Category Archives: Libertarian

Former Police Commissioner William Gross endorsed Annissa Essaibi George today.

Throughout her time as a City Councilor, she has shown up, at all hours of the day and night, and met people exactly where they are - in the neighborhood, at community events or civic meetings, and even at the station - to have thoughtful, honest conversations

Gross formally declared himself an AEG'er during a tour of Mattapan Square.

The Greater Boston Libertarian Party, which exists, plans a demonstration at 1 p.m. on Friday, May 21 in Mattapan Square, along with City Council candidates Jacob Urea, Domingos DaRosa and Kevin Reed in "protest of the City of Boston's many aggressions against black and brown business owners."

Michelle Wu talked about her time at Harvard Law, including with Prof. Elizabeth Warren, as well as about campaign issues, in an online press conference with Harvard and other Boston-area student journalists.

State Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, who earlier had endorsed David Halbert for one of the four at-large council seats, yesterday endorsed Ruthzee Louijeune for one of the seats, leaving her with two open spots on her at-large endorsement card:

Whether as an attorney representing families in housing court or an advocate for our kids in Boston Public Schools, Ruthzee has always used her expertise to give back to the community that raised her. She has the values, the smarts, and the conviction to meet the urgency of this moment and help lead us toward a more equitable Boston.

NECN's Sue O'Connell talks to Kim Janey.

Read the rest here:

Election roundup: Essaibi George gets the nod from Gross; Libertarians jump into council race - Universal Hub

Peter Thiel appeared at a Zoom event one evening this past April in a familiar pose: his face sat tense and almost twitchy, and yet his voice radiated authority and calm. Even by Thiels rarefied standards, his main interviewer that evening, in a conversation hosted by the Nixon Foundation, was impressive: Mike Pompeo, Trumps former Secretary of State and a potential Presidential contender, who was treating the billionaire with deference while asking him the broadest of questions about the future of the U.S. and China. You spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the technology fight between the West and the ideas that the Chinese Communist Party puts forwardwhether thats disinformation or the capacity to move digits around the world, Pompeo said to Thiel, before asking the investor how the two powers compared, technologically. For anyone interested in who will hold power in the Republican Party in the near future, the event made for a stark tableau of clout. Pompeos eyes narrowed attentively as he listened to Thiel; the Trump national-security adviser, Robert OBrien, who had also been invited to ask questions, was nodding appreciatively beneath a formidable white coif.

Most of us, these days, operate downstream from one billionaire or another, and the most interesting and destabilizing parts of the Republican Party are operating downstream from Thiel, whose net worth Bloomberg recently estimated at more than six billion dollars. Eric Weinstein, who coined the term intellectual dark Web, is the managing director at Thiel Capital. (Man of many hats, Thiel said not long ago, when asked to describe Weinsteins role within his empire.) In 2015 and 2016, Thiel made a critical three-hundred-thousand-dollar donation to the campaign of Josh Hawley, who was then running for Missouri attorney general; once in office, Hawley had to answer questions about whether his announcement of an antitrust investigation into Google had anything to do with Thiel, an avowed opponent of the search giant. This year, Thiel has given ten million dollars to an outside group funding the Ohio Senate campaign of J. D. Vance, the venture capitalist who became famous as the author of the 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, and a voice on behalf of the parts of America that globalization had left behind. (He is now a regular on Tucker Carlsons Fox News show.) Thiel donated ten million dollars to the Arizona U.S. Senate campaign of his own aide, Blake Masters, who co-authored one of his books and has mostly worked for Thiel since he graduated from Stanford Law, a decade ago; he gave roughly two million dollars to the failed 2020 Senate campaign of the hard-right anti-immigrationist Senate candidate Kris Kobach. There is no obvious party line among the Thielists, but they tend to share a couple of characteristics. They are interested in championing outr ideas and causes, and they are members of an American lite who nevertheless emphasize, in their politics, how awful lites have been for ordinary Americans.

The American right just now is in a state of nervous incoherence. Even the most basic questions (for democracy or against?) seem to trigger panicked, multidimensional calculations, with eyes always cast uncertainly at Mar-a-Lago. The temptation is to say that some of this uncertainty is ideological in naturethat, a decade ago, the organizing principle of conservatism was libertarianism (embodied by much of the Tea Party). Trump elevated a long-dormant nationalism that briefly energized the Party, and, after his loss, politicians are left trying to sort out which model still works. Thiel himself came out of the libertarian movement: he backed Ron Paul for President twice, and he donated lavishly to Pauls campaigns. But, like Hawley, Vance, and Kobach, Thiel developed a much more prominent role in service of Trumps nationalism, perhaps most of all in the address he gave in 2016 to the Republican National Convention, in which he seemed bewildered by the fact that the astonishing prosperity he saw every day in Silicon Valley was not evident in Sacramento. Wait, wasnt Peter Thiel a libertarian? Reason magazine, the movements Bible, wondered in 2020. Thiel and the Thielists are a through line, from the Partys recent past to its likely future; their persistence suggests that Trumps nationalism didnt represent as extreme a departure from the Partys prior libertarianism as it appeared to.

Before Peter Thiel was a billionaire, he had the biographical points of a pretty conventional Gen-X young Republican. He was born in 1967, in Frankfurt, to a German family that followed his chemical-engineer father to jobs around the globe before settling in Northern California. As a teen-ager, Thiel was a mathematics prodigy who says he was comfortable taking contrarian positions early, supporting Ronald Reagan and opposing drug legalization in middle school. As an undergraduate, he founded the combative, conservative Stanford Review, and, after law school and a stint as an appellate clerk for a Reagan appointee, Thiel co-authored The Diversity Myth, in 1995, a book decrying mounting political correctness on campus. His career had scarcely begunafter a stint at a New York law firm, hed founded a small tech-investment companybut Thiel already had a fully formed political identityhis rsum wasnt far from what you get from many Republican congressional candidates.

