Category Archives: Libertarian

Two white guys in their 70s. Thats the best the two-party system has offered to represent the U.S.

Dr. Joanne Jorgensen believes this is the best time to be a third-party candidate. And the best candidate might just be a woman not in her 70s, which she is both.

Dr. Jo is the Libertarian Partys 2020 presidential candidate. And she says, for those who think voting third-party is, essentially, like voting for Donald Trump, theyre wrong.

History shows that we typically take from both sides equally, Jorgensen said on La Crosse Talk PM. However, we do take more votes from independents or people who havent voted. Thats who we take most of our votes from. People are so fed up.

She added thats pretty much how we got Trump in the first place.

It was a bunch of people who said, Were fed up with the professional politicians, we want an outsider, but then we get Trump, who promises us smaller government, but gives us bigger government, Jorgensen said. He was supposed to get rid of the deficit, but its just getting bigger.

Part of Jorgensens platform is, of course, ending government debt, but also to get the U.S. out of foreign wars and transition the world not just the U.S. away from coal and oil and toward nuclear power.

On that note, Jorgensen said that the new tech surrounding nuclear is what environmentalists should be pushing over green energy options, like wind and solar.

If they were efficient, if they were a good option, then people would have invested their own money in it to make a killing, Jorgensen said. If there were profits to be made, you know that the greedy capitalist would have done it, right? And I say that facetiously.

Thats the good part of the free-market system, is that the dollars go to the good market choices.

Green energy, however, at its most efficient, might not make capitalists any money, however, unless they figured out a way to charge to use the sun or command the wind.

Jorgensen also touched on income inequality, which she said theres not a problem at the top.

Whenever we have progress, she said, whenever we have technology and people working to better their lives we have a wealth gap, because there are opportunities that some people make that others, either choose not to or whatever.

Jorgensen was very much against anything having to do with a wealth tax, as that word, tax, is not anything Libertarians stand for. The problems, to her, with poverty has been the governments fault.

Her solutions to end poverty hover around eliminating government policies and regulations that, she says, drive up costs for anything from housing to health care to new businesses.

Jorgensen lays out some of the issues on her campaign website taxes, health care, social security, among others but notes that they are just brief overviews.

Originally posted here:

The other Jo, wants your 2020 vote, if youre fed up with the two-party system or if youre not - WIZM NEWS

After the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, America is finally embracing police reform. As is so often the case in matters of personal freedom, libertarians were here long before mainstream political counterparts and fought a frequently lonely battle against abusive government power. Now, just as they did with same-sex relationships, drug reform, and the ongoing battle against the surveillance state, people across the political spectrum seem ready to concede that a little more freedom could be a good thing. If the effort succeeds, we may not get the creditnewly converted reformers are already trying to separate the cause from its long-time promoters but at least we'll live in a better world.

"Where are the libertarians?" is such a knee-jerk cry after incidents of police brutality that it's safe to assume that it's a matter of bad faith rather than of ignorance. Having left the issue on the back burner for so long, some people don't want to admit that we were there ahead of them. Unfortunately, when it comes to police misconduct, we've been way ahead of them.

"Of the three political alternatives, a free economy, a mixed economy, a totalitarian state, only one provides the economic, political, and cultural context in which systematic police brutality cannot be a problem: a free society," wrote Reason founder Lanny Friedlander in a very '60s-ish 1969 essay. "The police of a free society, engaging in retaliatory force only, enforcing laws of a defensive nature only, would be bound by the same laws they enforced, and would stand fully accountable for their actions."

Going beyond window-dressing, libertarians favor minimizing opportunities for police to act against the public and making any interactions as non-confrontational as possible.

In 1971, the fledgling Libertarian Party (L.P.) called for "the repeal of all 'crimes without victims' now incorporated in federal and state laws," such as the prohibitions on drug use that have driven so much of the escalation in aggressive police tactics. The same platform declared itself opposed to "so-called 'no-knock laws'" of the sort that got Breonna Taylor killed by cops this year when they crashed through her door at night, unannounced, looking for illegal drugs.

In cases of police misconduct, libertarians favor holding government agencies and their employees accountable for their actions.

"We support full restitution for all loss suffered by persons arrested, indicted, tried, imprisoned, or otherwise injured in the course of criminal proceedings against them which do not result in their conviction," the L.P. proposed in 1976. "Law enforcement agencies should be liable for this restitution unless malfeasance of the officials involved is proven, in which case they should be personally liable."

That police agencies too often foster abusive conduct was no secret to libertarians long before the Minneapolis Police Department failed to implement reforms that might have saved George Floyd's life.

"When a rookie Houston patrolman named Alan Nichols did the unthinkable and reported three fellow officers for the vicious beating of a black prisoner, police internal-affairs investigators tried to have him fired, the chief publicly reprimanded him, and other police ostracized him," Glenn Garvin wrote in Inquiry, a Cato Institute publication, in 1979 coverage of violent and racially charged policing in Texas.

"Civil libertarians need to recognize that federal prosecution of law-enforcement officers who use excessive force often provides the only check on such unrestrained state power," Dirk G. Roggeveen urged in the pages of Reason as Americans reacted to the 1991 police beating of Rodney King.

Through these years, police not only misbehaved but also came to act like an occupying army lording it over a hostile populace.

Seattle's "police force has spied on local political activists for more than 20 years," Roxanne Park warned in Inquiry in 1978. "The intelligence abuses discovered in Seattle are 'typical examples' of the practices of urban police departments."

"Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work," Radley Balko cautioned for the Cato Institute in 2006. He expanded his argument in his 2013 book, Rise of the Warrior Cop.

Now, after decades of manifestos, journalism, research, and advocacy, America seems to agree with libertarians. "Americans by a 2-to-1 margin are more troubled by the actions of police in the killing of George Floyd than by violence at some protests," the Wall Street Journal reports from survey results. That just may result in policy changes.

Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, the only Libertarian in Congress, literally wrote the bill that would eliminate qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it so difficult to hold police accountable for their bad behavior unless courts in the same jurisdiction have already ruled that such conduct is wrong.

If Congress doesn't rise to the occasion, the Supreme Court could. Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor both look eager to revisit the mess the court created when it invented qualified immunity.

No-knock raids, which so often end in tragedy when police kick-in the wrong door, or when suddenly awakened residents try to defend against intruders, are also getting a second look. Louisville, Kentucky is considering banning such warrants, a half-century after the Libertarian Party proposed exactly that.

City council members in Minneapolis are even talking about disbanding the police department amidst a national, though ill-defined, movement to "defund police." Whether or not that's an improvement depends on what comes next. Retaining harsh enforcement by another name will continue the abuses, the intrusiveness, and the disproportionate use of state violence against disfavored communities under nothing more than different branding.

