. As it always seemed to, his luck held.

Cricks biography is the first; it tells us how it happened, but doesnt tell us why. Whether he saved the club, or made a colossal wreck of it remains uncertain. One Party After Another doesnt have the answers. Crick claims that Farage is one of the most significant politicians of the last fifty years. His reason? Nobody can dispute that Nigel Farage achieved his goal of leaving the European Union. Well, duh.

Yes, he rode his luck, and he won. Farage is still agitating; hes now a two-legged media empire; a pundit, a poster, a YouTuber. Crick leaves Farage on a boat in the channel, bathetically posed, eyes and cameras scanning the choppy waters for fighting-age men in listing dinghies.

Of all the 2010s populists Le Pen, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Bannon, Trump, Wilders, Petry only Farage actually got what he wanted. In the process, his two contradictory impulses have resolved themselves. The libertarian beat up the conservative. The bomb-thrower exploded several British institutions. But like a pinstriped Alexander, Farage has no more worlds to conquer. His victories have handed him obsolescence.

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How Farage had the last laugh - UnHerd

February 2, 2022

February 2, 2022

Do you remember the "libertarian moment"?

I wouldn't blame you if not. For a few years around the end of the Obama administration, though, it looked as if the right just might coalesce around restrained foreign policy, opposition to electronic surveillance and other threats to civil liberties, and enthusiasm for an innovative economy, very much including the tech industry. Beyond policy, the libertarian turn was associated with a hip affect that signaled comfort with pop culture. Even though they were personally far from cool, The New York Times compared the movement's electoral figureheads, the father-and-son duo Ron and Rand Paul, to grunge bands Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

In retrospect, those descriptions seem naive. Less than a year after the Times feature was published, the announcement of Donald Trump's presidential campaign sounded the death knell of the libertarian moment (along with Rand Paul's own bid for the presidency).In another unforeseen twist, though, the pendulum seems to now be swinging back toward libertarian instincts.

While in office, Trump had deployed an apocalyptic idiom that clashed dramatically with the libertarians'characteristic optimism. Although personally indifferent to ideas, Trump also inspired a cohort of intellectuals who denounced libertarians' ostensible indifference to the common good and proposed a more assertive role for government in directing economic and social life.

But as the pandemic has continued, opposition to restrictions on personal conduct, suspicion of expert authority, and free speech for controversial opinions have become dominant themes in center-right argument and activism. The symbolic villain of the new libertarian moment is Anthony Fauci. Its heroes include Joe Rogan, whose podcast has been a platform for vaccine skeptics, advocates of ivermectin and other dubious treatments for COVID, and other challenges to the expert consensus.

Appeals to personal freedom, limited government, and epistemological skepticism against pandemic authorities have some basis in the organized libertarian movement. Early in the pandemic, the American Institute for Economic Research issued the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, which rejected lockdowns and argued (before vaccines became available) that mitigation strategies should be limited to the most vulnerable portion of the population. In the Senate, Paul (Ky.) has been the leading critic of Fauci and the CDC. Long-standing libertarian positions have also been energized by the pandemic. The disruption of public education, for example, has revitalized the school choice movement.

But it would be a mistake to think these appeals succeed because Americans have any newfound appreciation for Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, or other libertarian thinkers. More than any coherent political theory, the libertarian revival draws on inarticulate but powerful currents of anti-authoritarianism in American culture. In a blog post drawing on the work of historian David Hackett Fischer, the writer Tanner Greer argues that this disposition is an inheritance from the Scots-Irish settlers of colonial America. Concentrating on its recent expressions, my predecessor Matthew Walther described the defiant, individualistic, risk-embracing sensibility as "barstool conservatism" after Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, who joins Rogan among its most prominent representatives.

Whatever its origins, the new quasi-libertarianism is an obstacle to the managerial tendencies that increasingly define the center-left. More than opposition to the government as such, it revolves around opposition to administrative restrictions imposed for one's own good. If the old libertarianism was obsessed with the risk of ideological totalitarianism, the new version concentrates on the influence of human resources bureaucrats, public health officials, and neighborhood busybodies.

Its idealized enemy isn't the commissar. It's the high school guidance counselor.

That reorientation from philosophical to mundane grievances iskey to its demographic appeal. Decades ago, the left benefitted from its association with resistance to busybodies. Think of Frank Zappa and other musicians who opposed efforts to place warning labels on records they considered obscene. Today, outspoken progressives are prominent among those demanding censorship of putative misinformation including Rogan's removal from the Spotify platform that hosts his podcast. An occasionally juvenile sense of defying petty tyranny helps explain why the libertarian revival appeals so powerfully to young men (and why spokesmen like Rogan and Portnoy often have backgrounds in sports entertainment). Rather than a defense of natural rights, it's an instinctive dislike of being bossed around.