Silicon Valley was booming during the late nineties, and it did not take Thiel very long to have a huge hit, when he founded PayPal with a half-dozen friends and acquaintances. Thiels friends, George Packer wrote, in 2011, are, for the most part, like him and one another: male, conservative, and super-smart in the fields of math and logical reasoning. Thiel reportedly came out as gay to his friends in 2003 (he would be outed publicly by Gawker some years later, and went on to sponsor a lawsuit against the company). Thiel co-founded the defense-and-intelligence firm Palantir Technologies, in 2004; that same year, he became Facebooks first outside investor. Thiel donated to John McCains 2008 Presidential campaign after supporting Ron Paul in the primary, but his Republicanism received less attention than the fanciful, long-arc libertarian projects in which he invested: the Seasteading Institute (which aimed to build politically autonomous cities on platforms in international waters), the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (which wanted to insure that artificial intelligence was friendly to humans), and the Thiel Fellowship (which supported exceptionally talented young people in creating startup companies, if they skipped, dropped out of, or took time off from college).

In 2012, Blake Masters, then a Stanford Law student, took a course on startups that Thiel taught, and published the notes on his Tumblr page, where they became a phenomenon. By 2014, Thiel and Masters had published the notes as a book, Zero to One, offering theories on startups and advice for founders. Reviewing it, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic thought it might be the best business book Ive read. Thiel and Masters emphasize the breadth of forces arrayed against any founder: In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle. Actually, if American business is going to succeed, we are going to need hundreds, or even thousands of miracles. This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.

In between the slightly batty charts (one distinguishes between the definite optimism of societies like the U.S. in the fifties and sixties and the indefinite pessimism of others, like present-day Europe), Thiel and Masters offer a vision of the founder that is patterned after Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged, in which imaginative individuals are forced to fight through a society that is bureaucratized and stultifying in all its institutional forms. They wonder why the educational system compels people to strive for mediocre competence in many things, instead of trying to be uniquely great at one thing, and bemoan the way large organizations stifle ideas. In Washington, libertarianism tends to take the form of a stark anti-government position, usually putting Republicans on the side of large businesses, which want to reduce their tax burden. But Thiels more elemental libertarianism casts big business as an opponent of progress. (The seeming paradox of Josh Hawley and other members of an ideologically pro-business party routinely calling for the breakup of Google, Amazon, and Facebook on antitrust grounds may not be a paradox at allit may simply be Thielist.) The deepest quality of Thiel and Masterss book is its outsized vision of what a heroic individuala foundercan do. In a late chapter, they argue that successful founders tend to have the opposite qualities of those seen in the general populationthat they are, in some basic ways, differentand compare them to kings and figures of ancient mythology. In a section on Steve Jobs, Thiel and Masters write:

Apples value crucially depended on the singular vision of a particular person. This hints at the strange way in which the companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more modern. A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades. Paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracies staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time horizons. The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.

The heightened vision of what a single leader can do, the veneration for more ancient and direct forms of leadership, the praise for authoritative decision-making and disdain for bureaucraciesits a short hop from here to the Donald Trump of I alone can fix it.

During Trumps 2016 Presidential campaign, Thiel appeared to be developing some alliances with the far right: BuzzFeedNews later reported that he had hosted a dinner that included a prominent white nationalist, Kevin DeAnna; that story also noted that Thiel had backed the startup of a prominent far-right blogger named Curtis Yarvin, known online as Mencius Moldbug. But, by the summer of 2020, Thiel, like many other Republican funders, had tired of the President. The Wall Street Journal reported that he was not backing Trumps relection campaign, which he found so chaotic he privately termed it the S.S. Minnow.

By Thiels own account, his libertarianism had evolved. When I was in college in the nineteen-eighties I used to think that libertarianism was a timeless and eternal thing. It was just these absolute truths for all places in all times. And Ive now come to think that there are certain contexts when its more true or less true, Thiel said, in a long interview with Dave Rubin, the comedian and libertarian commentator, who is a mainstay of the intellectual dark Web. If you had an incredibly well-functioning government and politics, he went on, libertarian principles seemed less relevant. When Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged, in the nineteen-fifties, it felt like it was crazy, Thiel said. America was booming, and yet the books were so bleak, so pessimistic. It was so busted, so broken. When I first read them in the late eighties it still felt pretty crazy. And then, the last decade, it in many ways felt much more correct. He remembered the vision of Detroit that Rand had conjured: Detroit was sort of falling apart, someone was farming in the middle of the cityand this was 1957, it was sort of a crazy thing, and its disturbingly more true today.

For a long time, Thiels venture firm had a slogan on its Web site: We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. Even if many elements of Thiels politics were not a good match for Trumps, they both were sure that the outlook was bleak. In 2011, Thiel published an essay in National Review titled The End of the Future. In a 2018 debate with his old PayPal friend Reid Hoffman, now more famous as the co-founder of LinkedIn, Thiel suggested that differing views on the technological future shaped political categories. Thiel said, The rough political mapping I would give on this tripartite division is, the centrist establishment in this country is accelerationistthat would be Clinton, that would be the Bush family. Obama was broadly in this camp. Theres a non-establishment leftthat would be inequality, which is the Sanders line. Then the non-establishment right, which Trump represented, thats stagnation. Make America Great Again is very offensive to people in Silicon Valley, because youre telling people in Silicon Valley that the futures not progressing.