Maybe that's why it's taken so long for people to seriously consider police reform, and why they're so resistant to giving libertarians credit on the issue. Real change requires not just dropping the word "police" but reducing the opportunity for government agents to use violence against the public. That means fewer laws to be enforced and less intrusive enforcement of those laws. That's a hard pill to swallow for ideologues who are committed to forcing people to do what they don't want to do, or to forcibly stopping them from exercising their own preferences.

Libertarians should be happy that Americans are ready to discuss police reform. But we'll have to see if the country is actually prepared for less policing.

See the article here:

'Where Are Libertarians on Police Reform?' Right Where We've Always Been. - Reason

Last Tuesday, I tweeted out a photo of a truck parked in downtown Washington, DC, not far from the White House and the protests against police brutality and the killing of George Floyd that had engulfed the city.

It was the bumper stickers on the back of the Toyota Tacoma that made me do it. They showed what seemed to be a political evolution of sorts, mirroring one that many Americans may be having in 2020: from a 2000 sticker for John McCains failed presidential campaign to a sticker supporting Mitt Romneys candidacy in 2012 to ones supportive of then-Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson in 2016 and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2020.

And in the middle, a handwritten sign stating Black Lives Matter.

I had a lot of questions about this truck, some simple: Whose truck was it? Was the BLM-supportive sign real or just put there to fend off possible thieves? And some not so simple how did this person get to this place? How did their politics change over time, and why? Or did they?

This week, 26-year-old Nathan, the owner of the truck, gave me the answers.

Nathan is a Korean-American self-described libertarian-leaning Republican who has never been a fan of the two-party system. But President Donald Trump was something of a breaking point for him.

I have pretty much felt politically homeless since 2016, he told me. Its been fucking internal screaming for almost four years.

Hes a Texas-born 2016 Virginia Military Institute graduate whose job search in Washington has been stymied by the coronavirus pandemic. He had never attended a street protest before last week, but he told me that being in Lafayette Park when Park Police used tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters radicalized him. I just had to fucking show up after that, he told me.

Now hes attending anti-police brutality protests outside the White House every day. Wearing a hard hat emblazoned with quotes from Mahatma Gandhi and Mr. Rogers, he carries a broom and dustpan and tidies the streets as he walks, because he wanted his form of protest to be a peaceful contribution.

We spoke on Saturday before he headed back to the White House to protest. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nathans last name has been withheld to protect his privacy.

I moved around a lot. Virginia is the longest Ive lived anywhere. My story: born in Plano, Texas, near Dallas, and I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, [then] Seattle, Hong Kong, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

I wanted to join the military. So I asked my parents to send me to a military high school to see if military college was something I could hack. I liked it. And then I went to the Virginia Military Institute. My life goal was to be an infantry officer, a cavalry scout officer, or an armor officer so, like, a guy in a tank.

[I got a] medical disqualification and never got to serve. I worked for [a transport company] in Pennsylvania; life sucked, hated that. Quit that job, went to get my shit together in Oregon, worked in a restaurant. I was just cleaning dishes, cleaning tables. [At the time I thought,] I got a degree from, I thought, a fairly reputable institution, now Im doing this. I needed a calling.

I was always a libertarian-leaning Republican, still consider myself a Republican fighting within [the party]. So the son of a bitch I voted for president in 2016 [former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson] decided to run for Senate. I was willing to just go for something that I thought had meaning. And that felt like that was doing something worth doing. I was willing to go for free and just live off my savings from [the transport company]. But I got hired by an organization called Young Americans for Liberty, went out, knocked on doors, made a positive impression. A few months later, they invited me back working full time.

I had a blast, went, Im going to try Congress. I dont think Im gonna reveal who I worked for, but I ended up being on the Hill for a while [before I was] let go. And then two weeks later, coronavirus hit the US, and every job I applied for replied back with, We are no longer hiring. I did some side hustles online, managed to pay rent that way. And then this all happened.

Can we stand up and look at the back of your truck? I think a lot of folks were interested in that. So you mentioned [in our Twitter messages] that John McCain was one of your heroes.

In 2008, I watched [the campaign] and I was like, I like that guy. The reason for the stickers is what I do is I just [think], who did I like all the years? Cause Im just a fan. I put them up.

I found an original Ross Perot sticker. I slapped on that one [on my old truck]. And that one was just me rebelling against a two-party system. Im a guy who happened at that point to just vote Republican. But Ill vote for a Democrat you know, who gets in shouldnt fucking matter. As far as Im concerned, Id like to see the destruction of the two-party system, frankly.

But I liked McCain, I liked his campaign against George Bush. W, you know, I didnt put him up [on my truck]. I think in terms of a compassionate person, he definitely is. But as far as Im concerned, I think he should have been impeached for the Iraq War and leading us into that.

And then Romney was your first vote.

Yeah. First vote in 2012. Him, [Paul] Ryan. Those were the kind of Republicans I really identified with.

[On Sunday, Sen. Mitt Romney marched in a protest in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In a direct message, Nathan asked me to add how extremely proud (he is) to see my man Mitt out today.]

Bipartisanship is not a dirty word to me. [Former House Speaker John Boehner] didnt do everything right. But I liked that he was willing to try to get that grand bargain with Obama. [Some of my colleagues have debated Boehners interest in bipartisanship.]

Then [theres] 2016, when I was chairman of the College Republicans at VMI, and thats like the most conservative school you could be at. And then the moment [Donald Trump] came down that escalator and talked about, you know, hes sure some Mexican people are okay, I was like, No, Im not. I cant. I wasnt going to vote for Trump. I couldnt.

And we all know what happened. So [for 2020,] I made a custom Joe Walsh, I guess, fine sticker. I had that up for a while and he dropped out. Then there wasnt a Republican primary. I couldnt vote. I was like, I guess I can do [Joe] Biden. But for a while, I thought I was staring down the apocalyptic scenario for me and a lot of moderates, of Trump versus Bernie Sanders. And that was like my nightmare.

And thats why you were supportive of Mike Bloomberg?

I mean, stop-and-frisk, you know, theres plenty of shit I can say. I was trying to pick between shooting myself in the fucking head and shooting myself in the foot, and that was an obvious preference for me. And he [Bloomberg] had appeal; hes a moderate and a centrist. And it looked like he was going to do it until Elizabeth Warren spanked him on live TV.

I have pretty much felt politically homeless since 2016. Its been fucking internal screaming for almost four years.

Do you think that this protest has given you a chance to get some of that out or speak out in some way?