The inchoate libertarian revival isn't just the political equivalent of cutting class, though. The unimpressive performance of schools, the FDA, and other vehicles of public policy have undermined the ambitious goals Democrats hoped to pursue under the Biden Administration. It's hard to make the case for free college, increased educational spending, or single-payer healthcare with the institutions that would have to deliver these benefits seem unwilling or unable to do their current jobs. Progressives don't want to hear it, but the era of big government is probably over again.

In the past, that conclusion might have been celebrated by conservatives. Today, it's more controversial. During Trump's presidency, some theorists entertained hopes that Republicans might become the "party of the state." In addition to conventional hopes for restricting pornography and halting or reversing the legalization of drugs, that includes proposals for sweeping industrial policies to promote domestic manufacturing and cash benefits for married parents to promote traditional family patterns. Rejecting libertarian confidence in spontaneous order, these intellectuals argued that both the economy and the culture need to be intentionally guided toward the common good.

The New Right's challenge to libertarian optimism that order, prosperity, or other conservative goals would come about automatically is often insightful. But it's their hope that the dour and devout can achieve theoretically rational outcomesby capturing and redirecting some of the same institutions that have been discredited during the pandemic that now seems utopian.

Iconoclastic podcasters and the "Freedom Convoy" of truckers protesting vaccine mandates may not have been what journalists and activists had in mind when they spoke of the libertarian moment five years ago. But they're the vanguard of its sequeltoday.

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The return of the libertarian moment - The Week Magazine

Late last year, El Salvadors president Nayib Bukele announced plans to build Bitcoin City a tax-free territory in the countrys east.

The city will use the cryptocurrency and be powered by the nearby Conchuagua volcano. According to Bukele, there will be:

Residential areas, commercial areas, services, museums, entertainment, bars, restaurants, airport, port, rail [..] [but] no income tax, zero property tax, no contract tax, zero city tax and zero CO2 emissions.

Whether or not Bitcoin City eventuates, it joins a long and bizarre history of libertarian-inspired attempts to start independent cities and countries.

The generous financial incentives in Bitcoin City are aimed at encouraging foreign investment.

However, the plan has quickly been derided by finance commentators as something worthy of a Bond villain. There are doubts construction will ever begin.

As the Australian Financial Review observes, Bitcoin City is likely nothing more than a splashy distraction from Bukeles economic woes.

But Bukele is not the only one to be tempted to set up a new territory, with new (or no) rules.

In a 2009 TED Talk, American economist Paul Romer argued developing nations should partner with foreign countries or corporations to create autonomous model cities.

Under his plan, host states would lease large tracts of undeveloped land to developed states, who would administer the territory according to their own legal system. The citys residents would largely come from the developing state, but the administrators of the city would be appointed by (and accountable to) the developed state. Residents could vote with their feet by either migrating to or from the model city.

Read more: How El Salvador and Nigeria are taking different approaches to digital currencies plus, are we living in a simulation? The Conversation Weekly podcast transcript

Romer argues such cities would attract significant international investment because their legal architecture would insulate them from any political turmoil present in their host state. Notwithstanding the strong neo-colonial or neo-imperial overtones, several states have considered adopting Romers proposition.

In 2011, the Honduran Congress amended its constitution to facilitate the development of Romers idea. Cities built within special development regions would not be subject to Honduran law or taxation. Instead, they would be self-governing under a unique legal framework.

After legal disputes about whether this breached Honduran national sovereignty, the plan was revived in 2015. Under the new plan, an investor that builds infrastructure in a site designated as a zone for employment and economic development (ZEDE) will be granted quasi-sovereign authority. The investor will be permitted to impose and collect income and property taxes, and establish its own education, health, civil service, and social security systems.

Under the ZEDE law, the president appoints a committee to oversee all of the model cities as well as setting the baseline rules and standards investors must follow. Reflecting the ideological backing of the idea, the first committee, announced in 2014, was heavily comprised of libertarians and former advisers to United States President Ronald Reagan. In 2020, the first site was launched, but development does not appear to have commenced.

The Honduran plan involves a country leasing (temporarily or perhaps permanently) sovereign rights over its territory. Other projects have sought to build a new country on the sea.

Since 2008, attention has focused on the California-based Sea Steading Institute.

Founded by American libertarian Patri Friedman (grandson of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman) and initially financed by billionaire Peter Thiel, the institute sought to build habitable structures on the high seas outside the jurisdiction (and taxation) of any state.

Read more: Why is Australia 'micronation central'? And do you still have to pay tax if you secede?

Although their website suggests sea steading could offer significant benefits to humanity globally, making money free of regulatory burden is the primary motivation. Backers are interested in sea steadings potential to peacefully test new ideas for governance so the most successful can then inspire change in governments around the world.

No city has yet been built. In 2017 negotiations with French Polynesia for the development of floating cities within their territorial waters stalled when community pressure forced the government to withdraw. Many wondered whether facilitating the tax evasion of the worlds greatest fortunes would actually be beneficial for the islands.

