Category Archives: Libertarian

My older brother, Bill, claimed to be a libertarian, although I think he was closer to an anarchist. He believed that most of societys ills were caused by government, and claimed to want no government at all.

As one form of protest, he refused to wear a seat belt, since the state required it. And being a taxi driver in Hawaii, he was taking quite a chance.

Too much of one, as it turned out. One fall day in 1983 he got into a serious accident, one that was nearly fatal and required a four-month hospital stay. He was never the same after that. His motor skills were compromised, he limped slightly, he was unable to play sports. He also became prone to strokes, and died at the age of 74, a premature death in my family.

Apparently Bill was both unconcerned about the possible harm he might bring upon himself and unmindful about the grief he caused our parents, who had to suffer through several weeks of doubt about whether he would live, and several months of concern about what his life would become.

I have to admire him for being so faithful to his beliefs, though. Even after the accident, he refused to wear a seat belt for the rest of his needlessly shortened life. But for resisting the law when the only possible consequence was injury to himself, that I find reckless and asinine.

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I didnt think there were a lot of people like Bill who were so irrational about their political beliefs. Then the other day it occurred to me that there are a great many of them, all around me. In fact the similarity to my brothers situation is striking.

These people are in proximate danger to their lives and health; the consequence of losing their gamble with fate is harm to themselves and suffering of their loved ones; avoiding the problem is remarkably easy; and their reason for resisting is a perceived affront to personal liberty.

Im referring, of course, to those who accept the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines but refuse to take them. Their actions carry the same consequence as my brothers, with one notable addition. The unvaccinated can infect others, who then may fall ill or die. A car accident doesnt spread like a virus.

I have encountered several cases recently of someone in serious need of emergency care who has not been able to receive it because so many hospital beds are taken by COVID-19 victims, most of whom are unvaccinated.

At this point, accepting vaccination has little to do with political views or personal liberty. Refusing vaccination doesnt give you any rights you dont already have. But it is a way of giving possibly life-saving help to a fellow citizen.

Bob Murley lives in Grass Valley.

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Bob Murley: Give life-saving help to a fellow citizen Get vaccinated - The Union

Its an issue that has long engaged my attention: Where do we draw the line between autonomy and subjugation, between when we should be left alone and when we must be made to conform for the common good?

I have strong libertarian instincts, so I have always argued for the minimum government necessary to protect us against threats to our lives and property, and that otherwise we should be free to pursue our own interests and flee our own demons. The laws should be few but well defined, clearly explained and enforced equally against all offenders.

That viewpoint gives us an obvious place to draw the line: If my actions would harm only me, let it be. If they could harm others, a case can be made for government intervention.

But we can see a problem with that simple demarcation just by looking at Indiana traffic laws.

Prohibitions against driving under the influence are entirely justifiable because the drunken driver endangers everybody else on the road. Mandatory use of seat belts and motorcycle helmets should be on the other side of the line, since we only risk our own lives with noncompliance.

Indiana, alas, cannot handle the distinction. Seat belts are mandatory; motorcycle helmets are not. And the reason is not complicated: politics. Motorcycle riders have an active lobby. Car drivers do not.

That dilemma the implementation of necessary and understandable law complicated by political considerations - has been brought into sharper focus by the COVID pandemic and the response to it. We should now be thinking much more deeply about the relationship between governors and the governed.

That relationship may not have been broken, but it has certainly been sorely tested, because the government has squandered the faith of the governed without which we lack the trust civil society needs to exist.

Time and time and again, we have been misled about well, everything. Masks. Vaccinations. Social distancing. The chances of serious effects, hospitalizations, death.

It could be said that our politicians lied to us in a cynical attempt to curry favor with one group and demonize another group, or merely to savor the sense of power the emergency gave them.

Or we could be less cynical and say we have succumbed to a mistaken idea of science. Starting with global warming alarmism, we were encouraged to view the science as settled truth instead of a trial-and-error search for the truth. Now, with the pandemic, we expect the scientific answers to always hold instead of being subject to change as more data emerge. The pairing of politics, which is about short-term answers to immediate concerns, and science was always a bad marriage; we should be beginning to understand just how dysfunctional it is.

In either case, we keep repeating the same mistakes. Given the low threat level to everyone except the elderly and those with underlying conditions, the economy should not have been shut down, and incalculable damage was done to a whole generation of children by closing their schools. Yet, with every wave of new-variant infections, there are those who call for those same responses, and too many who willing accept them.

Early in the pandemic, I wrote that another crisis, similar to this but worse, would surely come, and we should learn from this episode to better handle the next one. Today I really wonder if we are capable of that.

As I write this, Novak Djokovic, the No. 1 tennis player in the world, has been kicked out of Australia and denied the opportunity to compete in that countrys Open tournament because he refused to get the COVID vaccine, despite the fact that he had suffered through the virus and thus had better immunity than the vaccine could give him.

They could have forbidden entry to the country in the first place, but they let him come and then jerked him around for 11 days before sending him on his way. Not for any valid medical reason but because, in the words of one analysis, he was seen as someone who could stir up anti-vaccine sentiments.

I feel for you, pal, I really do. A line was crossed here, but not by you.

Leo Morris, columnist for The Indiana Policy Review, is winner of the Hoosier Press Associations award for Best Editorial Writer. Morris, as opinion editor of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, was named a finalist in editorial writing by the Pulitzer Prize committee. Contact him at leoedits@yahoo.com.

