Category Archives: Libertarianism

Gene Strandberg, Gilpin County. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David, was a founding member of the John Birch Society, a right-fringe group that spouted conspiracy theories about communist subversion plots in the U.S. These two sons would organize and lead the real subversion one generation later.

Fred helped Stalins engineers build 15 oil refineries, establishing Russias oil industry. The American businessman and Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis hired Winkler-Koch Engineering to supply the plans and oversee construction of a huge oil refinery in Hitlers Germany, one of the few in Germany that could produce high octane fuel for fighter planes.

The John Birch Society tried to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren, after SCOTUS desegregated public schools. In 1968 Fred wanted a Birch Society member to run for President on a platform of segregation and the abolition of all income taxes.

In 1966 Charles was an executive and trustee of the Freedom School, founded in 1956 in Larkspur, Colorado by Robert LeFevre, who promoted the abolition of the state. The school opposed anti-poverty programs, Medicare, and forced integration. It taught that robber barons were heroes, taxes were theft, slavery was less evil than a military draft, and the Bill of Rights should consist of only one right, the right to own property.

According to a 1982 Bill Koch deposition, Charles led his brothers David and Bill in an attempt to blackmail his brother Fred out of his share of the family business by threatening to tell their father that Fred was gay, resulting in Freds disinheritance. The plot failed, because Fred wasnt gay, and he wouldnt give in. Exposing his character, Charles gave Fred so little notice of their mothers death that Fred could not get home in time for her funeral.

In 1974 Charles told a group of businessmen, The development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us today. In 1976 the Center for Libertarian Studies was founded with $65,000 from Charles Koch. At a Center conference Charles suggested the movement attract young people because, that was the only group open to a radically different social philosophy. Charles was supported by Leonard Liggio, a libertarian historian with the Kochs Institute for Humane Studies from 1974-1998. He lauded the Nazis youth movement and said libertarians should organize university students to create group identity.

Former Birch Society member George Pearson presented a paper that was adopted for their higher education indoctrination grants. It proposed funding private institutions within universities, where they could influence who would be teaching and what would be taught. Pearson said it would be essential to use ambiguous and misleading names and hide the programs true agenda.

In a 1978 article for Libertarian Review, Charles wrote, Ideas do not spread by themselves; they spread only through people, which means we need a movement. Our movement must destroy the current statist paradigm.

In 1980 they tried through election, with David Koch as the Libertarian candidate for Vice-President. The platform called for the abolition of: the Federal Election Commission and all campaign finance laws; Medicare, Medicaid and all other government health care programs; Social Security; all income taxes and corporate taxes; the Securities and Exchange Commission; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Central Intelligence Agency; the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; minimum wage laws; child labor laws; seat belt laws; public schools and all welfare programs for the poor. The parallel with ALEC and the current Republican goals is not coincidental.

Even arch-conservative William F. Buckley called their views anarcho-totalitarianism. They got only 1% of the vote, so they decided infiltrating universities, establishing think tanks, and co-opting the Republican Party was a better way to destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.

In the 1980s their disciple Richard Fink wrote The Structure of Social Change, which Fink described as a three-phase takeover of American politics. Phase 1 is an investment in academia, where the ideas to achieve their goals would be born.

Phase 2 is the establishment of think tanks to turn the ideas into palatable policies.

Phase 3 is forming front groups (promoted as grassroots), to influence officeholders to enact the policies.

If the Kochs were truly free market libertarians, they would have opposed the government bailout during the financial collapse, which the House of Representatives did reject. After the stock market dropped 777 points in one day, the Kochs and their think tank, Americans for Prosperity, scrapped ideology in favor of money. Two days later a list of conservative groups now supporting the bailout was shown to Republican legislators. The Senate soon passed TARP with overwhelming bipartisan support.

By 2009 Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas were speakers at the Koch donor summits, which are secretive to the point of paranoia. Attendees are told to destroy all document copies, not to post any related information online, and to keep notes and materials secure. Names of guests and agendas are kept secret, sign up is done through Koch staff, not resort staff, name tags are required, all electronic devices are confiscated before sessions, and white-noise emitting loudspeakers are placed facing outward to defeat any eavesdropping attempts. One would think they had something to hide. Sources include politico.com January 2016, the New Yorker August 30, 2010, and prwatch.org January, 2016

Next time: secret money

(Originally published in the December 5, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)

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Meet the Kochs - The Mountain -Ear

Im not one of those people who consider billboards a blight on the landscape, and as will become clear in a moment, this isnt actually a column about billboards. At least not entirely.