It feels nice to do something. Id tell people that if you care about shit, just bitching on Facebooks not going to change anything; go out there. I guess trying to film and getting footage was my toe into it.

But here I am now, [and] its odd. I mean, Im still, I can vote for centrist Democrats, but Im too right of center. Im definitely not progressive, but, I mean, theres always overlap. Ive always thought that the militarization of police has been a bad idea. The drug war has been catastrophic, as far as I can see. I think if states want to legalize [drugs], thats up to them. I wouldnt do it, but Id even say psychedelics should be legal now. But it was weird because when I was at VMI, to [Republicans], I was a libertarian and then I worked with libertarians, and to them I was a statist cuck. You probably get this if youve been paying attention to right-wing stuff, but every libertarian agrees on two things: that theres only one libertarian and its them.

So whats your plan for the rest of the day?

All I do is clean the streets; thats it. Thats how I choose to protest. Trying to bring that energy. Like yesterday, I filled maybe three trash bags.

Everyones self-organized; its a beautiful thing. Im not far out enough where the people are saying abolish the police, Im not there, theres a lot of places that [other protesters and I] dont overlap, but Ive always thought where theres overlap, why fight it? Which I think they should do in Congress.

So whats your plan after this, after these protests?

Ive had five-year plans. Theyve all blown up in my face. I thought success at first was just chasing a fat paycheck. But Ive found out that doing this stuff out here, interacting with people, the activist stuff, was super rewarding. This is rewarding, Ive seen. [But] Im going to start applying for work.

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Continued here:

Protests: Meet the Romney-Gary Johnson-Bloomberg voter embracing Black Lives Matter - Vox.com

On March 3, in response to reports that some Republican lawmakers favored free testing and treatments for COVID-19, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic tweeted, There are no libertarians in a pandemic. The witticism bounced all over social media during the ensuing days and weeks and with good reason, since the jab hit its target squarely on the nose.

When public safety is threatened, whether by war or disease, our dependence on government becomes immediately and viscerally obvious. There are no Centers for Disease Control in the private sector. There is no possibility of swiftly identifying the virus, and launching a crash program to develop tests, treatments, and vaccines, without massive government support for medical research. And for those tests, treatments, and vaccines to be effective, their distribution cannot be restricted by ability to pay; government must step in to ensure wide availability.

In addition, vigorous use of the governments emergency powers banning large public gatherings, temporarily shutting down schools and businesses, issuing stay-at-home orders, quarantining the sick and those exposed to them has been needed to help contain the outbreak. When a highly contagious and fatal disease can spread before its victims even show symptoms, the libertarian ethos of personal responsibility do what you want, and bear the consequences for good or ill leads not to mass flourishing but to mass death. Only the government has the power and resources to internalize the externalities of contagion and coordinate a rational response.

Despite being put on the defensive, supporters of free markets and limited government were able to respond with some fairly effective counterpunching. In the first place, the fact that certain kinds of government action are necessary under the extraordinary conditions of a public health emergency a fact freely acknowledged by many libertarians and partisans of small government does not mean that expansive government across the board is a good idea in normal times. Further, in the emergency now upon us, overweening government has contributed significantly to the scale of the pandemic here in the United States. Effective responses to the outbreak have been badly hampered by inadequate supplies of test kits and equipment, and primary responsibility for this failure rests with the Food and Drug Administration and its heavy-handed regulatory approach. A key blunder was the decision in early February to allow only the CDC to produce and conduct tests; problems with the CDCs initial test then led to weeks of disastrous delay.

Meanwhile, responding to the crisis has necessitated a string of regulatory waivers at the federal and state levels to allow doctors and nurses to work out of state, to facilitate telemedicine, to expand the scope of work that non-M.D. health professionals can do, to allow restaurants and bars to sell alcohol to takeout customers, and more. The relevant rules have been put aside temporarily as obviously dysfunctional now but perhaps that means at least some of them are dysfunctional, if less obviously, all the time?

And although emergency measures to slow transmission of the virus were clearly called for, the actual restrictions imposed were certainly not above criticism. As we have learned more about how the virus spreads, it appears that bans on outdoor activities went too far and may have been counterproductive. Where to draw the line between permitted and proscribed was never going to be an exact science in the fog of crisis, but there were plenty of cases of seemingly arbitrary distinctions (for example, one jurisdiction banned use of motorboats but not nonmotorized boats) that did nothing to advance public safety but did undermine the legitimacy of necessary restrictions.

The points scored on both sides in this back-and-forth hold profoundly important implications for the intellectual future of the political right. To begin with, the pandemic makes clear that there will always be a vital need for critical scrutiny of governments actions, and thus an important role to play for those with a skeptical view of government power and competence. Even in the middle of a public health emergency, when the case for broad government powers is overwhelming, there is no guarantee that those powers will be used wisely or effectively. The CDC and the FDA both have thousands of employees and multi-billion-dollar annual budgets; notwithstanding those considerable resources at their disposal, and the obvious importance of controlling infectious diseases to their missions, those two agencies failed in the relatively simple task of developing viral infection tests in a timely manner with a staggering cost in lives and dollars lost as a result of their incompetence.

Just because we give government the requisite authority and funding to perform some task, we cannot assume that the result will be mission accomplished. Indeed, there are sound reasons to assume otherwise. Overconfidence and the lure of technocratic control provide an ever-present temptation for governments to overreach; the lack of clear feedback signals about the effectiveness of government actions dulls incentives to recognize problems and improve performance; there is always a risk that government authority, no matter that its exercise is unquestionably called for, will be misappropriated by insiders to benefit them at the publics expense. Placing and defending limits on government, preventing and rolling back excesses, are therefore jobs that will always be with us.

But if the pandemic has shown that a critical stance toward government is always needed in formulating and evaluating policy, it has demonstrated even more forcefully the limitations and shortcomings of libertarians exclusive focus on government excess. The gravest failures in the government response to the pandemic were sins of omission, not commission not unnecessary and ill-advised interference with the private sector, but the inability to accomplish tasks for which only government is suited. Yes, at the outset of the crisis the FDA was disastrously over-restrictive in permitting labs to develop their own tests for the virus, but it is flatly risible to suggest that everything would have worked out fine if only government had gotten out of the way. Leaving aside the decades of government support for medical research that made it technologically possible to identify the virus and test for its presence in a human host, there is no way that private, profit-seeking firms would ever develop and conduct the testing, contact tracing, and isolation of the infected needed to slow the spread of the virus. Government funding and coordination are irreplaceable. Looking ahead, there is no prospect for rapid development and wide distribution of treatments and vaccines without a heavy dose of government involvement.