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COVID and the Djokovic Line - Journal Review

The U.K. government is beefing up regulation over crypto assets, announcing Tuesday that it plans to tackle predatory advertisements less than 24 hours after Spain did likewise.

Recent studies conducted by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the U.K. securities watchdog, highlight why legislators are concerned. Although 2.3 million people and rising are believed to own such tokens, roughly 4.4% of its population, but only 58% of crypto users surveyed believed they possessed a good understanding of how cryptocurrencies and the underlying technology works.

This 4 percentage point decline suggests U.K. consumers are not fully cognizant of what they are buying, and some even falsely believe their investments enjoy some form of regulatory protection, indicating "inaccurate promotions are a key risk to consumers," according to the Treasury.

Following the research published in June by the FCA, the government now argues that "evidence of risks to consumers provides a strong case for intervention," citing data by which nearly a third of cryptoasset holders that saw an advert were encouraged to buy as a result.

Cryptoassets can provide exciting new opportunities, offering people new ways to transact and investbut its important that consumers are not being sold products with misleading claims, U.K. Chancellor Rishi Sunak said in a statement on Tuesday.

Britain's head of the exchequer wants promotional material for cryptoassets to be issued by businesses authorized either by the FCA, or the countrys bank regulator.

This will provide the Financial Conduct Authority with the appropriate powers to regulate the market more effectively, the government explained.

Regulators like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have likened the proliferation of digital tokens to the Wild West, when lenders were able to freely issue their own currencies with little interference from the federal government. But despite an understanding that more oversight is needed, little action has been taken in Europe and North America.

Story continues

Downing Street's desire to be among the first to impose new red tape after exiting the European Union is surprising. Britain prides itself on its historic role linking the East and West, and is typically wary of erecting any barriers that might threaten Londons status as the leading financial center.

A key motivation behind Brexit was the explicit desire to swap the EU's perceived nanny state approach to governing in favor of becoming a lightly-regulated, low-tax, high-growth innovator patterned on more nimble jurisdictions like the U.S.. This coined the phrase Singapore-on-Thames among many libertarian Brexit advocates.

Widely tipped to be Britains next prime minister, Sunak's Tuesday announcement means it is likely just a matter of time before cryptoasset advertisements are brought within the scope of existing financial promotions legislation and hence subject to oversight by the FCA, the countrys equivalent of the SEC.

Any ads for new coins would need to follow the same strict standards governing other financial securities like shares in equity or even insurance products. Binding rules state such promotional material must be fair, clear and not misleading.

Spain went even further than Britain on Monday. While the U.K. is currently launching a consultation into the planned legislation, the Iberian nation already mandated similar regulations that go into effect by the middle of next month. Madrid even went so far as to require all material include the same identical explicit warning to investors that they may lose everything.

Criminals have in fact sought to capitalise on the combination of market euphoria and lax oversight to cheat people of their hard-earned savings. Most recently, people gambling on a rise in a token unofficially linked to the hit Korean Squid Game series on Netflix found out they had been the victim of a fraud.

"We are ensuring consumers are protected, while also supporting innovation of the cryptoasset market, Sunak said.

Non-fungible tokens will be excluded from the regulatory crackdown in both the U.K. and Spain, since they are not viewed as a financial services product in the conventional sense.But Sunak's ministry reserved the right to revisit the subject at a later date should new developments emerge.

Appetite for such digital collectibles has been soaring, with virtually every business, including Fortune, examining whether to issue NFTs if they haven't already.

"As the non-fungible token market is evolving rapidly and remains at an early stage of development, the government does not yet have sufficient information on risks and use-cases," the U.K. Treasury said this week. "As such, seeking to bring non-fungible tokens into scope might have unintended consequences for the market. Instead, the government will continue to closely monitor market developments, and stands ready to take further legislative action if required."

In order to close potential loopholes in which a fungible token like a new crypto coin is wrapped inside a non-fungible token, the U.K. government said it could determine the eligibility of such "wrapped tokens" on a case-by-case basis.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Crypto advertisings wild profit claims are coming under the microscopeand countries are cracking down - Yahoo Finance

Nevertheless, Bundy dismissed McGeachins governor-for-a-day anti-mandate orders as a political gimmick. The only one they benefit is her. What would he have done in her place? I would have done what I did do, rally the people. I would have used the office of the lieutenant governor to unite the legislature to end the [governors] emergency order. As governor, he added, he would focus on downsizing the executive agencies and restoring power back to the legislature, where it belongs. But without appearing to see a contradiction, he said he would do so by executive fiat: I think I could spend four years doing that and not have to deal with the legislature at all.

In Idaho as elsewhere, Republicans tend to extol local control rather than high-handed state and federal directives. But that principle tends to hold only as long as local governments do what conservatives want. Boise, for example, elected its city councilmembers at large, which reinforced its Democratic-leaning majority. So in 2020 Republican legislators passed a law ordering all cities with more than 100,000 residents which then meant only Boise to hold district elections, in hopes of capturing some seats. This may have unintended consequences: Two Republican-dominated cities in the Treasure Valley, Meridian and Nampa, have since passed the 100,000 threshold.