So, lets talk about why Mount Pleasant and Charleston County need to hold firm against a local companys requests to digitize six old-fashioned billboards in the town and replace a digital billboard near the county landfill in West Ashley with a smaller but much more visible one.

The conversation begins as most questions of public policy in South Carolina do at the Statehouse.

The year is 2006, Mark Sanford is governor, and the General Assembly has just passed the S.C. Landowner and Advertising Protection and Property Valuation Act, declaring that local governments may require the removal of billboards only if the ordinance requires the payment of just compensation to the sign owners.

The bill masqueraded as part of the regulatory takings movement, which is built on the idea that the U.S. Constitutions prohibition on taking private property for public use without just compensation should apply to regulations that limit the use of property.

Since the courts dont usually buy that reading, libertarians support laws that require payments when a state says people cant erode the neighbors property by erecting a new seawall. Or a county says people cant give children an education they dont need by opening a strip club next to an elementary school. Or a city tries to prevent flooding by limiting how much fill dirt a builder can use to elevate property.

But this bill wasnt a libertarian effort to rein in regulatory takings. It was just the opposite: an attempt to pick winners and losers. And it was so extreme that even our most libertarian governor ever couldnt swallow it.

The bill, Mr. Sanford wrote in his veto message, put billboard owners in a position superior to homeowners, farmers and other businesses. It did this in two ways.

First, it required owners whose billboards were forced down to be paid as if the signs were real estate, which increases in value, even though billboards are taxed like personal property, which decreases in value. When the government actually takes the property of homeowners, farmers and other businesses, through eminent domain, the payment is based on the valuation system on which its taxed.

Second, when government actually takes your land, you get paid what its worth. Billboard owners would get paid based on the amount of money their signs would generate over years or even decades to come. Thats like saying if the government makes a food truck move to a new location, it has to pay the owner all the money she would have made from the food truck staying in its old location for the next 10 or 20 years.

The Legislature quickly overrode Mr. Sanfords veto, and the bill became law, making it extraordinarily expensive to remove billboards.

Since the cost is based on the potential revenue a particular billboard could generate, it costs far more to remove a luminous electronic sign that changes several times a minute than an old-fashioned one-message-a-month billboard. So no rational local government would ever deliberately allow a digital billboard within its jurisdiction.

It might seem ironic, poetically just in fact, that in its overwrought attempt to please the billboard industry, the Legislature passed a law that encourages cities and counties to do everything they can to prevent new billboards or new billboard technology, in order to avoid getting stuck with them for eternity. In fact, its a predictable result of what seems at times like the Legislatures single-minded fixation on asserting itself as the only real power in the state of South Carolina.

This fixation means keeping the states executive branch divided among seven statewide elected officials, and keeping two-thirds of the government beyond the governors control. It means keeping the courts on a short leash. It means limiting the ability of cities and counties to raise taxes and constantly dreaming up new things to tell them they cant do. Or must do. Like paying to remove billboards something the Legislature does not require of the state Transportation Department or other state agencies. Since, even though the governor ostensibly controls a few of them, everybody knows that state agencies all work at the bidding of the Legislature.

It also means South Carolinians get stuck with one-size-fits-all government that caters to the special-interest groups with the best lobbyists in Columbia, while ordinary citizens are back home lobbying their local governments for changes those governments arent allowed to make. Because theres only room for one power in this state, and its located on the second floor of the Statehouse.

Cindi Ross Scoppe is an editorial writer for The Post and Courier. Contact her at cscoppe@postandcourier.com or follow her on Facebook or Twitter @cindiscoppe.

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Scoppe: How SC law made it crazy for cities, counties to give any ground to billboards - Charleston Post Courier

The U.K. election has delivered a huge victory to conservativesand to Tory leader Boris Johnsonand astounding losses to the Labour Party. The results mean much more than the Conservative Party continuing to control the U.K.'s governing bodies.

With at least 364 seats won, the Conservative Party has well surpassed the number required for a majority in Parliament. Prime Minster Boris Johnson "will now enjoy a comfortable majority to 'get Brexit done'in other words, to pass the withdrawal agreement that he negotiated with European Union leaders in October," notes The Economist.

"In truth, the election-night story was not so much that of a Tory surge but of a Labour slump," the magazine adds.

The Jeremy Corbynled Labour Party will see its parliamentary vote share drop eight points. It was the party's worst showing since 1935.

Labour's steepest drops came in areas where the Nigel Farageled Brexit Party did well. (But asThe Spectator notes, Farage's party did not "even come close to winning a single parliamentary seat.")

In any event, it looks like Brexit is on.

And with the chances of Scottish secession rising again, some say this could kick off the destruction of the United Kingdom itself.

