Category Archives: Libertarian

Professedpurveyors of civil liberties refusing to speak out against releasing of privileged phone recordsare sacrificing their cause"on the alter of Trump's impeachment," according civil liberties legal expert Alan Dershowitz on Newsmax TV.

"Every civil libertarian, the ACLU, everybody who cares about civil liberties in the Constitution should be up in arms at the tactics being used by this congressional committee to obtain evidence,"Dershowitz told Monday's "America Talks Live" about Rep. Adam Schiff's, D-Calif., House Intelligence Committee in pursuit of the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

"And, yet, we don't hear a word from civil libertarians, because they like the end result. They want to see Trump impeached, so they're prepared to sacrifice basic civil liberties on the alter of Trump's impeachment."

Dershowitz rejected House Democrats' partisan arguments for grounds ofimpeachment because "none of them satisfy the constitutional criteria for impeachment" and our democracy's check on their abuse of power will come in the November 2020 elections.

"I think people who vote for impeachment without satisfying the constitutional criteria are going to have to pay a price at the ballot box," Dershowitz told host John Cardillo.

Constitutional checks and balances are also being abused by House Democrats in this impeachment attempt, because they are "ignoring" the Judicial branch to "circumvent the Constitution," according to Dershowitz.

"What's going on for the most part in this impeachment is the Democrats are ignoring the third branch of government, the Judicial branch," Dershowitz said. "They want the president to comply with subpoenas without challenging them in court. They want to get records and documents without going through court procedures.

"What we're seeing is kind of diminishing impact of courts, and the courts are supposed to be the referees between the Executive branch and the Legislative branch. And the Legislative branch in this case is eliminating the courts in trying to circumvent the Constitution."

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Alan Dershowitz to Newsmax TV: Silence of the Libertarians - Newsmax

SACRAMENTO, CA December 11, 2019 Californiacounty elections offices across California are mailing postcards to every No Party Preference voter who is registered to vote-by-mail. These postcards are standard and provide voters with their presidential primary voting options.The American Independent, Democratic, and Libertarian parties are allowing No Party Preference voters to participate in theirMarch 3, 2020Presidential Primary Elections.In order to do so,No Party Preference voters should complete and return this postcard to select and receive a vote-by-mail ballot listing presidential candidates from one of these parties.

Voters are encouraged to return these postcards before the new year if possible, so that elections officials can process their requests in time for ballot printing and mailing.

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TheMarch 3, 2020Presidential Primary is now less than 90 days away and voters should start preparing now, Secretary of State Alex Padilla. With the launch of a new How to vote for U.S. President website, direct mailings to voters, and social media campaigns, elections officials are working to educate and assist all eligible Californians. No Party Preference voters, in particular, need to know their options for requesting a ballot with presidential candidates, if they so choose. Voters registered with No Party Preference should be on the lookout for a postcard from your county elections office with options for voting in the presidential primary. Returning this postcard in a timely manner will make for a smoother experience for voters and elections officials alike.

REQUESTING A CROSSOVER BALLOT

No Party Preference voters who do not respond to this postcard will be mailed a ballot without any presidential candidates listed. If after receiving a non-partisan ballot a No Party Preference voters prefers to receive a crossover ballot, they can still request one from their county elections official by:

Voters also have the option of taking their non-partisan vote-by-mail ballot to their polling place (or any vote center in a Voters Choice Act County) and exchange it for a ballot with presidential candidates from the American Independent, Democratic, or Libertarian Party.

HOW TO VOTE FOR PRESIDENT

The Secretary of States office recently launched a new websiteHowToVoteForPresident.sos.ca.govdetailing California voters options for voting for U.S. President in theMarch 3, 2020Presidential Primary.

NO PARTY PREFERENCE VOTERS WHO VOTE IN PERSON No Party Preference voters who vote at the polls, can ask the poll worker for a ballot with either American Independent, Democratic, or Libertarian Party presidential candidates when checking-in at a polling place.

VOTING IN THE GREEN, PEACE AND FREEDOM, OR REPUBLICAN PARTY PRIMARY No Party Preference voters who want to vote for a Green, Peace and Freedom, or Republican Parties presidential candidate, must first re-register with that specific party.