Bundy, however, leapfrogs over this contradiction. When I asked him if local control meant school boards and cities should be free to adopt Covid restrictions, he responded in classic libertarian fashion: The primary local control is the individual, over his own life and body. Theres no role of a city to come in and say, you cant come out of your homes unless you wear a mask.

Still, theres something inconsistent about his Keep Idaho Idaho slogan. He proposes to restore the original Idaho, to rescue it from the likes of third-generation Idahoan rancher Brad Little. But Bundy himself only moved to Idaho six-and-a-half years ago; he grew up on his fathers ranch in Nevada, then lived in Phoenix. The city had grown up around us there, he explained. I just didnt want to raise my children in the city. He and his wife visited state after state seeking a new home that, as he put it, still believes in freedom. But, he laments, the whole West is changing. I grew up in Nevada. I never thought it would be predominant Democrat. Even Utah has its struggle right now. Its converting over. In Salt Lake theres a gay mayor. Which is fine, but

When the Bundys reached Emmett, they knew it was the place we needed to be. Idaho is a beautiful land, but its also a beautiful idea. Idaho is basically what the United States was.

No one seems to expect him to win the primary; according to one political operative, an unreleased Republican poll showed him with single-digit support, McGeachin in the low 20s (pre-Trump endorsement) and Little above 60 percent. Bundys brother Ryan, running as an independent for governor of Nevada in 2018, won just 2 percent of that vote.

Even if Bundy were somehow nominated, he might not get help from the party. Weve got to unite around whoever wins the nomination, Luna told me. Even if its Bundy? Lunas expression darkened. Hes not a Republican.

Hes right, Im not the Republican they are, that is for danged sure, Bundy responded. I never will be. Im going to give the people of Idaho a decision are you Republican or are you conservative? Cause theyre not the same thing, especially in Idaho right now.

Newcomer that he is, Bundy represents a demographic trend that is transforming politics and life in the Gem State. Call it right flight. From the 1950s through the 1980s, California was what would now be called a purple state; it elected Republican governors half the time and voted R in nearly every presidential race. Since then, California has turned deep blue; Republicans loss there has been red Idahos gain. Fueled by migration from California and, to a lesser extent, Washington and Oregon, Idahos population has soared since 2015, rising faster than any other states.

This growth has been concentrated in Boise and the sprawling, conservative suburbs and exurbs west of it places such as Star, population 11,000, roughly twice what it was 10 years ago, and Meridian, the states second-largest city, which grew 1,157 percent, from fewer than 10,000 to nearly 120,000 residents, between 1990 and 2020. Population has also surged in the far northern Panhandle, which stretches up to the Canadian border. In the heyday of unionized mining and timber industries, the north was the states most Democratic region. Now its an incubator of armed militias and fiercely ideological local politics and the center of the decade-old Redoubt Movement, which promotes the Inland Northwest as a conservative Christian refuge.

Republican migrants to Idaho outnumber Democrats about two-to-one, according to a statewide annual survey of public attitudes conducted at Boise State University. Rather than importing the liberal politics of the coastal cities theyve left, many bring smoldering resentment of government regulation and socialism. They want to make sure people here know how evil liberals are, says Alicia Abbott, a political independent in Sandpoint, the largest town in far-northern Bonner County. Shes doing voter outreach for 97 Percent, an effort to counter the Three Percenters armed extremism.

Those who fear and those who cheer the effects of right flight agree on one point: The newcomers are pushing Idaho politics farther to the right. Like Bundy, they bring a converts zeal for the hallowed rugged individualism of their new home. New to Idaho, true to Idaho, proclaims the influential Idaho Freedom Foundation, which vets legislation and legislators for their conservative correctness. Are you a refugee from California, or some other liberal playground? Did you move to Idaho to escape the craziness? its website says. Welcome to Idaho.

A thriving local preparedness real estate industry is cashing in on right flight. One broker, Todd Savage of the PATRIOTS ONLY real estate firm Black Rifle Real Estate and a self-proclaimed conservative libertarian refugee from San Francisco, had to revise a listing that read, This property is for sale to Liberty / Constitutional Buyers ONLY because the Multiple Listing Service thought it suggested bias against immigrants. No big deal, Savage told me: Business is fantastic! This whole pandemic thing has really fueled land ownership in rural areas. A lot of my clients are in police, fire, and medical fields. They are coming here in droves. They dont care about real estate prices. They have money to burn.

Luna likewise speaks of sending out the political welcome wagon to these new Idahoans, to make sure they dont get the wrong idea about Republicans: We want to make sure the first time they hear about the Idaho Republican Party, its from one of our volunteers, not on TV or in the newspapers.

The question is, which Republican Party? The power centers in Boise and the Panhandle are not moving in step. The rift opened publicly in July when the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee unanimously passed an effusive resolution endorsing the John Birch Society and urged the state party to adopt it too. (It refused.) The Kootenai resolution also urged those who do not support our party platform to follow the example of Bill Brooks, and voluntarily disaffiliate from the Idaho Republican Party. Brooks, a Kootenai County commissioner, quit the party to protest its cozying up to the Birchers, though he still considers himself a staunch conservative. He sees it as symptomatic of a broader shift: We came here 20 years ago because it was the closest thing we could find to Norman Rockwell, he told me. Now people come looking for George Lincoln Rockwell the founder of the American Nazi Party.