Other proposals have not bothered to ask anyone whether they can get started. In the 1960s, several American businessmen sought to establish independent states upon coral reefs off the coasts of California and Florida. Both fell apart under pressure from the US government.

In the early 1970s, US libertarian Michael Oliver tried to finance the construction of a new country - the Republic of Minerva - on a submerged atoll in the Pacific Ocean between Tonga and Fiji. There would be no tax and no social welfare in his laissez-faire paradise.

Over the second half of 1971, Olivers team ferried sand on barges from Fiji to raise the atoll above sea level and commenced basic construction. Oliver envisioned creating 2,500 acres of habitable land elevated around two and a half to three metres above high tide. Floating cities and an ocean resort would also be built.

Progress proved hard going. Only 15 acres of land had been reclaimed by the time Olivers funds were exhausted. Nearby countries were also watching with alarm. In June 1972, King Tupou IV declared Tongan sovereignty over the atoll and ejected Olivers team.

Oliver abandoned Minerva, but in 1982, another group of American libertarians attempted to reassert and restore the republic. After spending three weeks moored in the lagoon, they were expelled by the Tongan military. Today, Minerva has been more or less reclaimed by the sea.

Perhaps they should have invested in Bitcoin.

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'Worthy of a Bond villain': the bizarre history of libertarian attempts to create independent cities - The Conversation AU

A study published in the journalRisk Analysissuggests that people who embrace the ideologies of libertarianism and anti-egalitarianism are more likely to disregard the risks of COVID-19 and oppose government actions.

Assistant professor Yilang Peng of the University of Georgia analyzed data from two surveys to investigate the relationship between attitudes toward COVID-19 and specific political ideologies. The first survey of approximately 500 Americans asked participants to specify their party identity, rate their political views (from extremely liberal to extremely conservative), and indicate their agreement on a scale with various statements related to Social Dominance Orientation (related to equality and the distribution of resources among groups), libertarianism, and other ideological factors. The participants included roughly equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents/other party.

In his statistical analysis of the data, Peng found that individuals who endorse principles of libertarianism and anti-egalitarianism were less concerned about COVID-19 and more likely to oppose government actions such as mask mandates and vaccination. (Libertarians uphold the principles of individual liberty and generally oppose government involvement in citizens private lives and economic activities, while the principles of anti-egalitarians are contrary to those of social equality and fairness.)

To test his initial findings, Peng conducted a second analysis of data from another survey conducted by the American National Election Studies (ANES) before and after the 2020 U.S. presidential election. A sample of 7,449 adults participated in both surveys. The questions were different than those in Pengs survey but covered the same concepts of political ideologies and attitudes toward COVID-19. His analysis of the data revealed the same results: that individuals who endorse libertarianism and anti-egalitarianism are more likely to oppose government responses to COVID-19.

Political ideology incorporates ideas, worldviews, and issue positions that occupy multiple dimensions. For example, citizens may hold a liberal position regarding economic issues (such as social welfare), but a conservative stance on social issues like abortion. Past research has documented the association between political ideology, often measured with a liberal-conservative spectrum, and attitudes toward COVID-19.

Peng argues that different dimensions of political ideology can pose distinct effects on attitudes toward sociopolitical issues, including science topics like vaccines, climate change, and emerging technologies such as self-driving cars. Simply identifying as a liberal or conservative does not cover the full scope of political ideology and world views, says Peng. Since political ideology reflects citizens ideas about how an ideal society should be structured, it would naturally influence citizens preferences for societal responses to a crisis such as the COVID-19 outbreak.

Both survey analyses found that trust in science was impacted by an individuals political orientation and party identification and also shaped attitudes toward the pandemic. This contributes to accumulating evidence that trust is a crucial variable in risk communication about science issues, says Peng.

In addition, the data showed that political orientation and party identity still play a role in shaping COVID-19 attitudes. Peng argues that such findings confirm that elite cueing is a powerful mechanism that shapes public perceptions of science issues. An examination of the role of ideological components may advance our theoretical understanding of why certain science issues become polarized while also providing implications for the design of communication campaigns and policies that effectively resonate with partisan audiences.

For example, prior research has observed that COVID-19 communications from left-wing activists and politicians largely focus on the themes of care and fairness. This might not resonate well with people across the political spectrum. In particular, says Peng, individuals with anti-egalitarian views may not be highly attentive to the enhancement of equality and the protection of vulnerable populations.

He adds that future research can test if communication strategies that address libertarian ideologies for example, framing public health interventions as a way to enhance the liberty and freedom of citizens and to give people more choices and autonomy can better appeal to partisan audiences.

About SRA

The Society for Risk Analysis is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, scholarly, international society that provides an open forum for all those interested in risk analysis. SRA was established in 1980 and has publishedRisk Analysis: An International Journal,the leading scholarly journal in the field, continuously since 1981. For more information, visitwww.sra.org.