The pandemic produced not only a public health crisis, but an economic crisis as well the sharpest and most severe contraction of economic activity since the Great Depression. While the economic collapse was doubtless aggravated at the margins by forced business closures and stay-at-home orders, those interventions largely codified the publics spontaneous response to the uncontrolled outbreak of a highly infectious and potentially fatal disease. Its quite simply impossible to run a modern economy at anything near its potential level of output when people are afraid that going to work or going shopping might kill them or their loved ones.

Government excess, in other words, was not the fundamental problem. On the contrary, a large and activist government was all that stood between us and mass privation and suffering on a mind-boggling scale. Only government can mitigate the economic effects of the pandemic in the same way it responds to other shocks that lead to other, less drastic slumps by acting as insurer of last resort, using its taxing, spending, borrowing, and money-creating powers to sustain household spending and keep businesses afloat until resumption of something approaching normal economic activity is possible.

Unfortunately, the patchwork kludgeocracy that is the American welfare state was poorly suited to meet the challenge of the coronavirus shock. Our employment-based health insurance system left people abandoned in their hour of need as layoffs spiked into the tens of millions. The absence of any well-designed system of automatic stabilizers sent states and localities hurtling toward fiscal collapse. Many state unemployment insurance systems fell victim to antiquated software based on long-defunct programming languages while one states system was exposed as having been designed purposefully to discourage people from claiming benefits. Policymakers flailed in their efforts to extend emergency aid to businesses, forced to go through banks with improvised lending programs that too often funneled money to where it was needed least.

In the current double crisis, what has been lacking is not restraints on government power. What has been lacking shockingly, shamefully, tragically lacking is the capacity to exercise government power effectively. Of course that incapacity has been most obvious at the top, with the shambolic failures of the Trump administration to prepare for the outbreak and lead a coordinated, coherent national response. But the backwardness and incompetence of American government have been visible at all levels especially in contrast to the sophisticated and efficient governance on display in places as diverse as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany.

How far weve fallen is truly shocking: The country that beat the Nazis, conquered the atom, and put a man on the moon now struggles to produce enough masks for its doctors and nurses. Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger, wrote Irish columnist Fintan OToole, voicing the emerging and humiliating verdict of global public opinion. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.

As to how to close Americas deficit in state capacity, a question with millions of lives in the balance, libertarianism has nothing to say. The libertarian project is devoted exclusively to stopping government from doing things it ought not to do; its only advice about how to improve government is less. When it comes to making government strong enough and capable enough to do the things it needs to do, libertarianism is silent.

Actually, worse than silent. It is quite simply impossible to lead any institution capably without believing in the fundamental integrity of that institution and the importance of its mission. And the modern libertarian movement, which has done so much to shape attitudes on the American right about the nature of government and its proper role, is dedicated to the proposition that the contemporary American state is illegitimate and contemptible. In the libertarian view, government is congenitally incapable of doing anything well, the public sphere is by its very nature dysfunctional and morally tainted, and therefore the only thing to do with government is in the famous words of activist Grover Norquist to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

The gradual diffusion of these anti-government attitudes through the conservative movement and the Republican Party has rendered the American right worse than irrelevant to the project of restoring American state capacity. It has become actively hostile, undermining the motivations needed to launch such a project and the virtues needed to pull it off.

As Ive already argued, none of this means that libertarians are wrong about everything, or that libertarian ideas are worthless. But it does mean that skepticism about government, standing alone, is an insufficient foundation for good governance. The insights of libertarian thought suspicion of centralized power, alertness to how even the best-intended government measures can still go horribly wrong, recognition of the enormous fertility of the marketplaces decentralized, trial-and-error experimentation are genuine and abiding. But they are not sufficient.

The ideology of libertarianism claims otherwise: It asserts that a set of important but partial and contingent truths are in fact a comprehensive and timeless blueprint for the ideal political order. The error of this assertion has been made painfully obvious by the pandemic, but it was increasingly evident for many years beforehand. The overlap between genuine libertarian insights and the pressing challenges facing the American polity has been steadily shrinking since the end of the 20th century.

I say this as someone who discovered libertarian ideas in the 1970s. Back then, the intellectual orthodoxy tilted heavily in favor of top-down, technocratic management of economic life. Paul Samuelsons bestselling economics textbook was still predicting that the Soviet Union would soon overtake us in GDP. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that competition was as pass here as it was behind the Iron Curtain; the technostructure of central planning reigned supreme, whether it took the form of the Politburo or Big Business. As to the newly independent countries of the postcolonial world, there was widespread confidence that a big push of state-led investment would put them on the fast track to prosperity. Here at home, the dominant economic analysis of regulation continued to assume that its scope and content were guided purely by considerations of the public interest as opposed to any political factors. And inflation was widely assumed to be an affliction endemic to advanced economies that could be subdued only with price controls.

The intellectual turn against markets had derived enormous momentum from events. The catastrophic collapse of the Great Depression had seriously discredited capitalism, while the energetic experimentation of the New Deal showcased government activism favorably. Belief in the benevolence and effectiveness of American government, and the crucial importance of collective action for collective welfare, gained further strength from the experience of World War II. And the glittering economic performance of the postwar decades under the Big Government-Big Business-Big Labor triumvirate seemed to confirm that government management and economies of scale had permanently displaced upstart entrepreneurship and creative destruction as the primary engines of progress.

But by the 1970s, events had turned. Stagflation, the combination of soaring prices and slumping output, was afflicting the country despite the fact that its very existence was a baffling mystery to the reigning practitioners of macroeconomic fine-tuning. In cruel mockery of the noble goals and soaring rhetoric of the War on Poverty, a major expansion of anti-poverty programs had been followed by waves of urban riots, a soaring crime rate, and the catastrophic breakdown of intact families among African-Americans. The auto and steel industries, pillars of the economy and only recently world leaders in efficiency and innovation, were buckling under the competitive challenge of imports from Europe and Japan. Gas lines and periodic rationing suggested a grim future of ever more tightly binding limits to growth.

Against this backdrop, the rising movement of libertarian thought and free-market economics represented a much-needed corrective. The information processing and incentive alignment performed by markets had been seriously underappreciated, as had the gap between the theoretical possibilities of government activism and what was actually achievable in practice. Under the circumstances, it mattered little that the new movements philosophical foundations were shaky and its empirical claims overstated. At the relevant margins, the critics of Big Government had the better of the argument overall and were pushing in the right direction. After a massive increase in the size and scope of government over the course of decades, the nation was reeling from multiplying economic and social ills. The time was ripe for a thoroughgoing critique of top-down, centralized, technocratic policymaking.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the return of boom times at home, the collapse of communism and the rise of globalization abroad, and the entrepreneur-led information technology revolution seemed to affirm the conclusion that the era of big government is over. But with the dawn of a new century, the tide of events shifted again. The failure of another round of tax cutting to unleash dynamism and growth; the incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina; the bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing financial and economic meltdown; the opening of a yawning class divide along educational lines; the spread of social problems once identified with the urban underclass to broad swaths of the country; the rise of deaths of despair; and now the coronavirus pandemic in the face of all this, the one-size-fits-all prescription of cutting taxes, government spending, and regulatory costs imposed on business looked increasingly irrelevant, if not like outright quackery.