Candidate lawn signs dot the side of the road. | Eric Scigliano

The newcomers may denounce the cities theyve left, but they bring a combative, impatient post-urban edge to once-mellow Idaho, an impatience that shows in politics as in the increasingly congested traffic in Idahos fast-growing cities.

Chris Fillios, who serves with Brooks on the Kootenai County Commission, feels the heat. Unlike Brooks, hes stayed in the Republican Party, even though he says hes been called communist, Marxist, socialist. Its not his politics that have changed, suggests Fillios, whos lived in Idaho for 21 years and spoke at the first local Tea Party rally. Its the party. Its a psychological mass movement. People are coming here for freedom, thinking, I dont have to mask, I dont have to be nice.

Most people dont understand that we control only the county departments budgets, he continued. They think were legislators. They want to know where we stand on gun rights and abortion. They want us to reflect their values.

Fillios succinctly summed up his partys paradoxical predicament: Weve become so politicized with this single-party dominance.

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Why Theres a Civil War in Idaho Inside the GOP - Swift Digital news agency

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Sarah Huckabee Sanders reports raising over $12.8 million total from more than 87,000 donors for her campaign for governor, with 66% of that being raised outside of the Natural State.

According to a release from the campaign, just $4.4 million of the donations came from around 11,000 Arkansans.

Sanders is now the only Republican running for office after other candidates, including Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin, dropped their bids for governor.

For the fourth quarter of 2021, during which time Sanders was running virtually unopposed for the GOP nomination, the campaign said they had brought in more than $1.6 million

After Rutledge left the race in early October, Sanders received a slew of endorsements in the race from Republican officials like Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Senators Tom Cotton and John Boozman.

Our campaigns record-breaking support across the state is a testament to the leader Arkansans want one who will invest in our kids education while ensuring parental control, create higher-paying jobs, and keep our communities safe, Sanders said. Clearly this message of opportunity for all is resonating, and together we will make our state the best place to live, work, and raise a family.

Currently, Sanders is the only candidate declared to run for the GOP nomination. Four candidates Anthony Bland, James Russell, Chris Jones and Supha Xayprasith-Mays are running for the Democratic party nomination, while Ricky Harrington is the lone Libertarian running for the office.

The general election for governor will be held on Nov. 8, 2022.

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Arkansas governor candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders raises over $12.8 million total for campaign, 66% from out of state donations - KNWA

For those who have considered throwing their proverbial hat into the ring and making a run for office in either the West Virginia State Senate or the West Virginia House of Delegates, now is the time to file the official candidate Certificate of Announcement for 2022 elections with the Secretary of States office.

According to information provided in the West Virginia Secretary of States 2022 Running For Office Guide, 17 of the states 34 Senate seats are up for election. This includes that of West Virginia Senate Minority Leader Stephen Baldwin (D), who represents Senate District 10.

Following the redistricting process in 2021, Senate District 10 now includes all of Greenbrier, Monroe, Nicholas and Summers counties and a portion of eastern Fayette County.

Those who have already filed their pre-candidacy intent to run, or certificate of announcement, for this four-year term District 10 seat include incumbent Baldwin (Ronceverte), Republican Vincent Scott Deeds (Renick), Libertarian Jonathon Fain (Alderson), Republican Harry Lee Forbes (Forest Hill), and Republican Thomas Perkins (Frankford), according to candidate filings with the Secretary of States office.

As for those interested in one of the newly formed 100 single-member Delegate District seats in the West Virginia House of Delegates, every two-year term seat will be on the ballot in 2022.

This includes District 46, which contains the portion of Greenbrier County east of the Route 219 corridor and a portion of southern Pocahontas County; District 47, which includes the portion of Greenbrier County west of the Route 219 corridor and a small portion of Monroe County; and District 48, which includes only a small portion of Greenbrier County down the Route 20 corridor to Quinwood.

Republican Mike Honaker (Lewisburg), recently appointed to his seat following the resignation of Barry Bruce, has filed his intent to run for a full-term for District 46.

Republican Todd Longanacre (Alderson) has also filed his intent to keep his House of Delegates Seat. He has registered to represent District 47.

The last day to file the candidate certificate of announcement is at midnight on January 29.

The West Virginia Daily News will provide updates on candidate filings as they become available.

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Now Is The Time To File Official Intent To Run For Public Office In 2022 - West Virginia Daily News

When you pay taxes, do you do so voluntarily? Or do you do so because you are forced to do so?

If you dont pay your taxes, what will happen? Will you be fined further? Harassed by the IRS or other government entities? Jailed?

The Libertarian Party is fundamentally opposed to the use of force to coerce people into doing anything. We think it is inherently wrong and should have no role in a civilized society.

Thus we think that government forcing people to pay taxes is inherently wrong.

Libertarians advocate for voluntary exchange, where people are free to make their own choices about what to do with their lives, their time, their bodies, their livelihood, and their dollars.

If Americans want to give money to the government for one reason or another, they should be free to do so. If Americans prefer to spend their money on other things, then they should be free to do that also.

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Taxes | Libertarian Party

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear argumentsonPresident BidenJoe BidenKentucky governor declares state of emergency after powerful storm Seven most vulnerable governors facing reelection in 2022 At least 20 states to increase minimum wage starting Saturday MORE's vaccine mandates on Friday, Jan. 7. Officially, the cases are about questions of federal power, administrative law and the capacity of Congress to delegate authority to agencies. But what is fundamentally driving the litigation is the libertarian myth one that may be embraced by the new conservative Supreme Court majority that freedom can be promoted by hamstringing the capacities of government.