Voters can re-register online atRegisterToVote.ca.gov. If a voter needs to re-registerafter February 17, 2020, a voter who wishes to re-register can do so in person at their polling place, any vote center (VCA counties only), or their county elections office.

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No Party Preference Voters Encouraged to Complete Presidential Primary Ballot Selection Postcards by the New Year - YubaNet

Brian Strietelmeier has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 2008. In 2020, the 34-year-old Prospect man might vote for a Libertarian or even Donald Trump.

Why?

Strietelmeiers top political issue heading into 2020 is not healthcare, or border security or any of the other top issues that seem to have split the electorate.

The candidate who will win his vote will need to be pro-vaping, or at least open to the idea of studying it before making policy changes such as a flavor ban.

Im not asking them to come out, hold up a vape, you know, and take a huge rip and be like, Im with you. I mean, I would love it. But, Im a realist, said Strietelmeier, a print services specialist.

Strietelmeier is not the only vape bloc voter.

In a Morning Consult and Politico poll of 1,988 voters last month, one in 10 former Trump voters said theyd be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate in favor of banning flavors, and 8% said theyd be much less likely.

Other vapers interviewed by LEO said they may vote for a third-party candidate, while others said they might vote for Trump, but all were skeptical of Democratic candidates, most of whom have stayed silent on vaping.

They said they arent against all regulations, such as raising the age for vaping to 21 and requiring vape supplies to be sold in only specialty shops. Mostly, they dont want a ban on flavors, and some just want a candidate who wont demonize vaping.

On Sept. 11, Trump threatened to ban vape flavors, but in November, he backed off, and now vapers like Strietelmeier are still waiting to see if he disavows the idea completely. Libertarians, by definition, arent big fans of government regulation, and that would include vaping regulations.

Not all vapers are single-issue voters.

Danielle Lavigne, who lives in Allen County, Kentucky, said she will consider other issues such as education, job growth and lower taxes. But, the 44-year-old supermarket employee understands why others would let vaping decide their vote. Many issues that candidates bring up dont touch peoples everyday lives, she said. Thats not the case with vaping.

Thats something that affects my life greatly, said Lavigne, who vapes in lieu of smoking, which she did for 26 years.

Still, some people doubt that there are many single-issue voters on vaping on either side of the debate. Skeptics include Ben Chandler, a former Kentucky congressman who is now president and CEO of the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, which lobbies for more vaping regulations in the state.

He said he hopes lawmakers wont hold off on passing vaping regulations because of what he called electoral blackmail from vaping lobbyists.

They dont have any evidence on their side that this is a healthy activity, said Chandler.

About that evidence

LEO interviewed four voters, two of them Kentuckians, who said they plan to base their votes in the presidential election solely on vaping. Some have opinions on issues such as immigration, healthcare and abortion, but after quitting smoking with the help of vaping now they believe its imperative to public health to vote with their vapes.

E-cigarettes have fewer toxins than do combustible cigarettes, but a health expert who studied vaping, Aruni Bhatnagar from UofL, has told LEO that just because vaping carries X number of fewer toxins doesnt mean e-cigarettes are X times healthier than smoking. Vaping still produces harmful substances, he said, and the long-term effects of the practice are not known. The recent vaping illnesses that have hospitalized 2,291 people led the CDC to urge people to stop using black market THC vapes and adding their own ingredients to nicotine e-cigarettes and other vaping products. This, after the additive vitamin E acetate was linked to the illness. But, the CDC said, there might be more than one cause and, as such, is advising abstinence from nicotine and THC vapes. Still, vaping has replaced smoking for millions of Americans, according to a report published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Smoking tobacco kills 480,000 people in the United States every year.

Lainey Tipton, a 38-year-old graphic designer from Tennessee, said she smoked cigarettes for 12 years before switching to vaping. Both her parents died from smoking-related lung illnesses.

When asked why vaping has become her main political issue, Tipton said, Because it saves lives.

Honestly, the day my mom died was probably the hardest day of my life, and I still just randomly burst out in tears, said Tipton. And its because of smoking.

For the vapers who spoke with LEO, flavored vapes were integral for transitioning away from smoking cigarettes, although they have continued vaping. Vanilla custard is the one Tipton attributes to helping her quit.

Most vapers interviewed by LEO said that they were consistent voters and registered with particular political groups, but most were free-flowing with their affiliation.