The election also speaks to the rising power of combining left-leaning economic policy with conservative social views and immigration policies (so, you know, the worst of all words for free minds/markets/migration types).

Britain's third largest party, the Liberal Democrats, also "had a dreadful night," points outThe Economist. And yet

the Tories' mighty new coalition is sure to come under strain. With its mix of blue collars and red trousers, the new party is ideologically incoherent. The northern votes are merely on loan. To keep them Mr Johnson will have to give people what they wantwhich means infrastructure, spending on health and welfare, and a tight immigration policy. By contrast, the Tories' old supporters in the south believe that leaving the EU will unshackle Britain and usher in an era of freewheeling globalism. Mr Johnson will doubtless try to paper over the differences. However, whereas Mr Trump's new coalition in America has been helped along by a roaring economy, post-Brexit Britain is likely to stall.

Some say the results highlight how it's easier for right-leaning politicians and parties to embrace left-leaning policies than vice versa, though this idea has its skeptics:

"The British election results, like any election result, is the result of unique circumstances and multiple factors," suggests Jonathan Chait at Intelligencer. "It is also, however, a test of a widely articulated political theory that has important implications for American politics. That theory holds that Corbyn's populist left-wing platform is both necessary and sufficient in order to defeat the rising nationalist right. Corbyn's crushing defeat is a decisive refutation."

"Vaping policy" consumes White House.

A good piece from Jane Coaston on the new porn wars, with cameos by Katherine Mangu-Ward and myself:

For several decades now, movement conservatism has adhered to Andrew Breitbart's maxim that "politics is downstream of culture," arguing that rather than engage the forces of government to create change, conservatives should focus on changing popular culture instead. But some social conservatives are now arguing the very opposite.

Arguments in favor of the use of laws to change or improve human behavior hasn't been a characteristic of the post-2010 conservative movement that still bears the influence of the Tea Party and libertarian-leaning Republicans. In fact, Mangu-Ward told me that such arguments were, in her view, generally made by left-leaning politicians and thinkers. Referencing former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's efforts to ban large sodas, she said such rationales stem from "the idea that we should prohibit people from making bad choices," or in short, "make the bad thing illegal."

Catholic theocrat and New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari told Coaston that pornography is "degrading" and "Andrea Dworkin was right."

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U.K. Election: Brexit Wins, Jeremy Corbyn Crashes - Reason

A view of the U.S. Capitol, in Washington DC, U.S., June 20, 2019. (Al Drago/Reuters)Well-intentioned though conservatives calling for a more activist government may be, ours has failed miserably with the responsibilities it already has.

The 2007 comedy Hot Fuzz is about a hyper-competitive London policeman who is reassigned to what initially appears to be the sleepiest, most boring small town in the entire United Kingdom. After a series of wildly suspicious deaths that the other cops insist must be accidents, the policeman and his partner uncover SPOILER ALERT a cabal of locals who are murdering their neighbors over the most minor flaws and sins, all insisting, in a ludicrous chant, that their actions serve, the greater good. The bad actor in the local theater, a local woman with an annoying laugh, a resident with an ostentatious house the town elders murder each one, all in the name of preserving the communitys award-winning reputation.

Fairly or not, every time I hear someone calling for common-good capitalism even someone as likable and usually reliable as Senator Marco Rubio I hear those deranged villagers who insist that enforcing their draconian punishments is for the greater good.

The common good can be pretty subjective. While its not that difficult to get Americans to agree on what is good in the broadest terms, its a lot tougher to build a consensus view of the good when you get down to specifics not to even mention the difficulty of forging a consensus view of how to bring the good about. Rubio, who is after all a politician, lists dignified work, strong families, and strong communities in his definition. You would have to look far and wide to find an American who wants to see more undignified work, weak families, and weak communities. But while most might agree with Rubios goals, whether and how federal policy can achieve them are open questions.

For example, Rubio warns, Weve allowed ourselves to become almost completely dependent on China for rare-earth minerals and wants the secretary of commerce to establish a privately funded, privately operated and privately managed Rare Earth Refinery Cooperative. Thats nice. Its probably a good idea, though some may wonder why, if everything about this is going to be private, we need the Department of Commerce to set it up. But its hard to believe that even if it were a success, it would do much more than nibble at the edges of whatever ails us.

The biggest obstacle to getting access to the 18 million tons of rare-earthminerals in Bear Lodge, Wyo. is securing permits and overcoming objections from environmentalists. It is odd that a proposal like Rubios is treated as part of a new force in opposition to libertarianism, but it runs into the same complaints about government bureaucracy, slow permitting, and red tape made chiefly by . . . libertarians.