Emergencies such as COVID-19 remind us why a powerful and effective state is indispensable. For most of human history, plagues were a misfortune that had to be patiently borne. Big Government has saved us from that. Massive federal spending induced a higher level of risky investment in COVID-19 vaccine research than the private sector would otherwise have been able to muster while enlisting the stupendous capabilities of Big Pharma. The work undertaken by those businesses built upon decades of state-funded basic science, especially in the expensive field of molecular biology. The speed with which the vaccines were developed is one of the most astounding accomplishments in history.

Another modern innovation is the use of government power to get people vaccinated. That has been going on for well over a century. It eliminated smallpox. It is why it has been years since any American child died of measles or polio. COVID-19 showed yet again that vaccine mandates work.

But conservatives as Ill shortly explain, this is the wrong word for them including some members of the Supreme Court, have been on a long-standing campaign to enfeeble the modern administrative state. A pandemic is the worst possible time to do that, but that hasnt stopped the lower court judges whose injunctions are being appealed.

In an important recent Niskanen Center report, Brink Lindsey observes that the capacity of government to do its job is one of the basic measures of development: Rich countries are all distinguished by having large, strong, and relatively capable states; poor countries, by contrast, are generally characterized by weak and frequently ineffective states, while those polities dysfunctional enough to be characterized as failed states are among the poorest and most miserable on Earth.

In the United States, after the bungled Iraq invasion and the 2008 financial crisis, declining state capacity has led to declining trust in government and a growing impatience with the often messy and muddled workings of democracy, Lindsey says. Rebuilding that capacity, he shows, is urgently necessary. Lindsey, who used to work at the libertarian Cato Institute, learned the limits of libertarianism from the inside.

Libertarians come in flavors, but their anti-vaccination ideology is consistently incoherent. The ones who emphasize rights have difficulty justifying the most basic functions of the state, such as taxation, but they understand that there cant be a right to infect others with deadly diseases. Others focus on the good consequences of economic liberty. But keeping people unvaccinated has no good consequences.

One lesson of the battles over COVID-19 (and ObamaCare before it) is that libertarianism rests on a deeper emotional source: a peculiar vision of the heroic solitary individual, self-sustained without any external support. I dont depend on anybody. I can take care of myself.

It is a delusion. Humans are communal animals. We are born helpless. We are not able to forage for ourselves at birth like lizards. Without settled practices of mutual aid, we would die within a few hours. It is because early hunter-gatherer groups cared for each others children 90,000 years ago that there were still humans 89,900 years ago. And, of course, if we survive into old age, we again become vulnerable and dependent.

Admirers of capitalism are fond of quoting the late biologist E.O. Wilsons dismissal of socialism: Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species. Ants can have systems in which individuals care only about the colony as a whole, but humans do best when they look after themselves. But Wilsons point can easily be overstated. Wilson thought we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring, but in fact humans have always lived in cooperative groups.

Humans need both self-reliance and cooperation. Doctrinaire libertarians, too, have the wrong species. (Libertarianism's growing popularity is probably a reaction to disappointment about institutions, which tempts people to fantasize that they can get along by themselves.) The burgeoning markets and diversity of lifestyles that libertarians laud can only happen in a state strong enough to operate autonomously from the powerful interests within it.

Freedom is an achievement. It is a collective achievement. Libertarianism tends to consider people in isolation from the systems in which they are embedded, but the risks to which they are vulnerable are often systemic risks. The notion of a life without vulnerability, dependence and need is an infantile fantasy.

That fantasy has captured the imagination of many conservative judges. They are prepared to do violence to facts and law in order to hamstring Bidens COVID-19 initiatives because they think that thispromotes freedom. But theres no freedom in a failed state.

One reason for Americas remarkable prosperity since the Great Depression has been the willingness of the judiciary to get out of the way and let government do its work. The new conservative majority on the Supreme Court appears to have a very different future in mind. Libertarian ideals lead them toward novel legal arguments that would cripple Americas capacity to protect itself from disasters like this one.

Today, Republicans call themselves conservative, but many are actually radicals who seem to hate the America they have inherited and want to replace it with a quasi-anarchist fantasy. They rail against socialism, but they resemble Stalin and Mao in their blithe willingness to accept quite a lot of death as the price of their utopia.

Andrew Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, is the author of Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed (St. Martins Press, forthcoming). Follow him on Twitter@AndrewKoppelman.

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The libertarian myth at the heart of legal challenges to Biden's vaccine mandates | TheHill - The Hill

Richard Wagner reports from Ballot Access News on Judge Lance E. Walkers (D.) decision today. Me.) Me.)Baines v. Bellows:

It places the Libertarian Party on 2022s ballot. The order permits Libertarians who wish to participate in the Libertarian Primary Election to obtain nomination signatures both from Libertarian voters and other independent voters.

Primary petitions must have 2,000 signatures from Governor. However, it wont be an easy task for Libertarians if they want to run for the Libertarian primary vote for Governor. The only people who will sign the Libertarian primary poll for Governor are about one-third the electorate. U.S. House Candidates need 1000 signatures. Libertarians who are running for the legislature will have no problem getting on the Libertarian primary list, as State Senate candidates require 100 signatures while State House candidates require 25.