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Anti-egalitarians, libertarians most likely to dismiss the risk of COVID-19 - ScienceBlog.com

Kevin Gaughen is a real estate broker and the executive director of the Pennsylvania Libertarian Party. He has lived in Silver Spring Township, near the state capital of Harrisburg, for 10 years and has concerns about how his town's finances have been managed.

In 2021, Gaughen decided to run for township auditor as a write-in candidate. On Election Day, he mobilized friends to hand out cards to potential voters that read, "Write In Kevin Gaughen for Auditor." Improbably, he won. Now, however, Silver Spring Township's manager won't let him do his job.

On January 3, Gaughen showed up to the year's first meeting of the board of supervisors, a five-person board that "govern[s] and supervise[s]" the township. To his surprise, his swearing-in was not on the agenda. According to Gaughen's account, when he raised the issue during the public comment section, the board insisted that it had been an oversight and that he would be sworn in at the next meeting. But days later, the township manager, Raymond Palmer, sent an email stating that, in fact, the township had retained an accounting firm, Maher Duessel, to serve as auditors and that "the elected auditor has duties lifted when a Township appoints an auditing firm." (Palmer did not respond to an email or text messages requesting comment).

It is within a township's authority to appoint an accounting firm to serve the audit function. Silver Spring Township appears to have retained Maher Duessel since at least 2010. (A representative for Maher Duessel did not respond to emails or a voicemail requesting comment.)

Simply hiring an accountant for the audits is not, in itself, suspicious, says Jennifer Moore, chair of the Pennsylvania Libertarian Party, who also serves as an auditor in the township where she lives. Her local board contracts with an accountant, which she feels is necessary for larger townships with bigger budgets. But, as she tells Reason, "we do still definitely have a role: We're elected by the people to make sure that everything's on the up-and-up." In Moore's case, the firm compiles the audit, and then the board of elected auditors pores through the report for anything that may require further scrutiny.

A Pennsylvania township auditor is not a particularly prestigious or powerful position. Salaries are capped at $2,000 annuallyhalf that for smaller municipalities. Auditors scrutinize their township's finances and deliver an annual report to the state capital. They also set the salaries for the board of supervisors. Each township has three auditors, who serve staggered six-year terms.

In addition to setting supervisor salaries and financial auditing and reporting, township auditors may investigate "official records of the district justices," similar to small claims courts, "to determine the amount of fines and costs paid over or due the township." If a township is writing too many tickets or assessing an inordinate amount of fines, the board of auditors would have the authority to investigate. The board of auditors also has the power to issue subpoenas to investigate members of the board of supervisors and to assess fines to any supervisor who misuses taxpayer funds. An accounting firm would be unable to serve these functions.

"I see them putting projects out, and I don't believe they're doing fair bidding on them," Gaughen toldReason. "I see them handing deals out" without putting it through a "fair bidding process There's a lot of items of concern that I see in this township, and I thought, 'I want to get involved, I want to open the books, I want to start attending these township meetings, and I want to know exactly what's going on here.'"

It is not clear whether the board of supervisors is even allowed to rely solely on an accounting firm for audits. "They just simply can't do that, under election law," says Moore, who also has an MBA. "It's a violation of the election code. The election code says that they may hire a CPA, but they still have to have a board of auditors." Indeed, state law stipulates that if an accountant or firm is appointed, "the board of auditors shall not audit, settle or adjust the accounts audited by the appointee but shall perform the other duties of the office." (A representative from the Governor's Center for Local Government Services, which oversees the township audit reports, did not respond to voicemails requesting comment.)

In trying to determine what his next steps were, Gaughen sought out the previous office winner. Chris Trafton ran as a Republican in 2019, though he self-identifies as an independent. In an interview with Reason, Trafton described an experience very similar to Gaughen's: Tired of seeing "shenanigans" in local governance, Trafton gravitated toward the township auditor role and mounted a successful write-in campaign based on word-of-mouth. When he showed up to be certified in his new role, town officials seemed surprised to see him. He was informed that "we've been intending to close down those [positions] in the election" anyway, since with a third-party auditing company, "there's no point in having auditors at all."

Trafton also shared with Reason a copy of an email from the township manager at the time, Theresa Eberly. Eberly's email used nearly identical language as Palmer's email to Gaughen, stating that "the elected auditor has duties lifted when a township appoints an auditing firm." (Eberly, who has since moved to a position in a different town, did not respond to emailed questions).

Currently, on the Cumberland County website, Silver Spring Township lists three auditors. Two, Gaughen and Trafton, have yet to be seated; the third, Kathleen Albright, has apparently moved out of the township and has not been replaced. (Albright responded to a text message, but has so far declined to participate in an interview for this article.)

It is entirely possible that the Silver Spring Township board of supervisors is operating in good faith, but by refusing to seat an auditor and instead relying solely on its own hand-picked replacement, the board is not only violating state law, but also defying the most basic principles of good governance. In Gaughen's words, the auditor is "a watchdog for the citizens," put in place to "make sure that economic malfeasance isn't going on. And I don't think that someone hired, who has a financial interest from the township, should be auditing the people that hired them."