Rubios other ideas are the sort that shouldnt really raze libertarian hackles that much: expanding the federal per-child tax credit, reforming the Small Business Administration, and so on. But they feel like small potatoes. If our capitalist system is doing a lousy job of serving the common good, well, that probably at least partially reflects problems in how our government regulates and creates incentives within it. Many Republicans and almost all Democrats are dancing around the glaring contradiction of asking a government thats doing a terrible job fulfilling its current responsibilities to do more.

To listen to the Democratic presidential candidates, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are a bunch of xenophobic thugs, Customs and Border Patrol officers are abusing innocent children, the Office of Management and Budget held up aid to Ukraine for corrupt reasons, the entire federal government is asleep at the wheel when it comes to protecting our elections and voting systems, the Department of Justice keeps giving grants to police forces full of cops who are racist and abusive . . . and the only solution is to give the government more money and power.

Do these folks realize that their primary tool for promoting the common good is the sputtering, jury-rigged, frequently malfunctioning Rube Goldberg machine known as the federal government?

With almost comical regularity, if you ask the federal government to do X, it will, given tons of funding and having the best of intentions, accidentally give you the opposite of X. We have a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that sent 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels. We have an Environmental Protection Agency that accidentally released 3 million gallons of wastewater tainted with iron, aluminum, manganese, lead, copper, and other metals into rivers in three states. The Office of Personnel Managements job is to collect and protect information about federal employees; it did a terrific job of putting all of the potential blackmail material on every government employee who handles classified information in one place for Chinese hackers to steal. We have a Transportation Security Administration that failed to find hidden fake explosives in 67 out of 70 tests. The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction found that the Pentagon could only account for 38 percent of the $3.8 billion allocated for the Commanders Emergency Response Program. The Department of Education spent more than $45 million on537 charter schools that never opened. If you put the federal government in charge of banning porn, youd probably end up getting Stormy Daniels videos sent to your phone by FEMA.

Is it really a good idea to give these folks bigger, more complicated duties?

A lot of good people work for the federal government. Unfortunately, its hard to get rid of the bad people who work there, and the good ones toil away in systems and offices that discourage change and new ideas, have few if any incentives for efficiency, use outdated technology, drown in paperwork, and have an obsessive fear of lawsuits. In addition to the traditional problems, in recent years many federal agencies have coped with a revolving door in their leadership. In his first 31 months in office, President Trump had two defense secretaries, two acting defense secretaries, two secretaries of homeland security, two acting secretaries of homeland security, two secretaries of state, one acting secretary of state, two CIA directors, and three chiefs of staff.

All of these existing agencies have a well-established mission meant to serve the greater good, from dont let weapons get onto planes to help build a decent society in Afghanistan to open new charter schools. Some days they succeed, but all too often they fall flat on their faces. That fact should give pause to Senator Rubio and others on the right pushing for expanded government powers in the service of conservative ends.

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A Federal Government Thats Not Good at Its Job Cant Effectively Serve the Common Good - National Review

Im fascinated by the debate that has been raging these past several days among conservatives around the issue of pornography. Im happy to accept blame for helping to start this scuffle because I think it has been a clarifying moment for conservatism. As Jane Coaston outlined in her fair and insightfulreporting at Vox,the dispute over porn regulation really springs from a more fundamental disagreement about the actual purpose of government.

Guys like Sohrab Ahmari have come down on the pro-regulation side, while the libertarians at Reason have settled, unsurprisingly, on the other. The dividing line even runs through The Daily Wire. My colleaguesMichael Knowles and Josh Hammerjoin Ahmari, myself, and others in the view that government has a legitimate role in battling the porn epidemic, while Ben Shapiroand Jeremy Boreingsay that it should not have a substantial role and any role, if there is one, should not include an outright ban. I think everyone cited above has contributed thoughtfully to the discussion, and Im not just saying that because two of them happen to sign my paychecks.

But through this whole back-and-forth, I havent seen anyone engage with what I consider to be my strongest argument. Putting aside, for a moment, the philosophical discussion about the nature of government and the states role in preserving the common good an important conversation, but one that leads us far into the weeds and loses sight of the original subject in the process Id like to re-emphasize a very simple point Ive made about the porn problem, specifically.

The defense of pornography, or at least of its remaining legal and mostly unregulated, seems to hinge on the fact that the content is produced and viewed by consenting adults. If viewers do not consent to viewing a sexual act, we all presumably agree that a crime has occurred. It would seem to strain the bounds of the most radical libertarianism to argue that a group of adults are within their rights to have an orgy on the subway, for example.