The ideals of free markets and limited government remain vital, and vitally important. But the times have made plain that the dominant conceptions of these ideals, rooted in libertarian ideology, are fatally flawed. That ideology is based on fundamental intellectual errors about the nature of politics and the conditions that make individual freedom and competitive markets possible. And as that ideology has moved beyond theoretical inquiry to exert real influence over political actors, its effects on American political culture have ultimately been nothing short of poisonous.

For those of us who continue to believe in the indispensability of a critical stance toward government power, the task before us is one of intellectual reconstruction. We must reject minimal government as the organizing principle of policy reform. Making or keeping government as small as possible is an ideological fixation, not a sound principle of good governance. Small government is a false idol, and it is time we smash it. In its place, we should erect effective government as the goal that guides the development and evaluation of public policy. For maxims, we can look to Americas greatest stateman. The legitimate object of government, wrote Abraham Lincoln, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselvesin their separate, and individual capacities.

Guided by the principle of effective government, we will sometimes conclude that government needs to be smaller, and sometimes that it needs to be larger depending on the circumstances. Given where things stand today, we will often conclude that government can be made simpler. We will continue to champion the ideals of free markets and limited government, but we must reconceive those ideals to free them from their libertarian baggage.

Free markets are the foundation of our prosperity and an important motor of social advance. But we need to see them, not as something that exists in the absence of government, but rather as complex achievements of good government. Free markets as we know them today are impossible without the modern state, and they function best when embedded in and supported by a structure of public goods that only government can adequately provide.

The guiding principle of effective government, meanwhile, continues to impose important limits on the exercise of state power but the contours of those limits are quite different from those demanded by libertarian ideology. Here the limiting principle addresses not the scope or subject matter of government action, but rather the effect of that action: The government policy or program in question must actually succeed in advancing its stated public purpose, and under no circumstances may benefit narrow private interests at public expense. The limiting principle, then, grows out of commitment to the public interest, not antipathy to government. The critical stance associated with policing the proper limits of state action thus shifts from anti-government to anti-corruption.

But reconstruction cannot proceed until demolition clears the scene. Accordingly, in Part Two of this series of essays, The Dead End of Small Government, I will identify what I see as the fundamental deficiencies of the libertarian ideology that has done so much to shape economic orthodoxy on the American right. Then in Part Three, Free Markets and Limited Government Reconceived, I will turn to how these important principles of good governance can be rescued from the errors and blind spots with which they are now tangled up.

Let me conclude this essay with an important qualification. My argument here is about economic and social policy: To meet the looming challenges of poor economic performance; widening social divisions; and threats to public health, we need more capable government, not more constrained government. Accordingly, the exclusive libertarian focus on restraining government power is not just irrelevant to confronting our problems, but actively counterproductive. But as recent events have made painfully clear, there are other areas of public concern where restraining government power remains not only relevant, but morally urgent. Here I am referring, of course, to the police murder of George Floyd, the latest in a long string of such incidents, and the weeks of protests in its wake (which have regrettably resulted in many further examples of inexcusable police violence). But not just that: In all the agencies of American government that deal directly in physical force not just the police, but the larger criminal justice system, the immigration authorities, and the military problems of excess and overreach and abuse are widespread.

The militarization and brutalization of police tactics; the immense waste and suffering caused by the War on Drugs; the moral stain of mass incarceration, deepened by the appalling cruelty that is widespread in Americas jails and prisons; the specter of mass surveillance; the caging of children on our border and betrayal of our heritage as an asylum for refugees; the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with spinoff military engagements in countries all over the region on all of these fronts, libertarians portrayal of government as Leviathan is all too accurate, and their calls for additional chains to bind it are well founded.

This qualification, though, only highlights how misguided it is for libertarians to conflate the provision of public goods, social insurance, and pro-market regulation with real problems of unchecked power. The vital work of controlling the instrumentalities of state violence is always difficult, but libertarians worthy efforts along these lines are badly undercut by their small-government fixation. Not only do they compromise their case by mixing bad arguments with good, they alienate themselves from their natural allies in particular, those communities that suffer most at the hands of excess force and thereby weaken the coalition needed for constructive change.

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What the Pandemic Revealed - Niskanen Center

The Air Force staff sergeant suspected of killing a Santa Cruz sheriff's deputy last Saturday and wounding another, as well as fatally shooting a federal security officer in Oakland on May 29, had been ranting on social media and making references to an extremist group that espouses anti-government, anti-law-enforcement views.

32-year-old Steven Carrillo is being arraigned today in Santa Cruz Superior Court, and on Thursday he was formally charged with murder, lying it wait, attempted murder, and multiple other charges and enhancements. He faces life in prison for the killing of 38-year-old Santa Cruz Sheriff's Sergeant Damon Gutzwiller.

According to court documents, per the Mercury News, Carrillo had recently been posting libertarian, anti-law-enforcement rhetoric on social media, and he seemed to have a particular vendetta against law enforcement in general. According to a former friend and fellow Air Force officer, Justin Ehrhardt, Carrillo specifically had aligned himself with the so-called "Boogaloo" movement, a far-right, citizen militia group composed partly of current and former military people who believe that an armed conflict with the government is on the horizon. And Ehrhardt speculated further that watching police use of force against unarmed demonstrators on the news during the week of George Floyd's death may have finally pushed Carrillo over the edge.

Federal prosecutors reportedly believe that Carrillo was also responsible for a shooting in Oakland on the night of May 29, during the height of protest activity there though the targets were two Homeland Security officers stationed outside the federal building in downtown Oakland who had nothing to do with the quelling of protests by police a few blocks away. 53-year-old David Patrick Underwood of Pinole was killed in that shooting.

Underwood, who was black and the sibling of Southern California congressional candidate Angela Underwood-Jacobs, was working as a federal security officer, and the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement calling the shooter an "assassin," and characterizing the act as "domestic terrorism."

Underwood-Jacobs, who is a Republican, complicated the political lines in the current national unrest in testimony earlier this week before the House Judiciary Committee. She spoke out against police brutality and the death of Floyd, but went on to condemn calls for defuning the police. And she said, it is "blatantly wrong to create an excuse out of discrimination and disparity, to loot and burn our communities, to kill our officers of the law."