Carl Hughes, a 42-year-old vaper who lives in Pikeville, Kentucky, described himself as not very political.

Which is why its easy for me to be a single-issue voter, said Hughes.

Hughes recently switched from being an independent to Libertarian as Trump toyed with a flavor ban. More needs to be done. He has to come to a decision, said Hughes. Im cautiously optimistic that hes going to do Trump will do the right thing, and if he does, Ill happily campaign for him.

Cherry Lai, a vaper from California whom Hughes knows, said that shes always based her votes on single issues. Last election, it was healthcare.

Lai, a retiree, described herself as a left-leaning moderate, but this election, she plans to vote for Trump.

Strietelmeier is currently leaning toward voting Libertarian, but he said that he would vote for Trump if he took a more pro-vaping stance.

Tipton said she voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson in the last presidential election, but shes also considering Trump in 2020. Nobody else has really spoken out on the issue, and Im going to vote for someone who has a stance on it, said Tipton, and at least hes gone, We need to really consider whats going to happen to the economy and to these peoples lives.

Vaping diehards such as Gregory Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, a vaping advocacy organization, think vapers could impact the election.

A lot of vaper voters are people that are largely disaffected, Conley said. And they may not be regular voters, but if you give them a reason to vote, they will turn out.

He pointed to a poll conducted by a Republican firm, McLaughlin & Associations, created for the Vaping Technology Association, that showed 74% of 4,669 vapers surveyed in 17 battleground states would be less likely to vote for Trump if he banned flavored e-cigarettes. Eighty-three percent said they would be likely to vote for or against a candidate based solely on their position on vaping products, the survey found.

Conley said that vapers have already decided elections, specifically, the race that re-elected U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Johnson thanked vapers in his acceptance speech, saying they made the results possible. Kaiser Health News reported that an owner of an online vape store at the time and former campaign manager for Herman Cain, Mark Block, rallied vapers around Johnson, raising $3,000 with a Vape PAC and sending out around 400,000 mailers. KHN also interviewed Tom Russell, the campaign manager who worked for Johnsons rival, who said it was the Tea Party, not vapers, that had made a difference in the election.

Vapers have organized mostly online, with a We Vape We Vote social media campaign paired with calls to contact representatives, although there have been rallies, including one in Washington, D.C. that attracted around 3,000 people, according to Conley, and another that occurred in Lexington, Kentucky, the day that Trump came to town for a pre-election rally for former Gov. Matt Bevin. Somewhere between 75 and 100 people showed up to that one, hoping to capture the presidents attention.

Vapers seem to have Trump worried.

The New York Times and The Washington Post reported on Nov. 17 that Trump stepped back from a flavor ban partially to keep support from vapers. Perhaps coincidentally, he changed his mind about a ban while on the way to his Kentucky rally, according to an unnamed Trump adviser interviewed by the Post.

The few candidates on the left who have taken a stance on vaping have called for more regulations. For vapers, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg became enemy No. 1 after allocating $160 million to push for flavor bans in at least 20 cities and states. Andrew Yang told The Washington Examiner that the country was headed in the right direction after Trump proposed a flavor ban. And, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been dinged by vape enthusiasts for urging regulators and companies to increase oversight [and] address health impacts of e-cigarette products.

At this point, I want to see them pay, said Strietelmeier. I want to see them do the right thing, or I want to see them go down on their swords.

More here:

Could Vapers Swing The 2020 Presidential Election? - Louisville Eccentric Observer

Recent weeks have seen global sentiment cool off as US-China trade talks turn positive. Granted, the inverted yield curve that gave a warning sign in the summer has already turned and while the mood is lightening, there are still some dark signs that point to a recession just around the corner.

The Equity Market

The equity market has sustained record high levels in an environment of flat revenues. The current corporate profit cycle started in 2016, and a retracement was expected after companies posted flat earnings in the first three quarters of 2019. But high valuations have persisted in the market, due to positive trade talks, and a change in the monetary policy environment. The US has cut rates thrice in 2019, but during the October meeting, the Federal Reserve signalled a pause in further rate cuts. The worry is that the current monetary policy has supported the high equity levels, rather than actual company fundamentals. A less favourable, even constant monetary situation would trigger the chase for fair valuations and will likely pressure stocks lower.