See more here:

This Libertarian Won His Local Election, but the Politicians He'd Audit Refuse To Seat Him - Reason

After giving a paper about free will at a professional philosophy conference, I was surprised by a questioner asking: When you say I love you to your wife, what does that mean to her? Given my Calvinist view of free will according to which God sovereignly determines everything that comes to pass, the questioner felt I couldnt rescue any meaning in human love relationships.

I quipped that as a Frenchman I could find romance in anything, and that with my view, I could tell my wife she was literally my destiny (I should have added, irresistible!). The audience laughed, but its a serious philosophical question with practical ramifications: how does ones view of free will affect how we see human love? Does God make us love him and love one another?

Lexham Academic. 216 pp.

Evil is a problem for all Christians. When responding to objections that both evil and God can exist, many resort to a free will defense, where God is not the creator of evil but of human freedom, by which evil is possible. This response is so pervasive that it is just as often assumed as it is defended. But is this answer biblically and philosophically defensible?

InGod Reforms Hearts, Thaddeus J. Williams offers a friendly challenge to the central claim of the free will defensethat love is possible only with true (or libertarian) free will. Williams argues that much thinking on free will fails to carve out the necessary distinction between an autonomous will and an unforced will. Scripture presents a God who desires relationship and places moral requirements on his often-rebellious creatures, but does absolute free will follow? Moreover, Gods reforming work on the human heart goes further than libertarian free will would allow.

With clarity, precision, and charity, Williams judges the merits and shortcomings of the relational free will defense while offering a philosophically and biblically robust alternative that draws from theologians of the past to point a way forward.

Lexham Academic. 216 pp.

In trying to explain how an all-good, all-powerful God could exist while there is so much evil in the world, many Christian philosophers have suggested human free will is one important answer. Its argued that God has given humans free will and doesnt determine the outcome of their free choices, which unfortunately means that humans will at times misuse that gift, with all kinds of evil resulting from their bad choices.

On that view of the human will, which is called libertarian free will, our choices are not determined by God, and it would be a contradiction in terms for God to make us freely do anything, much less make us freely love him.

Thaddeus Williams disagrees. In his book God Reforms Hearts: Rethinking Free Will and the Problem of Evil, he reexamines the place that libertarian free will has taken in Christian responses to the problem of evil, and more particularly whether authentic human love requires libertarian free will. Williams, an associate professor of systematic theology at Biola University, doesnt merely suggest that libertarian free will is uncalled for, he argues that its outright incompatible with true love and much of the biblical data. In its place, Williams commends the so-called compatibilist view of free will, according to which human free choices are compatible with their being determined by God. In this view, typically affirmed in the Reformed or Calvinist tradition, it truly is God who reforms hearts and thereby makes us freely love him and love our neighbor as ourselves (55).

It truly is God who reforms hearts and thereby makes us freely love him and love our neighbor as ourselves.

The book, organized into three parts, consists of one long and sustained argument against libertarian free will as a good answer to the problem of evil.

Part 1 clarifies the issue by drawing some of the philosophical distinctions necessary to understand the debate on free will and evil, and offers some philosophical problems with libertarian free will as a condition for authentic love. Part 2 presents three important arguments often raised in favor of libertarianism and offers biblical and philosophical responses. Finally, part 3 makes a biblical and philosophical case for the claim that God indeed reforms hearts, thereby determining the outcome of our choices and securing the existence of true human love.

The biblical and philosophical bi-disciplinary approach gives this book an interesting angle: it contains more biblical exegesis than youd expect from a philosopher and more logical argumentation than youd expect from a biblical theologian. Williams goes deep into the biblical text which he handles carefully (complete with reference to the original languages), including a nice study of human ability in the Gospel of John and a mini biblical theology of divine intervention in human hearts. He interacts with libertarian theologians (like Boyd, Geisler, and Marshall) and yet is also conversant with some of the important libertarian Christian philosophers (like Plantinga, van Inwagen, and Hasker).

The main focus of Williamss argument is the place of free will in genuine human love, but it maps closely onto the debates on free will as a condition for moral responsibility. Therefore, many of the arguments that bear on the matter of love are the usual suspects in debates on free will and moral responsibility: we find coercion cases, manipulation cases, the maxim that ought implies can, and discussion of whether indeterminism would make human choices arbitrary or improperly grounded in human desires.

While Williams offers some of the traditional compatibilist arguments and counterarguments, he often offers his own unique wording of the issues. Theres a risk that the reader may at times be put off by non-standard terminology, but, on the upside, Williamss new wording is often clever and colorful, and may invite libertarians to engage with his fresh formulation of the issues.