My brother wore a uniform," she said, "and he wore that uniform proudly. Im wondering, where is the outrage for a fallen officer that also happens to be African American?"

Federal charges against Carrillo in the killing of Underwood and the wounding of another officer are expected to be filed in the coming days, but federal prosecutors have yet to confirm that Carrillo is a suspect in the shooting.

The only information that was publicly released in the case, along with a surveillance image, was that the shooter fired shots out of a white cargo van like the one that Carrillo owned, and like the one he ambushed the Santa Cruz officers with last Saturday.

Carrillo, who was stationed at Travis Air Force Base, was living with his father in Ben Lomond, where officers confronted him. They were responding to a call from a resident who said they had seen explosives and weaponry inside Carrillo's van.

Carrillo was heard by witnesses after the shooting, before he was detained, talking about being "tired of the duality." He scrawled a similar message (using the word "duopoly," possibly in reference to the two-party system) in blood on a vehicle before his arrest. He also wrote the word "boog," and the phrase, "I became unreasonable," which is a meme used by the Boogaloo group, referring to anti-government icon Marvin Heemeyer.

Previously: Air Force Officer Named In Killing of Santa Cruz Sheriff's Deputy May Be Linked to Killing of Federal Officer in Oakland

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Santa Cruz Shooting Suspect Preached Libertarian Ideals, Was Pushed Over the Edge By Police Actions Against Protesters, Friends Say - SFist

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Libertarian think tanks are not commonly in the habit of sending out press releases praising Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), but that is exactly what happened Wednesday when the R Street Institute commended her call to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol.

Pelosi posted a letter she sent to Congress Joint Committee on the Library, the committee that oversees the management of the National Statuary Hall collection, to request that they direct the Architect of the Capitol to immediately take steps to remove from public display 11 statues representing Confederate soldiers and officials, including the President and Vice President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens.

Currently, the National Statuary Hall displays 102 statues, consisting of two statues donated by each of the fifty states, one from the District of Columbia, and one of Rosa Parks,who was added by an act of Congress in 2005, and her statue officially unveiled in 2013, the year she would have turned 100. The statue of Davis was donated by Mississippi and the statue of Stephens comes from Georgia.

The statues in the Capitol should embody our highest ideals as Americans, wrote Pelosi, expressing who we are and who we aspire to be as a nation. Monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to these ideals. Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage. They must be removed.

R Street responded to Pelosis letter by releasing their own press release, applauding her decision.

In 2017, R Street President Eli Lehrer and Demand Progress Policy Director Daniel Schuman co-authored an op-ed calling for these Confederate statues to be removed from public view, and the legislatures of the states represented by those statues invited to nominate new ones.

Mediaite reached out to Lehrer for comment, and asked him about the uniqueness of his organization publicly praising one of Congress most prominent Democrats.

We thought it was important, explained Lehrer, because properly understood libertarianism and classical liberalism is about building a diverse society.

Freedom is important because it allows for diversity, he continued, and puttingsymbols of a cause that existed solely for the purpose of preserving slavery and white supremacy in the very center of American democracy is not consistent with classical liberal values.

Look, the cause for what the Confederacy stood slavery is the least libertarian thing imaginable.

Lehrer noted that the law requires a special act of Congress to actually remove the statues completely from the Capitol property and return them to their states (similar to the congressional act that brought in Rosa Parks as a new statue), but there is no such procedure needed to simply remove them from public display, commenting that this was the solution he and Schuman had proposed in their 2017 op-ed.

Theresnothing that says where they have to be, and they can be hidden, he said. The states can then find more fitting symbols for them, that represent peoplewho are actually good and actually did good things anybody who is there primarily for their service to the Confederacy is not someone who is admirable.

For his own home state, Virginia, Lehrer suggested their Confederate statue should be replaced with Grace Hopper, a computer scientist, a pioneer in computer programming, and a Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy who passed away in 1992.

Theres only one female scientist or engineer in the collection right now, said Lehrer, calling Hopper perfect for Virginia because the two biggest industries are military and high tech, and observing that there was not currently anything of note in the state named for her.

As for my own home state of Florida, one of our Capitol statues depicts Dr. John B. Gorrie, the physician and inventor who is viewed as the father of air conditioning undoubtedly a most beloved representative for the Sunshine State. The other is Edmund Kirby Smith, a general in the Confederate Army who was born in St. Augustine but had little ties to Florida after his early childhood.

In 2018, the Florida Legislature passed a bill to replace Smith with an actual Floridian, Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of what is now Bethune-Cookman College, a historically black university in Daytona Beach.

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Libertarian Think Tank Praises Pelosis Call to Remove Confederate Statues from Capitol: Slavery is The Least Libertarian Thing Imaginable - Mediaite

Democrats seem surprised that Rep. Tom McClintock (RCalif.), a libertarian-leaning conservative, favors the abolition of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that often shields police officers from liability for violating people's constitutional rights. The Democrat opposing McClintock in this year's election, Brynne Kennedy, claims his position on qualified immunity, which she calls "a welcome surprise," implies that he should support the rest of her agenda, including such completely unrelated issues as Medicare, Social Security, and price controls for prescription drugs. If McClintock really wants to prove his bipartisanship, she says, he should agree with her about those issues too.

Given McClintock's history and ideology, Democrats should not have been surprised by his position on qualified immunity, and Kennedy's argument implies that true bipartisanship requires Republicans to agree with Democrats about everything. Her reaction to his stance, whether sincere or not, reflects a broader obstacle to building a trans-ideological coalition for police reform in the wake of George Floyd's death and the ensuing protests. Many left-leaning supporters of that cause either do not understand or willfully ignore the perspective of people like McClintock, and that incomprehension or misrepresentation risks alienating potential allies who disagree with them about a lot of other things.

As the RaleighNews & Observer noted, McClintock is not a newcomer to police reform, which he supported as a state legislator. Back in 2007, McClintock was outraged by the California Supreme Court's decision in Copley Press v. Superior Court,which shielded police disciplinary records from public view. "The Copley decision basically said that disciplinary proceedings against police officers are none of the public's business, even if conducted by a civil service commission under all due process considerations and even if the charges are proven," he said. "In short, once a citizen complains about the misuse of police power, even though the complaint is found to be entirely true, the public has no right to know. That is nuts."

Nor is McClintock a milquetoast when it comes to police invasions of people's homes. Here is what he had to say about no-knock raids this week: "No-knock warrants have proven to be lethal to citizens and police officers, for an obvious reason. The invasion of a person's home is one of the most terrifying powers government possesses. Every person in a free society has the right to take arms against an intruder in their homes, and the authority of the police to make such an intrusion has to be announcedbefore it takes place. To do otherwise places every one of us in mortal peril."