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The Rise of the Thielists - The New Yorker

T

he Government was today accused of nutty nanny statism with its plan to ban junk food adverts on TV before 9pm and a total ban online.

Despite railing against the Nanny State in the past, Boris Johnson plans to bring in a sweeping ban on junk food adverts.

The proposal to curb the advertising of fatty foods was revealed in a briefing document that accompanied Tuesdays Queens Speech.

Matthew Lesh, head of research at libertarian think tank the Adam Smith Institute, said: The ad ban plan is nutty nanny statism. It will do nothing to reduce obesity while savagely striking at struggling hospitality businesses and hurting the public.

The measures will apply to a shockingly large array of foods. It will be illegal to advertise online British favourites like fish and chips, scotch eggs or even a Full English breakfast; takeaways would be unable to post images of their food online; descriptive words like delicious will be banned.

Thousands of restaurants, which have been kept alive thanks to online delivery, will no longer be able to advertise online to find new customers, hitting small businesses the hardest.

Advertising Association chief executive Stephen Woodford said they were dismayed at the Governments decision that will damage business and put jobs at risk.

He added: The Governments own evidence shows that such measures will be ineffective in tackling obesity. The country needs balanced, consistent and well-evidenced policy interventions that will make a positive difference.

Christopher Snowdon, from free-market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs told the Standard: There still is no satisfactory legal definition of junk food. The kind of products that will be banned from advertising are not the kind of things normal people consider to be unhealthy or consider to be junk. Its going to affect everybody from the largest corporations to the local bakery, the local wedding cake maker, the local sweet shop.

The Government really needs to - at the very least - water down these proposals to protect what is the countrys largest and most important industry. Its a huge infringement of their free speech basically. This is really the last thing business needs, particularly at the moment.

Firms with more than 250 employees will be forced to list calories onfood - although plans to include drinks were ditched.

A new incentive scheme called Fit Miles will look at paying people to eat better and exercise more.

He said people were being sold a pig in a poke that it will only affect large hamburger companies, adding: Its not, its going to affect thousands and thousands of businesses large and small.

The Prime Minister abandoned his very libertarian view on food choices after contracting Covid-19 and ending up in intensive care last year. He admitted he had been too fat and his weight was likely a factor in him needing ICU.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan brought in similar policies at City Hall by outlawing adverts showing food and drinks with high fat, salt and sugar on the Tube, Overground and bus network.

Britain is the second fattest European nation and obesity is thought to be factor that could have worsened the countrys death toll during the pandemic.

The Prime Ministers official spokesman said the ban would be sensible and proportionate. Asked if it was possible to fine those who contravene the ban, he replied: Yes, were working with providers, were working with companies to make sure that this is something that can be done sensibly and proportionately.

Asked if a bakery selling cakes and pasties could not have an Instagram account, he replied: The consultation response will set out how we are going to do this sensibly and proportionately.

He said they would set out very clearly to businesses what would be required of them.

Read the rest here:

Government accused of nutty nanny statism over junk food ad ban - Evening Standard

Gas prices and inflation shoot up, there is trouble in Iran, crime is increasing and we have commodity shortages, "economic malaise," problems at the border and lines at gas stations. Wow, that visit between Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter is starting to make sense. And, if you can believe it, music today is even worse than disco.

Things are trending so badly that even Jimmy Carter is starting to compare Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter. Geico should be running commercials saying: "You can save 15% by switching back to Trump."

When asked at the border by Fox News reporters why they are coming here, illegals say they want to "escape socialism" in despot-led countries like Venezuela. Obviously, border crossers are not keeping up with politics in America.

For the kids out there, Jimmy Carter was a nice, old-line Democrat who became president after a scoundrel (Nixon) was president. Then people realized that they had made a mistake. Right now I would happily trade a few mean tweets for $1.95 per gallon gas and lower taxes. And Trump has been quiet. Personally, I am starting to believe he is not going to release his tax returns.

Trump had great policies, but his brash personality wore on people. Still, he was a refreshing change. Trump was like being married to a nymphomaniac: fun for about a month.

Jimmy Carter was a devout Baptist; he did not chase women or drink. And he taught Trump something. You can be a one-term president, but that does not mean you can't continue to be a pain in the butt when you are out of office.

The economy boomed under Clinton and Trump. It did not under Carter and Obama. The economics lesson is clear to those paying attention: marital fidelity is not good for business.

Like Biden, Carter opposed busing, and, also like Biden, Carter now lectures the rest of us on race and calls us "racist." Nothing is better than two old men from slave states lecturing us on how to treat Blacks.

Like Carter, Biden wants to raise taxes that will hurt the economy. Tax increases are where the supposed "government of the people and by the people" stick it to the people to support their own big government.

Both Biden and Carter thought they could regulate citizens' behavior through dictates from a heavy-handed central government in D.C. Carter lowered the speed limits on highways to 55 mph while he flew around on jets and rode in limousines. Biden wants to outlaw menthol cigarettes. Wasn't that the type Obama smoked?

Carter thought he could tell Americans to turn their heat down and put on a sweater. Biden tells everyone to wear a mask unless you are already fully brainwashed by the left and/or support a 50% tax increase.

Like Jimmy Carter, Biden is old and living well. Lifelong politician Biden bikes, swims naked and watches what he eats. He takes care of himself, as is evidenced by his personal net worth.