For example, I enjoyed his description of five increasing degrees of divine intervention in human hearts: heart persuasion, heart cooperation, heart activation, heart reformation, and heart circumvention (138). Williams argued we need to reject the fifth but affirm nothing short of the first four. It will be interesting to see if libertarians agree with his categories, and if so, what exit they take from this highway of divine intervention. And do they accept the problems Williams lays out for those who wish to exit too early (139144)?

I am mostly sympathetic to the books thesis and many of its supporting arguments, so let me just mention two potential shortcomings or elements readers may wish had been included.

The first is a question that many libertarians will no doubt raise and should be addressed. When facing conceptual arguments against libertarian free will like some of those Williams offersclaims that it makes choices arbitrary or meaningless because one needs to transcend ones own self (41), or act against ones desires, or with a liberty of indifference (5059) or with a freedom from ones own heart (3437)libertarians often punt back to God and say: at least God isnt determined, he has libertarian free will, so that shows that theres no conceptual problem with libertarian free will in itself, and its just a debate on whether humans have it too.

This is a fair retort, and applies equally to the question of authentic love: does God love us authentically? But isnt Gods free will libertarian? And if it is, does this invalidate conceptual arguments against human libertarian free will? And if God doesnt have libertarian free will, does this entail the so-called modal collapse where every truth is necessary and there is only one possible world? And would that modal collapse be a problem?

Compatibilists who use the conceptual arguments against libertarianism (arguments which I myself find generally plausible) would do well to provide elements of answers to these questions.

And finally, I may point out that the book doesnt really offer an actual theodicy in response to the problem of evil. Williamss goal was to make progress against the problem of evil (27), but his project is more a pushback on the wrong answer (libertarian free will) than a proposal of the right answer (like a greater good theodicy, soul-making theodicy, evil as Gods megaphone la C. S. Lewis, or other positive theodicies) to respond to the skeptic.

In the final chapter, Williams does offer a practical application of his positive claim that God reforms hearts and secures human love: when humans are facing moral evil in the real world, they are called upon to pray that God would do exactly what Williams says he does: change hearts.

When humans are facing moral evil in the real world, they are called upon to pray that God would change hearts.

God Reforms Hearts is a serious, academic-level treatment of the topic of free will and its role in love relationships, with a focus on divine involvement in human hearts. While not written at the popular level, the careful lay reader will benefit from it, and proponents (and detractors) of libertarianism will be challenged to think deeply about the place of free will in their response to the problem of evil.

Its a nice complement to recent philosophically robust treatments of free will and evil from a Calvinist perspective like Greg Weltys Why Is There Evil in the World (and So Much of It)? (Christian Focus, 2018), and the multi-author volume Calvinism and the Problem of Evil (Pickwick, 2016). As a Calvinist myself, I rejoice to see another philosophically-informed theological determinist, especially one who teaches at Biola University, a traditional fortress of libertarianism!

Let Williamss voice be heard, and the Reformed view of free will embraced to the glory of God who indeed sovereignly reforms our hearts.

More here:

Review: 'God Reforms Hearts' by Thaddeus Williams - The Gospel Coalition

Its hilarious that some folks are having a fit over President Joe Bidens plan to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court to fill the seat of retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. Youd think it was the most outlandish and horrific presidential proclamation in recent history.

Ive lost track but it seems the whining has reached a crescendo. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas recently called Bidens pledge offensive and an insult to Black women on his podcast. (Query: Whats more amazingthat Cruz speaks for Black women or that theres an audience for his podcast?) He added that Biden was essentially dissing White America, if youre a White guy, tough luck. If youre a White woman, tough luck. You dont qualify.

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi also chimed in, calling Bidens as yet unnamed nominee, the beneficiary of this sort of quota. And ex-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (remember her?) tweeted: Biden chose Harris as his VP because of the color of her skin and sexnot qualification. Shes been a disaster. Now he promises to choose Supreme Court nominee on the samecriteria. Identity politics is destroying our country.

For a woman whos yet to be identified as a contender, shes apparently already a bona fide catastrophe.

The Pied Piper of these rants is arguably libertarian Ilya Shapiro, former vice president of the Cato Institute, who started his attacks with a series of tweets on Jan. 26, right after Biden announced his plan to put a Black woman on the high court. Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, tweeted Shapiro, alluding to the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He added that Srinivasan is solid prog & v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesnt fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy, so well get lesser black woman.

Theres a lot to unpack. And because of the outrage sparked by his tweets (since deleted), Shapiro has been put on administrative leave as the new executive director of Georgetown Law Schools Center for the Constitution.

Though hes apologized for what he calls an inartful tweet, I thought his tweets (not just one, as he claimed) were actually quite artful in delivering his message that no Black woman could be up to the job.

Shapiro was adept at using the specter of the unqualified woman of color to stir fears that one of our most sacred institutionsthe U.S. Supreme Courtwould be jeopardized. Simply put, he used a racist tropethe radical affirmative action queento argue that a policy that advances a Black woman is inherently racist.