Regarding qualified immunity specifically, the News & Observer notes, "libertarians have long been clamoring for change on the issue." The paper mentions the Institute for Justice, which for years has been backing cases aimed at restricting or eliminating qualified immunity. Conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and 5th Circuit Judge Don Willett, a Trump appointee, also have criticized the doctrine.

McClintock's opposition to qualified immunity makes sense if you understand where he is coming from. During his 2008 House campaign, my formerReason colleague Dave Weigel observed, McClintock "saw the real political split in this country (and everywhere else) as between 'authoritarians and libertarians,' with authoritarians in the saddle now but libertarians coming on strong." McClintock also told Weigel, "I am concerned with civil liberties in this country, and with warrantless surveillance of Americans."

McClintock has been an outspoken critic of the PATRIOT Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and he supported amnesty for National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. "I think it would be best if the American government granted him amnesty to get him back to America where he can answer questions without the threat of prosecution," McClintock told a Sacramento TV station in 2013. "We have some very good laws against sharing secrets, and he broke those laws. On the other hand, he broke them for a very good reason:because those laws were being used in direct contravention of our Fourth Amendment rights as Americans."

McClintock also has broken with most of his Republican colleagues in backing marijuana reform. He was an early supporter of legislation aimed at stopping federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries and repealing the national ban on cannabis as it relates to conduct that is allowed by state law. McClintock opposed federal marijuana prohibition years before many prominent Democrats decided it was safe or politically expedient to do so. That position reflects not just a libertarian sensibility but a principled defense of federalism, a cause that many conservatives abandon when it proves inconvenient.

The fact that progressives can find common ground with McClintock on some issues, of course, hardly means he is about to embrace the rest of their agenda. Likewise with other conservatives, libertarians, and moderates, whether they have long supported police reform or are newly sympathetic because of the problems highlighted by George Floyd's death and other recent travesties.

It may seem obvious that you cannot build a coalition on an issue like police reform if you insist that your allies agree with you about everything or if you mistakenly treat them as Johnny-come-latelies. But progressives are making both of those mistakes.

Instead of supporting the four-page, stand-alone qualified immunity bill that Rep. Justin Amash (LMich.) introduced, House Democrats produced a 134-page billthat addresses qualified immunity but also includes several provisions Republicans are likely to oppose, including increased Justice Department scrutiny of local law enforcement polices and practices, government-backed racial profiling lawsuits, "training on racial bias" for federal law enforcement agents, and financial penalties for states that fail to ban chokeholds or are deficient in reporting data on traffic and pedestrian stops, body searches, and the use of force.

There is a huge gap between the Democrats' grab bag of proposalsmany of which are worthy ideasand the reforms that Republicans seem inclined to support. "The fact that it has no Republican sponsors, the fact that there was no effort to contact any of us to have us weigh in on the legislation, suggests it's designed to be a message piece, as opposed to a real piece of legislation," says Sen. Mitt Romney (RUtah), who plans to introduce a bipartisan police reform bill. "We should vote on each proposal separately," Amash argues. "Massive bills with dozens of topics aren't serious efforts to change law. They're messaging bills with no expectation of getting signed. They cram in so much that they're never written well or reviewed carefully."

The "defund police" slogan adopted by many activists (but wisely eschewed by most Democrats in Congress) poses similar problems. Some people who use it mean it literally, while others have in mind a restructuring of police departments and/or the transfer of money from them to social programs. Whatever the intent, the slogan is bound to alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to support reforms aimed at preventing police from abusing their powers and holding them accountable when they do. The fact that Donald Trump has latched onto the meme as a way of discrediting Democratic reformers is not a good sign. While "defund police" may appeal to some progressives and libertarians, it is not a message that will help attract broad public support for reforms.

It is also a strategic mistake for progressive reformers to act as if they own this issue when many people who don't agree with them on other subjects have been fighting this battle for a long time. As a libertarian who has been covering police abuse, the drug war, criminal justice reform, and civil liberties for more than three decades, I find that attitude irritating, and I'm sure other nonprogressives do as well. But this is not about personal pique; it's about how people with different ideological perspectives can come together on this issue now and avoid squandering an opportunity, perhaps the best we've had in many years, to do some good.

David Menschel, a criminal defense attorney, activist, and documentarian who runs the Vital Projects Fund, describes himself as a "left-winger," but he recognizes that progressives and libertarians are natural allies on this issue. He poses some provocative questions to libertarians about whether they are prepared to support social programs aimed at performing functions currently handled by the police. While that is a good conversation to have, it is not directly relevant to seizing this moment, which requires not only getting along with people who have different political views but also compromising with grudging supporters of reform who may be willing to back specific, concrete proposals to address police abuse that fall far short of the fundamental restructuring Menschel has in mind.

Much of the action on police reform is happening on the local and state levels, as you would expect given our federalist system of government. But to the extent that Congress can address the issue, we should be thinking about changes that might gain the support of not only Tom McClintock and Mitt Romney but also Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (RKy.), who has not heretofore distinguished himself as a criminal justice reformer but lately has been making noises about racial disparities in law enforcement. I'm not sure how much change someone like McConnell can stomach, but reform-minded legislators should find out before it's too late.

Original post:

How Not To Build a Transpartisan Coalition for Police Reform - Reason

And a ballot drop box is located near you.

Democratic, Libertarian, Republican and unaffiliated voters be on the watch for your Primary Election ballot in your mailbox. Ballots are being mailed the week of June 8, 2020. And remember,DouglasVotes.comis always your best source for up-to-date election information.

What ballot(s) should I expect to receive?Registered Democratic, Libertarian or Republican voters will receive one mail ballot for that partys Primary Election. Unaffiliated voters will receive TWO mail ballots (one Democratic and one Republican) but may return ONLY ONE. VisitDouglasVotes.comand read the2020 Primary Election Frequently Asked Questionsfor more information.

If you have not received your expected ballot(s) at the address associated with your voter registration by June 17, contact the Douglas County Elections office at 303.660.7444.

Whats on the ballot?Visit the Douglas Countyballot information pageto review a sample composite ballot for all items on Douglas County ballots.

Vote Early. Near You.Ballot drop boxes are open now through 7 p.m. on Election Day, June 30, 2020. Deliver your ballot for free using one of theconvenient ballot drop box locations countywide.

Will you turn 18 by the Nov. 3, 2020, General Election?Seventeen-year-olds who meet this criteria are able to vote in the Primary Election. Those who are pre-registered as Democratic, Libertarian, Republican or unaffiliated voters will receive their ballot(s) by mail. Visit the2020 Primary Election Frequently Asked Questionsfor more information.