I do like the comment that Carter made on "Meet the Depressed" with Chuck Todd. He says he does not send emails because the NSA sees them. I like his libertarian bent, but it is also probably because he does not know how to work a computer from Plains, Georgia.

Both Biden and Carter really felt that government had the answers to all our problems. They could tell us what to do, how to live and what to eat. I have a buddy who drinks, eats a cheeseburger a day, supports Republicans and drives a Hummer. I feel like maybe I am supposed to turn him in to the government.

Contact Ron Hart, a syndicated satirist, author and TV/radio commentator, at Ron@RonaldHart.com, or visit http://www.RonaldHart.com.

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Hart: Biden and Carter are two peanuts in the same shell game - Chattanooga Times Free Press

As I prepare my mail in ballot for the Republican primary, I remember my vote in the fall and my feeling that the Republican platform was still closer to my beliefs in free enterprise and the rule of law that I did not see the Democrats supporting.

I was then shocked and insulted by the president and Mike Kelly's attempts to disenfranchise my vote, the most sacred act in our democracy. Let's be clear, Donald Trump needed no help in losing the election.

Still, both parties are too far out to represent most of us that believe in freedom and the will of the people. Maybe it's time to consider a different path. Take a look at the Libertarian party. Their platform includes less government and taxes, personal freedom andresponsibility, free enterprise and civil liberties. The Libertarian presidential candidate, Jo Jorgensen, was on the ballot in all 50 states and was the only candidate to visit Meadville during the campaign.

So why don't you hear and know more about them? Follow the money. See who is getting the paybacks now that Joe Biden is president and who the Republicans would now be indebted to.

If we are to change, it has to come from the grassroots, the old silent majority. If it takes a new party to do it, I'm for it!

THOMAS MATTIS

Meadville

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LETTER: It's time to look for another party - Meadville Tribune

by Paul Moomjeanpaulmoomjean@yahoo.com

I was sitting in a cigar shop the other day, enjoying a stogie with a buddy I had not seen in over a year, when he looked at me and asked, What the hell is a Republican today?

Having been a former GOP member myself from 1999 to 2002 and labeling myself a libertarian conservative most of my life, I really couldnt tell him what a Republican is today. I just know Im not it at all.

Is it a member of a group of rioters led by a man in a bear suit who lives at home with his mother? Is it what Bill Maher once said, old white men taking care of my money? Or is it some balance of both? Recently Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney have been facing backlash for holding the line against the banned-from-social media and former President Donald Trump, causing a series of hot mic drops and corporate booing. Yet in a conservative world with no balanced common sense, the country doesnt look to have another voice in the Congress unless it wears a bear outfit.

Right now, Cheney is at war with her own party. On May 5 she tweeted: History is watching us. We must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution or join Trumps crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have.

This set off the degenerates of the party, and they are looking to remove her from any form of power, including a May 2021 conference where she would be the third-highest-ranking GOP member. Remember, this is the daughter of maybe the most powerful republican of our modern era, former Vice President Dick Cheney. To think she could be removed from a seat at the table because she believes what every state also does, that Joe Biden won the election fairly, shows how far the party has dropped.

Sadly, the GOP is now a party of violent, anti-voting-law-creating, gun-loving, conspiracy-theory nuts, hellbent on being cruel to transgender people, minority races and millennial and Gen Z snowflakes. Recently, the GOP had Rep. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is Black, speak after Bidens address to the nation. He said America isnt racist, and while America isnt racist, its not entirely not racist. The talking points of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, two very privileged white males on Fox News, seem to be the official talking points of the new unhinged GOP. This is the party that has lost the war on abortion, gay marriage, gun rights and the nuclear family. Now they might prop up Caitlyn Jenner for governor of California, while systematically denying transgender people the respect they ask in pronoun assessment. And the reason the GOP lost everything is because they listened to Hannity and Carlson. And now the next wave is Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles from Daily Wire. These people want ratings. To those still in the GOP, in the words of Malcom X, Youve been had! Ya been took! Ya been hoodwinked! Bamboozled!

Conservatism has become angry, like an impotent Clint Eastwood movie character, upset that the world grew up without their permission. To think that characters like Carlson and Shapiro are upset Derek Chauvin is going to jail after being found guilty of murdering George Floyd is downright wrong and insincere. Theres no way they watched that video and saw Chauvin as the man in the right unless they are clearly racist (which I dont believe) or just fighting for noise in the YouTube and 24/7 news cycle vacuum.

Conservatism and the GOP have become the party of whiteness. Its no longer a party with any ideals. It simply wants white people mad and hopes that its 75 million members will one day be enough to take back the presidency.

Not everyone is doing this. Conservatives George Will, Michael Medved and Mitt Romney are trying to be the practical people. But with George Will leaving the GOP, Medved being fired from Salem Radio for not signing a Trump loyalty contract, and Mitt Romney being booed by Mormons in Utah recently, only to remind them he was their GOP nominee in 2012, the party looks bleak, sad and scary.

So what the hell is a Republican today? Hell if I know.

Read more from the original source:

PURPLE IS THE NEW PARTY | What is a Republican today? - Ventura County Reporter

Starting a column with a disclaimer is weak. But the law I (mildly) challenge here has passionate defenders across the ideological spectrum and throughout the media. Whats more, I know the lawyers on the other side of this issue, and they are as good as they get. Those who fight them have about as much success as a masked monster squaring off against the Scooby Doo Gang. So before I go any farther down the foolish path of self-destruction, let me be absolutely clear on three fundamental points:

(1) transparency in government through access to the governments records is critical to constitutional order and the democratic process;

(2) the right of the people to watch the watchwomen and men in government should be inviolate; and

(3) there can be no tolerance for government officials who skirt or disobey the law on public records.