Sovereign Debt

Still, the biggest cause for concern is sovereign debt. The US already crossed the psychological $20 trillion debt barrier and is well on course to top $1.3 trillion in 2019. The last time the Fed ran $1 trillion in annual deficits was during 2009-2012 when an aggressive quantitative easing program was implemented following the 2008 global financial crisis. The Fed has already stated it is not undertaking any quantitative easing program at the moment, and the US economic data does not make the case for one. The economy is close to full employment and there have been a stream of overall positive economic data. In such an environment, the wisdom is always to cut federal deficits and hike rates. The fear is that there will likely be no bullets left for the Fed to utilise when things go south from here. This potentially means that any decline can easily turn catastrophic or unmanageable.

The Eurozone

The US is delivering some warning signs in a seemingly bright environment, but the situation is gloomy in the Eurozone. The common region has posted a mild and shaky recovery in 2019, but one of the major economies in the bloc has emerged as a huge risk factor. Italy avoided a political nightmare in September when a snap election was averted following the resignation of the countrys Prime Minister and the collapse of government. But the countrys even bigger problem is its public debt; which at $2.3 trillion, represents more than 133% of its GDP. During the global financial crisis, the Greece debt crisis weighed down on the entire Eurozone region. Italy, though, delivers an even bigger scare. Its economy (the third largest in the Eurozone) is ten times that of Greece, and any domestic crisis will have an even bigger doom loop effect on the entire region.

Consumer Sentiment

There is also another important indicator that investors must pay more attention to; the Consumer Sentiment. One of the major indicators for tracking this is the University of Michigans Consumer Sentiment Index, which has been turning lower for the better part of the year. As well, it has been suggested that in the current interconnected world, we can literally talk ourselves into a recession. The idea of narrative economics or viral recession can lead to consumers shifting their behaviours accordingly. They can save more or even cut their spending, and their collective negative sentiment is a major threat to corporate profits. There has been a stream of negative news throughout 2019 and there are major political events, such as the UK Brexit and the US general elections in the coming year. If consumer behaviour continues to be more risk averse, then the recession can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Final Words

When turbulence is around the corner, investors worry even more about their money. The tendency is to look for opportunities in the fixed-income market, such as bonds and government treasuries. Safe haven commodities, such as gold and nowadays, even cryptocurrencies, may appeal to investors willing to chase risk in a depressed market. But there may be even bigger opportunities in the stock market where short selling strategies can yield bigger returns as investors express their collective fear.

Read more:

A 2020 Recession is Blurry, But Still in Sight - The Libertarian Republic

Fox News Channel's Greg Gutfeld, who has made a career out of parodying current events,is having an event of his own this weekend in Knoxville.

The controversial commentator and satirist is bringing to life his latest book,"The Gutfeld Monologues: Classic Rants from The Five," on stage Sunday at the Tennessee Theatre.

Gutfeld is a co-host of Fox News' "The Five" and the host of "The Greg Gutfeld Show," which Forbes reported earlier this year was the third most-watched show in late-night television ahead of programs like "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" and"Nightline."

Knox News sent some questions to Gutfeld ahead of his sold-out stop in the Scruffy City. Here's what he had to say.

Greg Gutfeld of 'The Five' and 'The Greg Gutfeld Show' sits on a set for Fox News Channel. The TV host is coming to Knoxville on Sunday, Dec. 8, 2019, to bring his most recent book to life in front of a sold-out audience.(Photo: Courtesy of Fox News Channel)

On an October segment of "The Five," you called the current time we are living in the golden age of crazy. As the year winds down, what is the craziest news story you recall from 2019 and why?

"Its all nonstop crazy.the last three years have been the Trump show, and were just supporting characters in his television series.It is why the media is so bitter. Hes made them inconsequential, and they hate that.When he enters a room, the spotlight goes directly to him, and leaves the rest of the chattering classes in the dark. I like that. But the oversized egos at other networks dont."

Youre a libertarian although you already know that but so is the mayor of Knox County, WWE wrestler Glenn Jacobs. What makes now the golden age of crazy a good time to be a libertarian?