Not registered to vote but want to be?Colorado election law allows voter registration up to and on Election Day. If you live in Douglas County, plan to vote in the Primary Election and are not registered to vote, do so atDouglasVotes.comby June 22 to receive a ballot by mail after that time you must visit a VSPC.

Voter Service and Polling Centers (VSPC).Three Douglas County VSPCs open Monday, June 22 in Castle Rock, Highlands Ranch and Lone Tree. At a VSPC you may register to vote, update your voter registration, replace a ballot, vote in person or use an ADA-accessible voting machine. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 public health emergency, in-person services may be limited or unavailable at certain locations please checkDouglasVotes.comor call 303.660.7444 before visiting a VSPC to confirm availability.

When is the last possible day to vote?Know your ballot deadline. No matter how you deliver it, your ballot must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day, June 30.

Have questions or need assistance?Please visitDouglasVotes.comor contact Douglas County Elections by phone at 303.660.7444.

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Primary Election ballots are in the mail | YourHub - The Know

Why are Republicans in the Iowa Statehouse so afraid of democracy?

Perhaps they are not all afraid, but State Sen. Roby Smith, R-Davenport, certainly is, and based on this weeks vote in the Iowa Senate, it would sure seem that the rest of the GOP crew sitting in the Legislature are scared as well.

That can be the only possible explanation for their recent efforts to push through a last-minute amendment on a benign bill regarding county seals on ballots that passed the Iowa House 97-0. Sen. Smith and his fellow republicans pushed through the amendment under the guise of supposedly supporting safe, secure and reliable elections.

Partisan stonewalling and coronavirus conspire against Iowa candidates

Iowa Senate bars secretary of state from mailing absentee ballot requests

Make no mistake, the only things these scaredy cats are trying to keep safe and secure are their political careers by attempting to suppress a large segment of Iowa voters and striving to prevent them from having multiple choices on the ballot.

The amendment, that was passed the Iowa Senate along party lines this week, would require a written request from voters before the secretary of state would be able to mail out absentee ballots to Iowa voters. Im sure this has nothing to do with the record turnout Iowa saw during the primary elections on June 2. Turnout was high, largely due to the number of absentee ballots that were received in an election praised by Secretary of State Paul Pate (a Republican, mind you) as a huge success and an example of how counties, state agencies and the federal government working together to ensure Iowans could vote safely.

Let me say that quote again, just in case Sen. Smith and company missed it: This election was a terrific example of counties, state agencies and the federal government working together to ensure Iowans could vote safely.

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So we had a massively successful, safe and reliable election, and Republicans want us to believe that they are doing this for the betterment of Iowa voters.

But, wait! Theres more!

In an obvious move to keep third-party and independent candidates off the ballots, Smith tacked on a massive increase in the number of signatures that are required to obtain ballot access in Iowa. The amendment would increase the number of signatures required to gain ballot access for president, governor and U.S. Senate by 266 percent. The impact is even more devastating for prospective candidates who want to run for U.S. House, whose signature requirements would be raised from 375 to 2,000, an increase of more than 500 percent!

This is clearly an effort to alienate the 33 percent of Iowa voters who are so sick and tired of the partisan games played that they choose to register as either independent or third party when they fill out their voter registration cards. For a party that likes to espouse the virtues of freedom, Republicans sure love working to silence Iowans, huh?

I dont often take to calling out other parties. As somebody that was a Republican for nearly 20 years before becoming a Libertarian, and whose family is made up almost entirely of Republicans, I dont make these claims lightly. It is, however, glaringly obvious that this is not the same GOP that my great grandmother, who greatly influenced my political path, proudly represented her entire life. This is a party that can clearly see the writing on the wall, and are choosing to play political games to save their party and careers that are on life support.

They are waging a battle against freedom and democracy, plain and simple, and they deserve to be called out for doing so.

Mike Conner is Libertarian Party of Iowa chairman.

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Scared for their jobs, Iowa Republicans are gaming the democratic process - The Gazette

As a Christian libertarian, few things worry me more than the rise of socialism in America.

A March 2020 Gallup poll found that four out of ten Americans have a positive view of socialism. Among Democrats, 65 percent surveyed said they hold a favorable view of the doctrine.

Whats particularly alarming is that this embrace of socialism is making its way into Americas churches. In recent years, among my Christian friends, family members, and fellow church members, Ive seen sympathy for socialism expressed in various ways. Sometimes its outright support for socialistic policies like the Green New Deal. Other times its support for thinly veiled Marxist concepts or anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Ive had long discussions with people whove tried to convince me that Jesus of Nazareth, whom I recognize as God in flesh, was a socialist. Almost universally, I find these individuals dont misunderstand Jesus. They misunderstand socialism.

Reciting the evils of socialismwhich are legionis easy enough, but Ive found relating these lessons to the Gospel is somewhat more difficult.

Did Jesus not say money is the root of all evil? Did Jesus not say it would be exceedingly difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Didnt Jesus tell a rich man to sell all his possessions and then give it to the poor? Did Jesus not tell a parable about a landowner paying workers the same wage to all workers, even though some worked less than others?

Pointing out that socialism has killed tens of millions of people doesnt address these questions. But there are simple and persuasive answers to each of them, which I know now after reading Lawrence Reeds new book Was Jesus a Socialist?

As a full disclosure, Reed is FEEs president emeritus and a man I can consider a personal friend and mentor. My personal feelings aside, in his new bookwhich was officially released on Mondayhes provided a timely and meticulously well-researched work that deserves attention, especially from those who see Americas churches as the way forward for a loving and peaceful society.

Like it or not, Christian Socialism is on the rise. How we confront it will be one of the greatest challenges Christians face during turbulent times. To be clear, I dont believe Jesus was a capitalist. Or a libertarian. Or a Democrat or Republican.

As Daniel Hannan observed in a wonderful foreword to Reeds book, Jesus transcended such descriptions and showed little interest in the political or social structures of His own time, let alone of todays.

My kingdom is not of this world, Jesus told Pontius Pilate, according to John 18:36. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place."

Unfortunately, this simple truth will not dissuade people from claiming Jesus was a socialist. For Christians seeking intellectual ammunition to rebut such claims, youll not find a better place to start than Reeds new book.

Heres a brief list of observations, facts, and musings about socialism, wealth, and Jesus from the book.

This is just a small taste of what youll learn from reading Lawrence Reeds new book Was Jesus a Socialist?

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61 Quick Facts and Observations on Socialism, Jesus, and Wealth | Jon Miltimore - Foundation for Economic Education