I forever proclaim my obeisance to the righteous cause of sunlight in government. But current law on public records has caused my libertarian ideals to clash with my bureaucratic experience. When I served as Gov. Brian Sandovals general counsel, I was in charge of responding to all public records requests. I saw plenty of room for improvement, and not just on the make-the-law-more-strict side of the equation. The ends of the law are good and noble, but the means often fall short, even when government officials sincerely try their best to comply. The law is constantly trying to keep up with new technology and changing behavior. Humans adapt fast.

I dont pretend to have the answers. But I wish to point out some reasons why current law may be failing in ways that go beyond bad acts by government officials. Even the most honest, efficient, and compliant public servants respond to incentives, and until we fully understand the good and bad incentives that current law creates, our attempts at reform will likely fall short no matter what else we do.

Current law is overinclusive

I probably handled between 40-60 public records requests in an average year. Never once was there anything that needed disclosing that caused me more consternation than the process itself. Searching for and reviewing thousands of records is a painful task. We had a small staff, and the deadlines to respond could be daunting, especially during the heat of a legislative session. We were rarely worried about the embarrassment of anything we had to produce, but we were always distraught about not properly complying with the law. Appearing to hide something would look worse than anything we were supposedly hiding. I had some sleepless nights, terrified that there was a document I missed and failed to disclose that would somehow be discovered and broadcast to the world. Thus, we took every request seriously, even the weekly faxes (yes, faxes) generated by bots for partisan organizations. All requests, no matter how prescient or absurd, were entitled to and received attention.

Given these burdens, everyone was incentivized to avoid proliferating written records. We communicated in person and on the phone, even as the rest of the world did the opposite. We were not trying to avoid transparency. We merely wanted to minimize both the workload when the requests came in and the worry that we would fail to comply with the law.

To be sure, we also liked the liberty to speak freely without fear that everything we said could go public, but our main goal was efficiency, not concealment. We really just wanted a smaller paper record to cut down on back-end work and unnecessary embarrassment. As long as in-person communications were (and absolutely should remain) outside the reach and burdens of the law, in-person communications were preferred. They were better anyway.

Public records law has not kept up with technology and behavior. In the 1950s and 1960s, when public records laws were first enacted, the targets were often real, substantive government records. Now it seems like the law mostly traps stray, day-to-day emails and texts between government employees. More and more documents are subject to production, but they likely say less and less. 20 years ago, bureaucrats likely did not take the time to type out a formal letter detailing last nights dinner. Few public servants are actually villains. But every email and text must still be searched, just in case.

In some respects, the random evolution of technology and market demand has been a boon for champions of transparency. Thankfully, we do not demand that phone calls be recorded, or that bureaucrats wear body cams. Had communication trends drifted away from the written word, where would we be?

In other respects, technology has left the law in the dust. For many good reasons (and some bad), people will use new technology if they think it falls outside the domain of public records law. It takes case law to keep up. Texts on ones own personal cell phone now seem to be in play if state business is discussed. I imagine even the best public servants are already adapting, especially with quarantine-necessitated breakthroughs in video conferencing. Few people want the world or their colleagues to see the entirety of their (mostly irrelevant) daily discussions, context free. And even if the written record did not ultimately need producing, someone else still had to comb through those personal words.

The law is underinclusive, too

Public records law applies almost exclusively to the executive branch of government. The legislative and judicial branches are largely free from any transparency demands, and it is hard to see the reason for it if we take the stated purposes of the law at face value. Why are the internal deliberations of executive staff over implementing a law more worthy of sunlight than the internal deliberations of legislators who passed the law or of the Supreme Court justices who rule on the law?

Consider the disputed decision at the end of the 2019 legislative session that certain bills were not tax increases and therefore did not require a two-thirds vote from both houses of the Legislature. Current law allows us to demand records on the topic from Gov. Steve Sisolaks office. But we do not have the ability to request the same records from the Legislature or related records from the Nevada Supreme Court as it weighs the constitutionality of the decision. Why?

Ive worked for both the legislative and executive branches; the topics of conversation are largely the same. And about every 20 years or so we get a look into the papers of a retired Supreme Court justice; much of what those papers reveal seems worthy of the publics attention, too. Who wouldnt like to see whether Chief Justice Roberts switched his vote on the Obamacare case, or the conversations between Nevada Supreme Court justices on any 4-3 case? Either way, it would be nice to see how the Legislature would draft the law and the judiciary would interpret it if it applied to them both as well.

Dont get me wrong: I am not necessarily advocating that we expand the law into other branches. There are likely many good reasons not to. I simply point out that the law already excludes much government activity.

In short, despite my rather downbeat analysis, I agree strongly with reformers and advocates for greater transparency: the law is not working as it should. But the answer may not be to keep turning up the same dial in the same way. We have to account for, appreciate, and respect the human behavior public records laws attempt to capture. Until we do that, both the advocates for transparency and good government officials will remain frustrated, while the full promise of the law remains unfulfilled.

Daniel H. Stewart is a fifth-generation Nevadan and a partner with Hutchison & Steffen. He was Gov. Brian Sandovals general counsel and has represented various GOP elected officials and groups.