Ballot access law can be complicated. While I do know a lot about First Amendment law and Im not an expert, heres a sample from the Nov.11 summary judgment opinion. Todays decision announces that the remedy is available for the constitutional violations identified.

This is a case about the legal-political infrastructure that an association of like-minded citizens must navigate in Maine to qualify for ballot access as a minor political party and that party candidates must navigate to demonstrate local public support for their candidacies. It is essential to determine whether Maines law governing minor political parties has been a sufficient safeguard to allow them to freely associate and not an impermissible buffer.to equal protection under the law .

Also, the following is my decision as of today:

The [Summary Judgment]In an Order I found that Maine law prohibits candidates from ballot-qualified minor party candidates from showing popular support from nomination signatures from within-district voters. This deprives them of the right to political association with other like-minded voters. I also determined that Defendants batch unenrollment policyunder which the Secretary of State (the Secretary) automatically unenrolls a partys members when the party loses ballot access for failure to enroll 10,000 votersviolated the associational rights of the Libertarian Party of Maine (the Party) where it retained in excess of 5,000 voters at the time.

More here:

"US District Court Puts Maine Libertarian Party on the Ballot for 2022" - Capitol Hill Times

This article is part of The Week's 20th anniversary section, looking back at how the world has changed since our first issue was published in April 2001.

Saint Paul considered himself an "apostle to the Gentiles" though he did not number among them, and it's in this sense I've joked that, as a journalist, I'm an apostle to the American right.

That is, I don't call myself a conservative, except temperamentally. I'm certainly not a Republican. Though I've recently had a few people dub me a centrist, my own label of choice is libertarian, and I make all the usual protests to my progressive friends that we libertarians are not properly located on the right wing of American politics.

But I did grow up there. I remember thinking it was vital George W. Bush win the 2000 election, and the presidential campaign where I interned eight years later was not within the Libertarian Party but a vehemently rebuffed libertarian incursion into the GOP. Much of my writing today is for or about the right. It's still familiar territory but it seems to grow less recognizable by the day.

Over the past two decades, which correspond almost exactly to the post-9/11 era, the American right has changed remarkably. In 2001, Bush was president, the literal heir of the political heir of Ronald Reagan. He'd been elected talking about free markets and free trade, "compassionate conservatism," and a "humble" foreign policy. Coming off the sexual scandals of the Clinton era, Republicans cast themselves as the party of virtue. The party of artless patriotism and family values. The party of principle, of grown-ups, of Mayberry and small farmers and Wall Street capitalists and country clubs. The party seated squarely on Reagan's three-legged stool of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and defense hawks.

That is not the American right of 2021. Each leg of the stool has been thoroughly reshaped.

Perhaps most visible are the changes to the first leg, fiscal conservatism a category I'll broaden to include meta-level ideas about the size and scope of government; the legitimacy and value of state regulation and social welfare programs; and attitudes toward large corporations, international trade, and the market economy. Two decades ago, the right was still in thrall to the fusionist consensus, the partnership between conservatives and libertarians built on a then-shared vision of small government, at least where economic matters were concerned. To borrow the memorable phrasing of Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform in 2001, the fusionist goal was not "to abolish government," but to "reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

The right no longer wants a drownable government. Republicans and libertarians are no longer, as Reagan argued in 1975, "traveling the same path," because the median Republican is now more an economic populist than a fiscal conservative.

I'm painting in broad strokes here, I know, and there's no denying that tax cuts still thrill the GOP heart or that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is still trying "to get as right-of-center an outcome as possible." Nevertheless, the differences are stark. A YouGov survey of Republican voters earlier this year found nothing like the free-market orthodoxy of the past. Instead, these voters expressed wariness of foreign trade, with four in 10 saying they think it hurts the American economy and six in 10 affirming it harms our job market.

Gone as well is deep skepticism of "entitlements," at least for certain favored demographics; now, two in three say "it's more important to keep Social Security benefits at current levels even if it means raising payroll taxes." A 2020 Public Agenda/USA TODAY/Ipsos poll found similar trends, reporting majority Republican support for state and federal job creation via infrastructure projects, incentives for domestic industry, and reduction of educational costs. Most Republican voterswant to raise the minimum wage and increase regulation of tech companies.

"All the things that defined economic thinking before [former President Donald] Trump are now a complete split," said Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Henry Olsen, who managed the YouGov study. The late Rush Limbaugh agreed: "Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore," the radio host told a caller in 2019. "All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it's been around." Spend away, Limbaugh argued, because "the great jaws of the deficit have not bitten off our heads and chewed them up and spit them out," and perhaps they never will.

Even capitalism has lost its seat of honor, particularly as large corporations learn that touting progressive platitudes in glossy ads is a good way to get money or boycotts by right-wing pundits and the Twitter trends and headlines they bring. "If the right wants [to push back on this 'woke capitalism']," contended a reader letter The American Conservative's Rod Dreher featured on his popular blog in May, "then it has to be prepared to inflict economic costs on big business, including antitrust action, regulation, support for big labor, ending tax breaks, and a whole host of issues. This is a complete anathema to the fusionist, business, and donor class of the party, but, if implemented, it would be highly effective."