Porn is different, its argued, because you only view it if you seek it out. If viewers of porn were not consenting if internet porn were of such a nature that millions of people were forced to encounter it against their will every year then it would seem that the argument against prohibition or regulation begins to crumble. Well, I think it has already crumbled because indeed millions of people are exposed to itevery year against their will and consent. Those defending the legality of porn seem to be ignoring this group of victims, and I think that is an insurmountable moral and logical flaw in their position.

Children are first exposed to porn at the age of 11, on average. As we speak right now, there are no doubt millions of minors, some as young as five or six years old, watching adults have sex on the internet. This is an indisputable fact. Does the fact not blow to smithereens the consent excuse offered by the other side? Our legal system rests on the assumption that minors cannot consent to engage in sexual acts. If an adult has sex with a child, the adult is guilty of rape no matter if the child verbally agreed or not. In our society, we understand that children lack the mental and emotional maturity to make an informed decision in this area. To deny that is to literally defend pedophilia.

Well, if children cannot consent to engage in a sexual act, does it not inevitably follow that they cannot consent to witness such an act? If they cannot consent as a second-party participant, neither can they consent as a third-party participant. Thus, every child who watches porn does so, by definition, without consent. Again: I dont see how you can quibble with this argument without also quibbling with the logic for criminalizing pedophilic behavior. Im not saying that the people on the opposite side of this issue are trying to legalize pedophilia. Im saying that they fail to appreciate how our laws against pedophilia also provide a basis for pornography regulation.

This all means that every consenting adult who posts hardcore sex videos to the internet does so knowing that children can very easily access and view it. They are putting it, as it were, within reach of the child. If the child reaches for it, who do we blame? Is it the childs fault or the fault of the person who put it there? I would argue that every child who has viewed internet pornography is a victim of abuse. And the abuser is the person who posted that content where a child, with no trouble at all, could find it.

Indeed, the internet porn industry makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year on children. Each hit to a site like Pornhub is monetized. If millions of children go on that site which they do, because theres nothing to stop them then Pornhub profits to the tune of millions on the psychological and sexual abuse of children. If you dont think the government has an interest in the common good, broadly speaking, will you admit that it at least has an interest in preventing people from making millions on providing pornography to 12-year-olds?

The obvious dodge here is to lay the onus entirely at the feet of parents. Its not the pornographers fault, critics will respond. Its up to the parent to stop their kids from seeing this stuff. I find this rejoinder to be profoundly lazy. Its true that parents should be doing all they can to shield their children from the filth on the internet, but its also true that the internet is so ubiquitous that parents cannot, on their own, do a sufficient job in this regard. Even if the child has no phone and no internet access at home or, more likely, regulated internet access at home he can still go almost anywhere else and access the internet dozens of different ways. Short of moving into a cave in the desert, a parent can only provide partial cover. But partial cover, in the end, is only a little better than no cover at all.

Besides, this does nothing to relieve the responsibility of the person posting the content in the first place. Even if every child exposed to porn has ineffectual and inattentive parents (which is most emphatically not the case), that still doesnt explain why anyone should have the right to post sex videos on a public forum where children can easily access them. It might be true that some children who are molested could have been saved that trauma had their parents been more vigilant, but that does absolutely nothing at all to excuse the man who did the molesting. The same holds true for pornographers.

The question is this: Do we have a natural human right to post hardcore sex videos online where children can see them? Anyone who says yes has an extremely confused and hopelessly ambiguous conception of human rights. The rational people who say no, however, must weigh whether a persons privilege to post such content outweighs the right of a child to be free from sexual abuse and trauma.

This does not have to be a deeply philosophical debate about philosophies of governance and so on. This can be much simpler. You do not have a right to expose children to sexually explicit content. Children do have a right to certain basic legal protections. That fact alone, in my view, is enough to settle the argument.

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WALSH: Every Child Exposed To Internet Pornography Is An Abuse Victim. There Should Be Laws Protecting Them. - The Daily Wire

Surrounded by fellow Libertarians during a 2018 election night watch party at a rented Airbnb in Fort Worth, Eric Espinoza, who was running for state Rep. Jonathan Sticklands seat, saw a Facebook message notification pop up on his phone.

Its people like you who are preventing other candidates from winning, he recalls the message saying, though he doesnt recall which candidate the sender supported.

I was like, Hey, guys, look I think I finally made an impact, Espinoza remembers saying, as he passed his phone around to others in the crowded living room.

That to me was like, OK, cool, I was able to affect something so much that somebody who knows nothing about me, and nothing about why I ran, blames me for somebody losing when its not the votes. Its not that I took votes from them; its that people didnt want to vote for that person, and they had a better option.