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Public records law that ignores reality will always fall short - The Nevada Independent

President Biden, Vice President Harris, secretaries of Commerce and Transportation meet with Sens. Capito, Barrasso, Blunt, Crapo, Toomey and Wicker in the Oval Office.

A powerful, fiscally conservative and libertarian political advocacy group is launching a new seven-figure effort to drive opposition to President Bidens wide-ranging infrastructure proposal that hes trying to pass through Congress.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP), in announcing their new campaign titled "End Washington Waste: Stop the Spending Spree," said on Wednesday their aim is to inform Americans about what it calls "the harms of the proposal, while offering positive alternatives."

WHAT'S IN BIDEN'S $2.2T INFRASTRUCTURE AND TAX PROPOSAL?

AFP has committed to more than 100 events across the country to take its message directly to voters, including rallies, town halls, door-to-door canvassing, and phone banks. And the group highlighted that its campaign includes a paid media component, consisting of direct mail, digital advertising, and what it says are other tactics.

Americans for Prosperity, an influential fiscally conservative and libertarian political advocacy group, is launching a new seven-figure effort to drive opposition to President Bidens wide-ranging infrastructure proposal

The president formally announced his $2.3 trillion proposal titled the American Jobs Plan - six weeks ago. Thesweeping proposal aims to rebuild 20,000 miles of roads, expand access to clean water and broadband, and invest in care for the elderly.

"It's a once-in-a-generation investment in America, unlike anything we've seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago," Biden said at the time.

The White House emphasizes that the proposal would create millions of jobs and ignite the fight against climate change. The proposals massive tab, which would be spent out over eight years, would be paid for over 15 years by raising the corporate tax rate, which was dramatically cut by the 2017 tax cuts, the signature domestic achievement of former President Trumps tenure in the White House.

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While the presidents pushing for bipartisan support, Bidens finding little backing from congressional Republicans, who are dead set against making changes to the Trump tax cuts and who disagree on whats considered infrastructure. Theyve put forth their own proposal, with spending at less than half of what Bidens proposing.

"President Bidens multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure proposal is Washington waste at its worst a partisan spending spree masquerading as road and bridge improvement," AFP president Tim Phillips argued in a statement.

"Less than five percent of the $4 trillion dollars goes to traditional infrastructure, while the rest goes to a partisan grab bag of top-down ideas that will lead to fewer jobs, tax increases that hurt workers wages and crush small businesses, and a rigged economy that leaves everyone worse off," he emphasized.

Americans for Prosperity president Tim Phillips headlines an event taking aim at President Biden's infrastructure proposal, in Des Moines, Iowa on April 22, 2021

Phillips charged that "handouts to benefit special interests, favors for labor unions that undermine workers ability to find employment, and unnecessary regulation all paid for by historic tax increases will only devastate our recovering economy."

AFP TARGETS DEMOCRATS OVER BIDEN'S COVID SPENDING PROGRAM

AFP said the first phase of their push will spotlight 27 House Democrats in 16 states, some of whom could face challenging reelections in next years midterms, or who are considering bids for statewide office. They are Reps. Tom OHalleran of Arizona, Stephanie Murphy Florida, Carolyn Bourdeaux and Lucy McBath of Georgia, Cindy Axne of Iowa, Lauren Underwood Illinois, Sharice Davids Kasnas, Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens of Michigan, Angie Craig and Dean Phillips of Minnesota, Kathy Manning of North Carolina, Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Andy Kim, Mikie Sherrill, and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, Peter DeFazio and Kurt Shrader of Oregon, Matt Cartwright, Brian Fitzpatrick, Connor Lamb, and Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, Colin Allred and Lizzie Fletcher of Texas, Elaine Luria and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, and Ron Kind of Wisconsin.

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Top fiscal conservative group targeting Bidens infrastructure proposal with new campaign - Fox Business

The conflict is right there in the opening words of the document that founded the United States of America. Everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Few would disagree with Thomas Jeffersons declaration of principle. But what happens when life and liberty come into conflict?

Plainly, liberty must have some limits. And the coronavirus pandemic, posing a threat to life that can only be fought by collective actions to which some wont consent, revealed that few in the Western world knew where to put those limits, or even what they meant when they talked of liberty.

China, whose dominant Confucian philosophy emphasizes life and social harmony, showed how much easier it was to protect life if governments could ignore individual liberties. In January of 2020, after a cluster of coronavirus cases emerged in theprovince of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing, authorities declared a "wartime state" once the case count reached 600.

What followed was a literal lockdown. Some 20,000 residents of outlying villages were bussed to government quarantine facilities. People in three cities with a combined population of 17 million had to stay in their buildings at all times. All 11 million residents of the provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, had two compulsory Covid-19 tests each week. Men in hazmat suits marched through empty streets spraying disinfectant. Apartment doors were taped shut from the outside after authorities dropped off vegetable packages to last five days. Many homes lacked fridges or ovens.

By the end of the month, the number of cases had topped at 865. Train service re-started after a 34-day gap. Things returned to normal.

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This is what happens if life trumps liberty. In the West, where it doesnt, there were onerous but more lenient stay-at-home orders, which generally ended before outbreaks had been extinguished.

On March 2, a month after the Hebei lockdown, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas announced that his state was 100% open. Abbott admitted that Covid-19 remained a risk, but declined to impose further infringements on liberty.

Each person has a role to play in their own personal safety and the safety of others, he said. With this executive order, we are ensuring that all businesses and families in Texas have the freedom to determine their own destiny.Texas had reported 7,750 new cases in the previous week.