Unless Shapiro has identified every potential Black woman nominee and can defend their inferiority to Judge Srinivasan, this is the worst sort of casual racism and sexism, says Adrienne Davis, a professor at both the law and business schools of Washington University in St. Louis. Or, as [African American feminist scholar] Moya Bailey would call it, misogynoir.

Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Indeed, the list of Black women who might be contenders for the Supreme Court is almost an embarrassment of riches, chock full of Harvard and Yale law school graduates and former Supreme Court clerks. The three top contenders, according to multiple press reports, are: Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and former clerk to Justice Breyer; Leondra Kruger, a judge on the California Supreme Court and former clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens; and J. Michelle Childs, a judge of the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina.

Other names rumored for consideration include: Holly Thomas, a judge on the Ninth Circuit; Eunice Lee, of the Second Circuit and Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And the list goes on.

So what century are Shapiro and his cohorts living in when they suggest that theres no worthy Black woman to fill Breyers seat?

Also insidious is that Shapiro is stirring resentment between people of color. When he tweeted that Sri Srinivasan was the best pick, he signaled to Asian Americans to watch out because an unqualified Black or Brown Americanin this situation, a Black womanmight snatch away a coveted seat that rightfully belongs to them.

By all accounts, Srinivasan is an outstanding jurist but why is he suddenly being trotted out by foes of Biden? Is diversity suddenly a passion of the right?

Bringing Asian Americans in the picture can be done positively or negatively, says Frank Wu, president of Queens College, City University of New York, and the former chancellor at University of California, Hastings Law School. All too often, Asian Americans are introduced as spoilers, not in the spirit of civil rights and diversity, but instead to try to make Asian Americans an alternative to other people of color.

California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger

Official Photo, California Supreme Court

Gabriel Chin, a law professor at University of California at Davis, adds that this is a familiar play. Critics of race-conscious policies try to pit people of color against each other, intentionally or unintentionally, he says, citing the Harvard admissions litigation in which the plaintiff argued that Asian American applicants are harmed by affirmative action, as an example. Chin says he believes breaking down historical patterns of discrimination benefits all groups. I do not think that if a Black woman wins, the potential Asian or other candidates lose.

Is Shapiro deliberately throwing fire at relations between people of color? I cant read his mind. (Ive attempted to reach out to Shapiro via Georgetown Laws press office, but I havent heard back.) But let me say this: Raising the bogeyman (or bogeywoman) of affirmative action is a distraction from those who truly enjoy the rights and privileges of power. Let me put it this way: Of the 115 justices on the Supreme Court since 1789, 108or 94% of them have been White men, as CNN reports.

All this brings up whats intrigued me for a long time: Why do we dissect the qualifications of minorities, particularly minority women, while White men seem to get an automatic pass?

I guess the answer should be apparent.

Read more:

The Next SCOTUS Justice Will Be a Black Woman. Deal With It. - Bloomberg Law

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Greg Abbott is embracing an industry that sees itself as a libertarian form of finance free from meddling by banks and governments

Author of the article:

Bloomberg News

Michael Smith

Last fall, Texas Governor Greg Abbott gathered dozens of cryptocurrency deal makers in Austin where they discussed an idea that, on its face, seemed almost upside down: Electricity-hungry Bitcoin miners could shore up the states power grid, a top priority after a deep freeze last winter triggered blackouts that left hundreds dead.

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The industrys advocates have been making that pitch to the governor for years. The idea is that the miners computer arrays would demand so much electricity that someone would come along to build more power plants, something Texas badly needs. If the grid starts to go wobbly, as it did when winter storm Uri froze up power plants in February 2021, miners could quickly shut down to conserve energy for homes and businesses. At least two Bitcoin miners have already volunteered to do just that.

Theres no guarantee anyone will build more generation or switch off just because theyre asked. Theres even a chance the idea could backfire and put more strain on the grid overall. But at last Octobers meeting at the governors mansion, Abbott made it clear that he was going to count on the miners assistance when the electricity grid faced colder months ahead. Help me get through the winter, the governor said, according to four people who attended the meeting.

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Getting through the winter may be key to Abbotts political fortunes as he stands for re-election. He faces two main opponents in a March 1 Republican primary and a tougher fight in November against Democrat Beto ORourke. The grid is one of the governors few weak flanks: The most recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, from October, showed that 60 per cent of Texans disapprove of how state leaders have handled the reliability of the grid.

There has to be a really thoughtful approach to bringing gigawatts worth of Bitcoin onto the system, said Doug Lewin, an energy consultant in Austin. He said regulators need to require miners to shut down during a crisis, instead of making it voluntary. Weve got to make sure that if were getting close to scarcity, people arent mining Bitcoins anymore.

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Abbott is embracing an industry that sees itself as a libertarian form of finance free from meddling by banks and governments an ideal that appeals to his core GOP voters. That support, and Texass cheap electricity and near-zero regulation, helped spur big companies like Riot Blockchain Inc., Singapore-based Bitdeer Group and the U.K.s Argo Blockchain Plc to build some of the worlds largest Bitcoin mines in the state.