Republicans and Democrats alike will blame third-party candidates for siphoning votes from traditionally two-way races. Espinoza not only took votes that might have gone to Stickland, a Republican, but he had more votes than Sticklands margin of victory. Stickland beat his Democratic challenger by fewer than 1,500 votes, and Espinoza, in third place, had racked up more than 1,600.

Its still rare for third-party candidates to capture enough votes to potentially sway an outcome in the past three general elections, there have been just six such instances, according to a Hearst Newspapers analysis. But the number is growing, in a sign of tightening Texas elections.

Tight races getting tighter

As races in Texas become tighter, more third-party candidates are having an impact on elections. Over the past three general elections, there were six races in which a third-party candidate won more of the vote than the margin of victory.

Year

Race

Highest-Scoring Third-Party Candidate

Party

Third-Party Candidate's Percentage of the Vote

Margin of Victory

2014

U. S. Representative District 23 (Democrat Incumbent Democrat Pete P. Gallego and Republican Will Hurd)

Ruben Corvalan

Libertarian

2.54%

2.10%

2016

U. S. Representative District 23 (Republican Incumbent Will Hurd and Democrat Pete P. Gallego)

Ruben S. Corvalan

Libertarian

4.74%

1.33%

2016

Member, State Board of Education, District 5 (Republican Ken Mercer and

Democrat Rebecca Bell-Metereau)

Ricardo Perkins

Libertarian

4.72%

3.94%

2018

State Representative District 132 (Republican Mike Schofield and Democrat Gina Calanni)

Daniel Arevalo

Libertarian

1.66%

0.17%

2018

Member, State Board of Education, District 12 (Republican Pam Little and Democrat Suzanne Smith)

Rachel Wester

Libertarian

2.66%

1.52%

2018

State Representative District 92 (Republican Incumbent Jonathan Stickland and Democrat Steve Riddell)

Eric P. Espinoza

Libertarian

2.75%

2.39%

In 2014, one third-party candidate had the potential to affect a races outcome. In 2016, there were two such races. And in 2018, there were three. (None won an election.)

Two of the six races were Republican U.S. Rep. Will Hurds victories in Congressional District 23 in 2014 and 2016. Two were State Board of Education races.

Only one of those third-party efforts could be considered an outright spoil, when Libertarian Daniel Arevalo got 1,106 votes in a Texas House race in 2018 that saw Democrat Gina Calanni beat Republican incumbent Mike Schofield by just 113 votes.

In all six races, the margin of victory was low, most at about 2 percent or less, and the third-party candidates were Libertarian.

A year after some of the most competitive state-level races in decades, Texas Republicans moved to make it easier for third-party candidates to receive and maintain a spot on the ballot. In doing so, they returned ballot access to the Green Party after it lost it following the 2016 election.

Maybe Republicans are just kind of viewing this as, either you could call it an insurance policy or maybe its a way to subject the Democrats to things theyve been subjected to on the part of the Libertarians, said Phil Paolino, an associate professor of political science at the University of North Texas who has studied the effect of third parties on presidential races.

As elections get tighter, Paolino said, you might see a few more races where third-party candidates are able to cover the margins whether itll have the effect of altering the results is a big question.

During a more competitive election, with the stakes higher, some voters may be less likely to vote for third-party candidates and risk a major partys chances, Paolino said. In the six recent cases where third-party candidates drew more votes than the margin of victory, its impossible to know the outcome if they hadnt run whether their supporters would have voted for a Democrat, Republican or skipped going to the ballot box at all, he said.

For subscribers: Texas Green Party has qualified for 2020 ballot and welcomes Democrats climate change focus

If the Republicans behind the bill were hoping to hurt their Democratic competitors by allowing Green Party candidates, who typically pull votes from Democrats, onto the ballot, that appears unlikely from a historical standpoint, at least. Green Party candidates never came close to tipping a race when they were on the ballot in 2014 and 2016.

Whitney Bilyeu, a representative to the Libertarian National Committee for a five-state Southern region that includes Texas, said she thinks Republicans and Democrats in Texas are getting very afraid of us.

When we see things like this, which we expect them to continue to happen, it is a sign that people are finally figuring out, No. 1, they have other options, Bilyeu said. And No. 2, that third option, which is us, is the only one that actually gives them what they want and are about what they claim to be about.

Bilyeu said both major parties have reacted to Libertarian candidates success by trying to limit their access to the ballot.

The Texas Green Party did not respond to requests for comment.

Another voice that is pushing ideas

Republican Rep. Drew Springer, who sponsored the bill, said he hadnt studied third-party election results until a reporter presented him with an analysis. The North Texan has run unopposed since he was first elected in 2012.