Texas is a famously individualist state, but was not an outlier. The lockdowns of 2020 were well enough observed to causea savage economic recession, but provoked intensifying opposition. The universal theme was that freedoms had been violated.

In a viral video, a shopper entered a Costco warehouse in Colorado without a mask, and was asked toput one on because that is the companys policy.

Im not doing it because I woke up in a free country, replied the shopper, who complained that mask-wearers were sheep as the attendant took away his trolley.

In the U.K., a multi-party group called Keep Britain Free led protests on behalf of millions of people who want to think for themselves and take responsibility for their own lives. Banners at violent demonstrations in Germany proclaimed, Freedom isnt everything, but without freedom, everything is nothing.

There were arguments over whether lockdowns would work against the disease, and whether their heavy economic toll was justified. But the central point remained: Most Westerners felt the Hebei lockdown was immoral even though it successfully beat the virus, because it violated peoples freedom.The ends didnt justify the means.

But if liberty is so important, what exactly is it, and where does it come from?

Liberty has a surprisingly recent heritage. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Jewish prophets had any great concept of it, nor do any of the great Asian traditions. Instead, the doctrine of a right to be free dates to the ferment in 17th-century England that saw one king executed and another dismissed.The country rejected the notion of an absolute monarchy operating by divine right, and the philosopher John Locke offered a new system to replace it.

John Locke

Source: Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Locke believed in natural rights to life, liberty and property. But for men to be free, he saw that they must allow others to be free. Thus, in his formulation, freedom did not include a right to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions and included an obligation to preserve the rest of mankind. That would seem to exclude the freedom to ignore doctors who warn against the risk of infecting fellow citizens with Covid-19 by leaving the house, refusing to wear a mask or refusing a vaccination.

Striking the right balance between individual freedom and social obligation has been the aim of philosophers ever since. As Lockes ideas became the founding philosophy of Englands rebel colony, but not of Lockes home country itself, defining the right to liberty that he promulgated has been the central debate within the U.S. throughout its history. It has proved maddeningly difficult.

Sixty years ago, the Oxford University professor Isaiah Berlin, who fled the Soviet Union with his family when he was a child, made a famous speech defining two concepts of liberty.

The first was negative liberty: freedom from interference, the freedom to be left alone. This is the version that drove Jefferson and the other founding fathers. The Dont Tread on Me flag of a coiled rattlesnake, adapted by Benjamin Franklin as an emblem of resistance in the War of Independence, is now the flag of American resisters against pandemic restrictions.

Isaiah Berlin

Photographer: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma

Berlin also saw a rival concept of positive liberty, the freedom to do what one wants. This is whatFrench revolutionaries meant when they called for liberty, equality and fraternity.This notion of freedom motivated left-wing lockdown opponents, who held that quarantines were unfair to those who could not afford to go without income, and couldnt work from home. They were effectively deprived of their positive liberty.Those were the kinds of people who gained support from the Harvard philosopher John Rawls who published his massive Theory of Justice in 1970. Rawls imagined a social contract that people would sign behind a veil of ignorance, in which they did not know where they would rank in society. At great length, he argued that citizens would happily tolerate some degree of inequality, but that the worst off would have to be in an acceptable position. Put differently, everyone needs some positive liberty to have the chance to make something of themselves.

Such thinking justifies governments in clamping down on liberty in a pandemic, particularly if they pay money to those who lose their jobs as a result. Such a policy held sway, with regional variations, across the West.

Opposition to anti-Covid measures, from lockdowns to vaccines, has been dominated by negative, not positive liberty. George Crowder, a philosopher at Flinders University in Australia and author of several major books on Berlin, described it as the American revolutionary philosophy writ large.

I think these protests are just basically about negative liberty, he said in an interview. Its people wanting to do what they want to do and wanting government to get out of their way.

Berlin himself opposed positive liberty, fearing that it could become a Trojan horse for the kind of totalitarianism he witnessed in his youth. His last essay, published after his death in 1997 by the New York Review of Books, rang with the distrust of science that surfaced a quarter-century later:

There have always been thinkers who hold that if only scientists, or scientifically trained persons, could be put in charge of things, the world would be vastly improved. To this I have to say that no better excuse, or even reason, has ever been propounded for unlimited despotism on the part of an elite which robs the majority of its essential liberties.

The last years protests, then, have been an expression of a yearning for negative liberty. People expect to be left alone. But this entails leaving others alone, and that creates another set of problems.

Libertarians on the political right take Lockes notions of natural individual rights to their logical conclusion. Hugely influential in the U.S., where they have exerted a strong influence on the Republican Party, modern libertarians hold either for a limited state restricted to national defense, policing and safeguarding of contracts, or no state at all.

Ayn Rand

Source: New York Times Co./Getty Images

Its most famous exponent is another Russian emigre philosopher, Ayn Rand. Her acolytes included Alan Greenspan, who spent 18 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve starting in 1987, while Paul Ryan, a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, based policy proposals on a speech by a character in Rands novel Atlas Shrugged.These ideas underpinned Reaganomics, tax cuts, school vouchers and other policies to shrink the state.

But when fighting a pandemic, even rock-ribbed libertarians acknowledge limits to liberty. Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist and impassioned libertarian, accepted a role for the state in dealing with neighborhood effects, when the actions of one individual impose costs on others. He wrote in the 1950s that these justify substantial public health activities: maintaining the purity of water, assuring proper sewage disposal, controlling contagious diseases.

Others made no such concessions. Murray Rothbard, another libertarian economist of Friedmans generation, developed a theory of anarcho-capitalism that held that the state itself was illegal, along with taxation.