It would not be highly palatable to the conservative movement that was, but that movement is fading now. Fusionism is over, at least among those with real power. McConnell is labeling corporate political statements "economic blackmail" by a "woke parallel government." The "libertarian moment" has passed in the GOP, some folk libertarian impulses notwithstanding, and I don't expect the clock to tick toward it again in the foreseeable future. The right of today is entirely comfortable with a spendy, activist government, an indebted and mercantilist Washington that wields regulatory power for ideological ends.

Trump's success with hardline immigration policies is symptomatic of this shift. In the early 2000s, there was a real diversity of opinions on immigration in the GOP. There were hardliners, yes, but also Republicans who took a more open approach, casting immigration reform as a matter of expanding the labor pool for American businesses, simplifying federal bureaucracy, and welcoming newcomers many fleeing tyranny or persecution to pursue their free-market dreams. The tenure of former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who wanted to pause even legal immigration "until we no longer have to press one for English and two for any other language," coincided with the Senate passage of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, which included a path to citizenship for immigrants who had been in the country illegally for five years or longer. Though it never became law, the bill had Republican sponsors and strong bipartisan support.

When Elin Gonzlez was taken from his family for deportation to Cuba in the final days of the Clinton administration, Rudy Giuliani (then the Republican mayor of New York City, since a close Trump ally) slammedtheborder control agents responsible. He called them "storm troopers using guns" to "rip a boy away from a family that is caring for him, and a boy who has at least indicated an interest in growing up in democracy and freedom." And as recently as 2013, the "gang of eight" immigration reform effort, which also outlineda path to citizenship, counted Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) among its numbers. Rubio has since repudiated the project and taken a more restrictive stance, and Graham made a similar move.

It no longer makes sense to speak of immigration as part of this first, fiscal leg of the stool. The modern GOP wants to dramatically expand the federal government where border security is concerned, and anyway, immigration policy is mostly culture war now. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a skilled navigator of the flow of right-wing opinion, this past spring claimed "the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate ... [with] more obedient voters from the Third World." He denied he was speaking of "a racial issue" or "white replacement theory" while yet decrying "change[s to] the population" which "dilute the political power" of people like him. Immigration in a discourse like that is better located in the second leg, where we turn to social issues.

The culture war didn't begin in the last 20 years, of course, but its terms of engagement have changed. (Those changes aren't exclusively attributable to the right far from it but given the focus of this article, that's where my attention will be.) So much analysis of the right's approach to social issues in the past five years has focused on white evangelicals and their relationship to Trump. That's understandable, and I've written plenty on evangelicals myself, but it can also obscure another key phenomenon: the rise of the post-religious right.

Going to church didn't stop people from voting for Trump. On the contrary, among professing Christian voters, higher church attendance generally correlated with more Trump votes in 2020. But fewer and fewer people are involved in houses of worship. Membership rates for churches, synagogues, and mosques held roughly steady, between 70 and 75 percent, from before World War II until the new millennium began. Over these past two decades, it plummeted and is now below half for the first time on record.

And here's the thing: Going to church may make a Trump vote more likely, but it's a vote that comes from a different set of beliefs than a Trump vote cast by a member of the irreligious right. Polling has found the "more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration," wrote The New York Times' conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, in 2018. The differences were particularly sharp on matters of race and racism, Douthat observed, with "[s]ecularized Trump voters" pairing "an inchoate economic populism with strong racial resentments." Unchurched Republicans were nearly three times as likely as churchgoers to say their whiteness is "very important" to their identity.

It may be tempting for those outside the right to dismiss this evolution as irrelevant if the presidential votes are the same regardless. That would be a mistake. As French conservative Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote for The Week in 2017, "[i]f you didn't like the Christian right, you'll really hate the post-Christian right," because "the Christian gospel's relentless focus on the intrinsic dignity of every human being, and on Christ's focus on the outcast and the outsider, at least can put a brake" on racism and other types of identitarianism.

As the right secularizes, that constraint is fading. A post-religious right has no reason to attempt to see inherent worth in its political opponents. It needn't have "opponents," in fact, just enemies. It can shrug at "s--thole countries"and "grab 'em by the pussy" and anything cruel or foul or even illegal as long as the other side is on the receiving end, because winning is what matters. All is transactional. All is consequentialist. Own the libs. Claim the power. Revel in the thrill. (A headline at American Greatness, entirely sincere: "I won't take the [COVID-19] vaccine because it makes liberals mad.")

The trend I'm describing here is not universalized on the right, and it doesn't necessarily alter Republican policy preferences (immigration is a notable exception), just as it didn't necessarily alter voters' decisions about Trump. On familiar culture war fronts, like abortion, LGBTQ issues, and religious liberty, the right-wing position since 2001 has stayed fairly consistent or on gay marriage moved left. But the tenor is different. It's more tribal, less principled. Less about deeply held religious conviction and more about cosseting fears, indulging anger, and punishing the out-group. "Recent party polling indicates that, more than any issue, Republican voters crave candidates who 'won't back down in a fight with the Democrats,'" The New York Times reportedthis year.

It turns out "secularization isn't easing political conflict," The Atlantic's Peter Beinart has written. "It's making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum." As religiosity declines, the American right is growing more utilitarian, more openly rude, reactionary, and racist.