Springers bill required that third-party candidates either pay a filing fee or submit a petition to run for election, just as major party candidates are already expected to do. Filing fees range from $300 for a State Board of Education seat to $3,125 for a U.S. House race.

Prior to Springers bill passing, Republican Rep. Mayes Middleton had tried to pass a bill, HB 4416, which would have doubled the threshold for parties retaining ballot access by requiring candidates receive 10 percent of the vote in the previous general election.

An amendment Springer later added to his own bill reduced the ballot access threshold to 2 percent of the vote in the previous five general elections. Springer said its purpose was not to impact election results but to bring more voices to the table.

The biggest effect is the fact that you have another voice that is pushing ideas during the campaigning process, Springer said. Democrats and Republicans have to factor those policies into what theyre doing; I think that helps the whole process.

Of the presidential races that Paolino studied, third-party candidates did guide presidential priorities in some cases, such as in 1992, when Ross Perot took 19 percent of the vote, the most won by any independent or third-party candidate since former president Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

Perots campaign about the dangers of the deficit did create some motivation for the two major parties to think about ways to reduce the deficit and ultimately, as we saw by the end of Clinton administration, produced a surplus, Paolino said. Its the idea that if 19 percent of the voters out there might be concerned with this, then its going to be better if we can show were doing something about it.

While Libertarians success in Texas has mostly been in local elections, Bilyeu said she still thinks the direction at the Legislature has been influenced by the partys platform, including its advocacy for marijuana legalization. The Legislature added several more conditions to the states medical marijuana program in its most recent session.

We are impacting elections one way or another, whether were covering the spread (between Democrats and Republicans) or not, because were getting messages out there that would not be heard otherwise and were putting candidates from these old parties on notice, Bilyeu said.

For subscribers: Libertarian, Green parties sue Texas over ballot requirements

Ballot-access battle

The Texas Libertarian and Green parties, as well as other minor party groups and some individuals, in July sued the state over its ballot requirements, including those imposed in Springers bill.

They argue that ballot access requirements one of which calls for them to track down thousands of voters who did not cast ballots in a primary election and get their signatures create a financial barrier to candidates. A federal judge denied the states motion to dismiss the suit Monday but declined to temporarily block the requirements.

Also on Monday, House Speaker Dennis Bonnen requested that the Committee on Elections during the interim period until lawmakers next meet in 2021 monitor the bill, among others, to ensure intended legislative outcome.

Espinoza, the Libertarian candidate in the 2018 race won by Stickland, said laws that restrict third-party ballot access wont prevent them from spreading their message and getting through to voters.

You can do all the political posturing you want to, but if the public does not see the change they want, thats not going to matter, Espinoza said. Theyre going to try to vote for someone outside the two-party system whos going to do what they say theyre going to do and enhance the individual freedoms of each voter.

Data reporter Stephanie Lamm contributed to this report. taylor.goldenstein@chron.com

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As Texas elections get tighter, more third-party candidates are making inroads - Houston Chronicle

There are close to 7,000 languages spoken around the world today. Yet, sadly, every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, and it is predicted that between 50% and 90% of endangered languages will disappear by next century. When a community loses a language, it loses its connection to the past and part of its present. It loses a piece of its identity. As Microsoft thinks about protecting this heritage and the importance of preserving language, it believes that new technology can help.

For the past 14 years, Microsoft has been collaborating with te reo Mori experts and Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Mori (the Mori Language Commission) to weave te reo Mori into the technology that thousands of Kiwis use every day with the goal of ensuring it remains a living language with a strong future. The collaboration has already resulted in translations of Minecraft educational resources and it recently commissioned a game immersed entirely in the traditional Mori world, Ng Motu (The Islands).

Read More at Microsoft On The Issues.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci: The anti-vaxx movement is 'libertarianism taken to the extreme' - GZERO Media

TALLAHASSEE Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was in his element when he gave the opening speech last month at the national convention of the Federalist Society, the organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers.

Citing Federalist papers and 162-year-old U.S. Supreme Court cases, the Harvard-trained attorney made an articulate case against the branch of government he said felt superior to the others.

I think judicial power is too robust right now, DeSantis said. And I think the checks upon it are just simply inadequate.

Less than a year after taking office, DeSantis is faced with making his fourth and fifth picks for the state Supreme Court, melding Floridas highest court to his legal philosophy.

And his views are indistinguishable from the Federalist Society, whose members have been instrumental in making those picks. Leonard Leo, the societys executive director, vetted the three nominees DeSantis made earlier this year.