For this philosophy, saving lives is of no moment, Walter Block, a libertarian economics professor and follower of Rothbard, wrote in the Journal of Libertarian Studies last year. Rather, the essence of libertarianism concerns rights, obligations, duties, the nonaggression principle, and private property rights. Block argued that if libertarian rights are always respected, more lives would ultimately be spared.

Rigorous libertarian arguments lead to some surprising places.Since libertarians must respect property rights, the hapless Costco customer who refused to wear a mask inside the privately owned store would have had little support from Rothbard or Rand.

And even lockdowns are complicated for those who treat the liberty of others as seriously as their own, creating controversy among libertarians. The right to walk down the street with a gun in a holster would not extend to firing it at random without running afoul of thenon-aggression principle so familiar to libertarians that they give it a nickname, NAP. What does the NAP imply in a time of contagious disease?

Rothbard worried that the NAP might be misused to justify an over-active state, and warned in his book The Ethics of Liberty that force should not be used against someone just because his or her behavior is risky: Once one permits someones fear of the risky activities of others to lead to coercive action, then any tyranny becomes justified, he wrote.

But other libertarians are prepared to countenance a different balance in a pandemic, and remain agnostic on quarantines. If spreading illnesses is not a rights violation, then nothing is, Block wrote in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

Libertarians are often accused of justifying selfishness, and Rand even wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness. But the arguments that say the state shouldnt tell people what to do might also imply an obligation to voluntarily wear masks and observe social distancing. Liberty is a two-way street. Unmasked protesters gathering in large crowds under rattlesnake flags might not have thought this one through.

After a year of anger, the West is nocloser to defining the limits of liberty. Most countries ended up with compromises that satisfied nobody, with lockdowns tough enough to inflict misery but not to thwart the disease from claiming a dreadful toll.

That failure is dispiriting, and governments actions during the pandemic leave legitimate reasons for anger and protest. But even though liberty became a rallying call, its not clear that its adherents knew what liberty they wanted, or even whether liberty was what they wanted at all.

Crowder, the philosopher and Berlin chronicler, has probably thought about liberty as much as anyone now living. He put it this way: A lot of people abuse the idea of liberty and they present it as a fine sounding concept that in fact is just a placeholder for something else that concerns them or bothers them. Its a fine sounding placeholder for saying that they will do what they want to do and get out of my way.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:John Authers at jauthers@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net

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Covid, Liberty and Responsibility: Where's the Line? - Bloomberg

PHOENIX Political parties have no legal right to observe extra audits that counties perform on election equipment beyond those required by state law, a judge has ruled.

In a decision published Tuesday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Mikitish said the Arizona Libertarian Party was invited to oversee the four audits that are required by state law. That includes two before each election and two afterwards, including the random hand count.

This year, the judge said, county supervisors agreed to two additional "forensic audits'' following complaints by some, including Republican state legislators, who questioned the outcome that saw Joe Biden get 45,109 more votes in the county than Donald Trump. That enabled the Democratic challenger to win Arizona and its 11 electoral votes by 10,457.

But in both cases, the county declined to have party observers. Instead, it invited the League of Women Voters and deputy registrars, arguing the space restrictions at the county offices due to COVID-19 precluded party participation.

The Libertarian Party sued, contending its exclusion violated the law. And the Arizona Republican Party filing arguments in support, arguing that keeping out the political parties "aggravates the atmosphere of distrust that the county has fostered over the past year through their own misconduct and lack of transparency.''

Judge Mikitish, however, said there's one major flaw to all of this: There's no basis for the argument in state law.

He said the record shows what the county wanted and conducted was an examination of its hardware and software to analyze its vulnerability to being hacked, verify there was no malicious software installed, test to ensure that tabulators were not sending or receiving information from the internet, and conduct a logic and accuracy test to confirm that there was no vote switching.

Judge Mikitish said both Arizona laws and the state Election Procedures Manual do have specific requirements for political party participation or observation of these. But what the county conducted, the judge said, is separate from these and not legally required.

He also also said there are procedures about who is entitled to watch the official counting of ballots. But that's not what occurred here, Judge Mikitish said."The forensic audits did not count or audit ballots from the November 2020 general election,'' he wrote. "Because the audits at issue in this case did not related to the counting of ballots, the statutes do not require that they include observation or participation by political parties.''

Judge Mikitish acknowledged nothing prohibited the county from including parties in the special audits. But he said it's not up to judges to decide whether they should have done so.

"Such policy decisions are left to other branches of government,'' the judge wrote.

Tuesday's ruling does not affect a separate audit of Maricopa County election results being conducted at Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

But there are links. Most notably, Republican senators ordered that audit after they said the county's audits the ones at issue here were insufficient.

And attorney Michael Kielsky, who represents the Libertarian Party, said there's a bit of irony in the county using the results of its own audits to boast of the accuracy of the 2020 general election and then criticizing the Senate for following up with one of its own.

"The fact is, what they did is everything they're complaining about now that the Senate is doing, which is just an audit with a pre-determined outcome,'' he said of the county.

"They hand picked who they wanted to do what they wanted to do,'' Mr. Kielsky continued. "And they didn't want anybody to look too closely.''

Mr. Kielsky also noted that the Republican-controlled Senate, unlike the county, invited members of other political parties to observe the process at Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

Mr. Fischer, a longtime award-winning Arizona journalist, is founder and operator of Capitol Media Services.

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Judge: Arizona political parties don't have to be invited to extra election recounts - Your Valley