"Two very simple things: peace and prosperity. Any honest libertarian should admit that Trump has been good for Americans, by a libertarians definition. Meaning, unleashing the free market by reducing taxes, burdens, and regulations while trying to reduce our military footprint and avoiding regime change wars.Those are two central libertarian goals, and its a shame more libertarians dont give him credit for that.He also champions the individual over the group another libertarian mantra."

Lets just say the current field of Democratic candidates are the only people you can choose from for president. If you were forced to vote for one, who would it be and why?

"There are some interesting people there. I like Tulsi, I even like Joe, I really liked Marianne and Cory has energy. But once a candidate starts drifting into identity politics and the economics of grievance, I leave the room. I think out of everyone, Tulsi has the biggest and brightest future. Shes smart and scary, I like that."

Your bio mentions you have been called outrageous and outspoken, which has led to some controversy in your career. And the word controversy often has a negative connotation tied to it. But what do you see as the positive side of being controversial when it comes to participating in and discussing politics?

"Those words are editorial, so I dont see myself that way. Im just some guy who has the job of his life. I was a class clown in the back of homeroom when I was 16, and now Im doing that same gig, but getting paid for it. Chasing controversy for the sake of controversy is a losers game. I avoid that, and avoid people who do that!"

What five questions should a reporter ask if he was trying to get never-before-revealed information about Greg Gutfeld?

"WHY, WHO, WHERE, HOW, WHAT"

Read or Share this story: https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/2019/12/07/the-five-questions-we-asked-greg-gutfeld-fox-news/4358707002/

Excerpt from:

Here are 'The Five' questions we asked Fox News' Greg Gutfeld ahead of his Knoxville show - Knoxville News Sentinel

Today is the last day of Reason's annual webathon and you guys have really come through for us. Nearly 1,200 donors have kicked in more than $345,000 so far, which is pretty mindblowing considering that we set our initial goal at $200,000. Many of you stepped up to participate in the three (3!) generous challenge grants that turned every new $1 into $2!

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On the Last Day of Reason's Annual Webathon, Donate To Join Our Awesome Crew of Supporters and Friends - Reason

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The McKinsey Mayor has a plan: Copy the most successful Democratic politician of the last generation. If an inexperienced but inspiring young black man from Chicago could become president, why not an even less experienced, even younger gay man from Indiana? John McCormick reports for the Wall Street Journal reports that "it is Mr. Buttigieg among the top-tier candidates who is trying the hardest to mimic the former presidents campaign style."

There are just two problems. Pete Buttigieg is running a radically different campaign in a radically different time. Where the party's center of gravity was decidedly moderate in 2008, today it is deeply fissured between moderates and a resurgent left. Thus where the Obama campaign could plausibly both promise optimistic, sweeping change and run on moderate policies, the Buttigieg campaign is going straight for moderates by cynically blasting quality leftist policy like Medicare-for-all and tuition-free college with conservative rhetoric.

Despite his smiling persona, Buttigieg, like Amy Klobuchar, is all about falsely telling the American people what they can't have. Call it the audacity of nope.

Over the past few weeks Buttigieg has started several policy fights with the left. He attacked Elizabeth Warren over her support for Medicare-for-all, demanding to know how she would raise taxes to pay for it despite the fact that he has still not fully costed out his own plans, which would certainly require at least several hundred billion per year in new taxes (though the campaign has said repealing Trump's corporate tax cut might pay for his health-care agenda). More importantly, Buttigieg failed to mention that his own plan would be more expensive on net than Medicare-for-all, because it would not have the same leverage over prices and would preserve much of the current duplicative and wasteful structure.

Most recently, Buttigieg has attacked Medicare with tendentious libertarian ideology about choice. "Youre not free if you dont have health care," he said in a recent stump speech, "but you should have the freedom to choose whether you want it." By this view, non-universal Medicare increases choice and is hence better but elides the fact that it would foreclose the choice of a complete system which covers everyone from cradle to grave, without exception. As usual, libertarian choice rhetoric obscures more than it reveals.

Now, this might sound somewhat familiar. Back in 2008, the major health care policy argument was whether the reform that would become ObamaCare should have an individual mandate. And Obama did cynically promise, Buttigieg style, that his plan would not need one, only to put it back in when it came time to pass the bill. But this was a narrow and technical point that only partly obscured that both candidates basically agreed about what needed to be done. Unlike Buttigieg, Obama was not running far to the right of a full-throated Medicare-for-all supporter.