We've got to make sure that if we're getting close to scarcity, people aren't mining Bitcoins anymore

Doug Lewin

In all, there are seven big miners and more than 20 smaller ones in Texas, according to the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council.

Abbott and Republican lawmakers have taken some of the most aggressive steps in the U.S. to lure the industry. Last May, Texas became one of a few states to make it easier for businesses to hold crypto assets and use them as collateral for loans. Abbott also created the Work Group on Blockchain Matters, staffed by industry experts and insiders.

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He sees this huge opportunity, I believe, around the energy sector, said Christopher Calicott, a managing director at Austin venture capital firm Trammell Venture Partners whos on Abbotts crypto task force.

Texas is luring miners partially because other places dont want them. Governments from China to Kazakhstan to Iceland have outright banned or limited crypto mining because of their drain on electric grids.

Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain Council, finds opportunity in these bans. Hes met with Abbott several times to promote Bitcoin minings benefits to the power grid, including at the governors mansion last fall.

Its really a healthy dynamic that brings tax revenue, brings job creation and also is a grid strengthening mechanism, Bratcher said in an interview. Governor Abbotts been very supportive.

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And Abbott isnt alone. State leaders, from Austin Mayor Steve Adler on the left to conservative Senator Ted Cruz, are pushing Texas as a crypto paradise. A few days before the governors crypto meeting in Austin, Cruz spoke for 38 minutes at a blockchain industry conference, keying in on the potential for Bitcoin mining to bolster the states power system. In five years, I expect to see a dramatically different terrain with Bitcoin mining playing a significant role as strengthening and hardening the resiliency of the grid, he said.

Depending on Bitcoin miners is risky because theres a chance they wont shut down or will take too long to power off, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of energy consultant Wood Mackenzies Grid Edge unit. As crisis looms, miners could vie for power with families and businesses. At those times, Bitcoin mining would be competing with basic core societal needs like heating or cooling homes or the functioning of hospitals and nursing homes, Hertz-Shargel said.

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Abbotts spokespeople didnt respond to multiple email and phone requests for comment.

The governors embrace of crypto mining goes back years. Gideon Powell, an oil wildcatter in Dallas, recalls pitching crypto to Abbott soon after he got into Bitcoin mining about five years ago. And at another meeting a few weeks after last years storm, the governor quizzed him about how the industry could help stabilize the grid.

He definitely seems to grasp it, Powell said. And its such a weird concept: Hey, were gonna put more energy consumption in an energy system, and thats going to stabilize the grid.'

Texass competitive power market is central to the miners pitch. Nothing is more important to Bitcoin mining than electricity. It powers the computers that hum nonstop to solve complicated algorithmic equations. This work is the source of all the worlds Bitcoins.

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Within two years, enough new Bitcoin mines will come online to require as much as 5 gigawatts of additional electricity in Texas, according to the Texas Blockchain Council. Thats enough to light up Austin, a city of almost 1 million, twice over.

Theres a risk those projections may need to be adjusted. Mining is only profitable when Bitcoin trades above the cost of the power and computers needed to create them, and prices are off almost 50 per cent from a record high reached in November. An extended slump could delay the mining expansion.

For now, the idea of putting further stress on the grid is anathema to Texans who lived through last years storm, when frigid weather swept across the state, freezing up gas wells and forcing power plants offline. The blackouts left more than 200 people dead and paralyzed the state for almost a week. Texans blamed Abbotts lax regulation of the electricity system, and lawmakers ordered hundreds of power plants to winterize.

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Everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid, Abbott said in June. The power grid operator also is optimistic Bitcoin miners can help the grid, a spokesperson for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, said in a statement.

But there are signs the risk of blackouts remains. Two arctic blasts in January shut down some gas production, exposing continued vulnerabilities for equipment that ensures the flow of fuel to electricity generators.

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Rivals are hounding Abbott over his handling of the power disaster.

Experts continue to warn that Texas could face another grid failure the next time we experience an extreme weather event, ORourke said on his Twitter account in December after the governor promised the lights would stay on this winter. Abbott and his appointees shouldnt be betting our lives on the weather.

Former state senator Don Huffines, a GOP primary challenger, announced a plan this month to do more than Abbott to stimulate crypto, especially to strengthen the power grid. I am committed to making Texas the Citadel for Bitcoin, Huffines said in a statement.

At the Oct. 13 meeting in the governors mansion, Abbott made it clear hes already all-in on crypto mining. His blockchain working group is looking for more crypto-friendly laws and incentives to pursue, and the industrys expansion plans have his support. When someone asked if Texas is Bitcoin Country, the governor smiled and agreed.

Bloomberg.com

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Texas governor turns to Bitcoin miners to bolster the power grid and his re-election - Financial Post