Last, we come to foreign policy, the stool's third leg. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush promptly dropped all that humility stuff and decided it actually was "the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'this is the way it's got to be.'"Neoconservatism was ascendant, and the United States invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq, and embarked on doomed projects of regime change, nation building, and regional transformation.

Many of those military misadventures are still underway in some form, but the most recent Republican president won, in part, because of his explicit condemnation of their beginning. Trump's supporters cast him as a foreign policy renegade, a strong innovator who could end endless wars and achieve new diplomatic triumphs through his unparalleled deal-making prowess. They touted "his ability to identify America's national interest clearly and pursue it without regard to outdated ideological investments."

It's true Trump wasn't concerned with outdated ideological investments, but only because he and so much of the American right today has little in the way of ideological investments in foreign policy at all. Neoconservative foreign policy was horrific, but it had an internal logic. The Jacksonian mood of GOP foreign policy today, by contrast, is impulsive and incoherent. It decries permanent warfare but is not opposed to war in any principled sense.

Indeed, Trump never actually ended a war, and he blew up more major diplomatic accords than he engineered. Once-promising overtures to North Korea were wasted. The Iran nuclear deal withdrawal was borne of ridiculous hubris. Perhaps the most important pact of Trump's presidency, the U.S.-brokered deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, does not directly concern the United States. His foreign policy decisions sometimes seemed to be determined by whether he'd had more fun golfing with the Republican lawmaker arguing for military action or the one arguing against it.

Here's the crux of the matter: Suppose another 9/11-style attack happened in the United States and, in the aftermath, we learned the perpetrators had a host country arrangement like that of al Qaeda with the Taliban in Afghanistan. We have 20 years of hindsight. We know how costly, counterproductive, and tragic the war in Afghanistan was. We know it was the start of a whole slate of regional wars and smaller military interventions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. We know the futility displayed in its conclusion.

Yet for all that knowledge, my belief is that if another GOP president pushed for war in the wake of our hypothetical terrorist attack, most of the right would be raring to go. That includes many Trump supporters who liked his criticism of Bush-era foreign policy. They're not antiwar so much as tired of these wars and eager to redirect attention and resources to economic populism and culture wars at home.

Likewise inconsistent is the new right's attitude toward the intelligence establishment and law enforcement more generally. On the one hand, the GOP that passed the Patriot Act is not the GOP of today, in which conspiracy theories about the "deep state" cast suspicion on the CIA, NSA, FBI even the FDA. Trump's rhetoric toward these agencies was often antagonistic, and when the former president's fans stormed the Capitol Building in January, they attacked police defending the complex, seriously injuring many officersand possibly contributing to one's death.

On the other hand, that same rioting crowd at the Capitol had "Blue Lives Matter" flags. Respect for the military and law enforcement remains strong in a milieu where patriotic correctness flourishes. For the patriotically correct, "[b]elieving in American exceptionalism means that anything less than chest-thumping jingoism is capitulation," wrote the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh at The Washington Post. In this perspective, Nowrasteh continued, "[u]nionized public employees who can't be fired are bad at their jobs and are more interested in increasing their own power than fulfilling their public duties, except if they are police or Border Patrol officers, who are unselfishly devoted to their jobs." (Giuliani's "storm troopers" line would never publicly pass Republican lips today, and not only because of swings on immigration.)

To be clear, I'm glad of some of the policy outcomes newly complicated Republican views on law enforcement have produced, like the First Step Act and the permitted lapse of certain features of the Patriot Act in March of 2020. Yet where protection of privacy, in particular, is concerned, I don't seeburgeoning civil libertarianism so much as self-protection. Trump didn't want to rein in the FISA court because it had rubberstamped tens of thousands of surveillance requests, rejecting a mere 11 of nearly 34,000 between 1979 and 2013. No, his objection was its approval of surveillance of his campaign. The broader incongruity of right-wing attitudes here similarly pairs, by some measures, some decline in authoritarianism with a spike intribalism and paranoia.

Beyond all these shifts in policy and philosophy, maybe the biggest evolution of the American right over the past 20 years is the decline of the conservative temperament.

Conservatism, as it was once understood, is "not an ideology or a creed," David Brooks explained at The New York Timesin 2007, "but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change."

In this sense, conservatism is marked by prudence and restraint. It cultivates institutional stability and regard for the wisdom of the past. It preaches a modest patriotism, not the bombast of patriotic correctness, and abhors gaudiness, indecency, and waste. "Temperamental conservatism understands that in order to preserve anything, it must be kept within certain limits," wrote Daniel Larison for The American Conservative. "It recognizes that resources are finite and can be exhausted by current generations at the expense of posterity."

This is a conservatism with which I can identify. It is also a conservatism dangerously dwindled on the American right.

No longer is temperamental conservatism in healthy tension with progressivism's constant forward push. Rather, as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote of Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) the day after the Jan. 6 Capitol sedition, too much of the right today is "like people who know the value of nothing, who see no frailty around them, who inherited a great deal an estate built by the work and wealth of others and feel no responsibility for maintaining the foundation because pop gave them a strong house, right? They are careless inheritors of a nation, an institution, a party that previous generations built at some cost."

Instead of prudence, profligacy. Instead of serious politics, entertainment. Instead of virtue, victory. The change is so significant I'm rarely willing to use the word "conservative" to talk about the American right, because so little of it is conservative at all.

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2 decades of right turns - The Week Magazine