Buttigieg's case against tuition-free college is just as bad. He would zero out tuition only for families making less than $100,000, and reduce it for families making between that and $150,000. His reason: "I have a hard time getting my head around the idea a majority who earn less because they didnt go to college subsidize a minority who earn more because they did." This is utterly disingenuous, and politically poisonous. In fact, it is the ultra-rich who would pay for tuition-free college under both the Sanders and Warren proposals, with a financial transactions tax and a wealth tax respectively.

As historian Eric Rauchway points out, tuition-free college was also the actual reality for most public American colleges for over a century just the kind of universal program that boosted citizen solidarity and fellow feeling. Indeed, back in 1974, Fred M. Hechinger predicted that then-new tuition fees "threaten to turn higher education into an instigator of class warfare," because if the "children of the [poor] are encouraged to attend college tuitionfree or even on a subsistence subsidy as they ought to be then hardpressed middleclass families are likely to react in anger and political vindictiveness."

That is pretty much exactly what happened, as middle- and upper-middle class families with young children now have to scrimp and save for decades to have a chance at affording college or their kids end up saddled with gigantic student loan debt, or both. Now Buttigieg is exploiting that class divide, using education policy that absolutely would benefit the overwhelming majority to drive a wedge between the middle and working classes. "[W]here I come from, three out of four people dont have a college degree," he said recently. "And if the message were sending to them is that you need a college degree in order to get by in life were leaving most Americans out."

The major concrete effect of this duplicity, of course, would be to protect the top 1 percent from taxation, and make post-secondary education more expensive for people not terribly far up the income ladder.

In the 2008 primary, just like health care, Hillary Clinton and Obama basically agreed with the since-abandoned education reform consensus, and it barely came up during the debates. Unlike Buttigieg, Obama was not running far to the right of a free tuition supporter.

Buttigieg's cynical moderation is reflected in his demographic support, which comes overwhelmingly from older whites. Every supporter quoted in the Wall Street Journal article is over 58. Where Obama racked up tremendous margins among the young and minorities with his energetic charisma, the ongoing Morning Consult poll finds that nearly 90 percent of Buttigieg supporters are white, 59 percent over 55, and 35 percent over 65. Just 6 percent of his supporters are black, and 8 percent between 18-29. The famed Obama coalition it is not.

In retrospect, one can see a great deal of cynicism in the Obama campaign of 2008, especially in his subsequent treatment of homeowners. But partly because his presidency was a disappointment, you can no longer promise "hope and change" without actually backing it up with genuinely aggressive policy.

Buttigieg might be rising in the polls with his elderly coalition, but he'll never recapture that Obama magic.

Go here to see the original:

Pete Buttigieg and the audacity of nope - The Week

We're in the final few days of Reason's annual webathon, during which we ask our readers, viewers, and listeners to support our original, influential, and principled libertarian journalism with tax-deductible gifts (a perk of being published by a 501[c]3 nonprofit).Gohere to donate and to learn about the great swag we're giving out this year. The webathon ends Tuesday, so don't delay!

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The steeple of St. Marys Catholic Church in Guthrie, Okla.(Nick Oxford/Reuters)Cant they agree on local rule?

Are the priorities of the Leonines and libertarians irreconcilable? In a certain sense, they are Pope Leo XIIIs exhortation to further the common good in civic life was a call not merely to private conversion but to a conversion of the state itself. Leo affirms in Rerum Novarum that it is the province of the commonwealth to serve the common good and that the free and untrammelled action of individuals ought to be tempered by the common good and the interest of others. This type of thinking irritates the libertarian, who insists that vesting governments with a telos other than his preferred telos of secure property rights and the prerequisite conditions for the exercise of his liberty is a means of extracting a false unity from an otherwise varied people, of conscripting individual participation in a collective organism to which the individual has not consented to belong, and impeding the individuals pursuit of his own private business. Jacob Marleys realization that his business was the common welfare was one that came too little, too late, but the libertarian might take solace in the fact that the state didnt nudge him one way or the other.

That is a caricature, in part, and is not entirely fair to the libertarian impulse. The instinctual distrust that libertarians hold for concentrated state power is not unlike the Leonine preference for subsidiarity, the principle that problems are best settled on the most local level germane to the matter in question. By its nature, a distant, imperious state tends to abridge the authority of smaller centers of power: the town-hall meeting, local charitable organizations, the parish, the family, and the individual. To Leo, the danger of the state is not merely its size, but its power to disregard or even deny the authority of those institutions that predate it and that properly command its deference: Hence we have the family, the society of a mans house a society very small, one must admit, but none the less a true society, and one older than any State. Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State.

Whether it is an inborn feature of supra-state government or an accident of its maladministration, the federal government has decimated the power of localities, particularly in the past century. Federal grant-in-aid programs, for instance, have played an outsized role in the derogation of local institutions, undermining the autonomy afforded to local governments and civil-society organizations in dealing with homelessness, foster care, education, and the delivery of other social services. While one might respond that this is the fault of those administering such programs rather than of the grants themselves if men were to be governed by angels, etc. that assertion elides the fundamental problem, which is one of scale. It is beyond the scope of the federal government to determine, say, the history curriculum of schools in New Castle, Del., or the criminal penalties that ought to be levied against animal abusers in Le Claire, Iowa. The federal government with its empaneled experts bent on solving local problems, and the armies of discount-rack Fouchs it employs to enforce its solutions is naturally inclined to homogenize what is beyond homogenization, to flatten the diversity of American life, to standardize the particularities of local culture.

These dueling impulses that undergird Catholic social teaching solidarity, which angers the libertarians, and subsidiarity, which bothers would-be Catholic statists seems to be an impasse that can be resolved only by a vigorous preference for the local; for a thick, rather than thin, civil society; preferring, rather than recoiling from, the notion that local and state government might be active participants in shaping civic life for the common good.

Senator Marco Rubios speech at the Catholic University of America was a necessary, if inchoate, treatment of the solidarity half of the question. But when he asserts that deciding what the government should do about [social decline] must be the core question of our politics, he prompts the question: Which government? Some issues rightly fall under the carapace of the federal government, to be sure trade, immigration, national security, and yes, the consolidation of corporate power but in the rush to claim the ground abdicated by deracinated progressives, who feel more comfortable forwarding transnational priorities than national ones, the conservative risks ignoring the states and localities that make life worth living. Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen made this point at the National Conservatism conference, where he warned that the nationalist impulse on the right which seeks to reclaim the national ground forfeited by progressive cosmopolitans threatens to undermine localities: Any national conservatism worthy of the name needs to be clear and forthright: The nation should be embraced, to the extent that it is embraced, as the appropriate and necessary political unit, only and insofar as it can be supportive of those aspects of our lives that require conserving.

What are conservatives conserving, exactly, if not the local communities, regional identities, and traditions that take us outside ourselves and place us in a history not entirely our own, and that are most amenable to the problems that ail the individual and the community in which he lives?

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The Leonines and the Libertarians - National Review

Today's podcast is a "very special episode," though not in the way old TV shows did very special episodes, like when a character we'd never heard of would be introduced and then immediately die tragically, or we'd learn about a terrible new disease such as AIDS, or when Nancy Reagan or Michelle Obama would guest star just to bring everyone down.

No, The Reason Interview's very special episode is a two-part cross-over conversation with Jonah Goldberg, the former longtime National Review editor and bestselling author of Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West. The first part appears here and the second part will appear on Goldberg's podcast, The Remnant, on Thursday, December 5 (go here to subscribe).

Goldberg is a prominent conservative critic of Donald Trump and just a few months ago announced his departure from National Review, where he worked for over two decades. He now hangs his hat at a new media venture called The Dispatch, which involves another prominent conservative, the former editor in chief of The Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes, and another National Review refugee, David French (go here for The Reason Interview with French, which came out earlier this year).

Nick Gillespie talks with Goldberg about the reasons why he left the flagship publication of the American right wing, why he has little-to-no respect for right-wingers like Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, why he's moving in a libertarian direction, and what he, Hayes, and French hope to achieve with The Dispatch. To listen to the second half of this very special podcast when it drops on The Remnant on Thursday, go here, Apple podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Update (12/5): The second half of this conversation is now live at Jonah Goldberg's podcast site. Go here to listen and subscribe. Or click below!

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Jonah Goldberg on Why He Left National Review, Dislikes Sean Hannity and Seb Gorka, and Is Inching Toward Libertarianism - Reason