Two of those judges were later chosen by President Donald Trump for the federal bench meaning DeSantis gets two more Supreme Court picks, likely naming them early next year.

At the convention, Leo said he already knew who DeSantis will choose to replace them: committed Floridian originalists, referring to the originalist judicial philosophy popularized by the organizations most revered member former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The philosophy goes like this: When reading the law, judges should interpret it as its written on the page. If the law is messy or unclear as it often is judges should not strain to come up with their own interpretations, or rely on what lawmakers might have intended.

That goes for the Constitution as well. The Constitution is not a document that can be interpreted to apply to 21st century problems, as many judges do.

***

Reshaping the court has long been the goal of Republicans in Tallahassee. Since the GOP controlled the governors mansion and the Legislature for the past two decades, only the Supreme Court has checked its power, blocking top priorities from school vouchers to redistricting.

After DeSantis was elected, he got to replace the three justices who were appointed by Democratic governors, and some believe Floridas high court is now among the most conservative in the country.

But in his zeal to reshape the courts, DeSantis, or his staff, has been accused of injecting politics into the judicial selection process.

Attorney Alan Landman, a former head of a judicial circuit nominating commission for the Florida judicial circuit court covering Brevard and Seminole counties, quit this year after he said DeSantis staff asked his to nominate a particular person a lawyer who was a member of the Federalist Society to the bench.

Landman said it was highly inappropriate, and that it had never happened when he served under Gov. Rick Scott for eight years.

When I served (members of the governors staff) never, never stepped into the (judicial nominating) process, Landman said. Never, never.

And former judges and lawyers were alarmed when DeSantis general counsel, Joe Jacquot, asked the chief judge of the Division of Administrative Hearings to step down. DeSantis appointed one of his own lawyers, a Federalist Society chapter president who had virtually no experience in the courtroom.

Last year, Floridas Supreme Court judicial nominating commission stocked with Federalist Society members failed to recommend a single person who was black to the bench, leaving the high court without a black justice for the first time in decades.

Black lawyers are already underrepresented in the legal profession, and there is no guarantee that DeSantis fourth or fifth nominations will be black.

For Eugene Pettis, the first black president of the Florida Bar, the oversight is unthinkable.

To be in the State of Florida and have five appointments and not one of them is African-American? Pettis said. I cannot believe that will happen.

DeSantis spokeswoman Helen Ferr did not say whether DeSantis was committed to appointing a black justice.

Governor DeSantis expects the (commission) to send the best judicial recommendations that focus on candidates who understand the rule of law and the important but limited role of the judiciary, she said in an email. Respect for the Constitution is imperative.

***

The Federalist Society and its philosophy has been popular with Florida governors going back to Jeb Bush, but it hasnt had such an ardent fan in the governors mansion until DeSantis.

He was a member of the society while at Harvard, and hes able to explain his support for originalist philosophy to laymen or lawyers. At the convention last month, he derided judges who didnt subscribe to it.

You have to have some objective measure to go by, DeSantis said at last months convention. It cant just be fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants philosophizing and imposing whatever idiosyncratic views you have on society under the guise of constitutional interpretation. Originalism provides a mechanism to (restrain) judicial discretion, which I think is very, very important.

By its nature, it means that judges should have less power to strike down laws passed by the Legislature or Congress.

DeSantis last month recounted the Supreme Courts 1857 decision in Dred Scott vs. Sandford, in which the court ruled that black people were not intended to be included under the word citizens in the Constitution. DeSantis called it one of the worst cases the Supreme Court ever decided."

The courts chief justice cited state and local laws at the time the Constitution was created to state that black people and white people were supposed to be separated the kind of legal logic that would rankle originalists.

On the other hand, critics believe some members want to use the philosophy to overturn Roe vs. Wade and weigh in on other social issues.

While the Federalist Society is nonpartisan, its dominated by conservatives and libertarians, and Trump has drawn on its members and their advice to fill federal court seats. Bob Jarvis, a professor of law at Nova Southeastern University, said their philosophy was just a fig leaf for conservatism.

I would disagree with the characterization that theyre not partisan, Jarvis said. Theyre highly partisan.

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DeSantis is reshaping Floridas courts with the Federalist Societys help - Tampa Bay Times

The Lost President: A.D. Smith and the Hidden History of Radical Democracy in Civil War America, by Ruth Dunley, University of Georgia Press, 214 pages, $54.95

Ruth Dunley first encountered Abram D. Smith as a barely mentioned bit of trivia in Glyndon Van Deusen's 1959 bookThe Jacksonian Era. "In September, 1838," Van Deusen wrote, "some 160 Hunters from both sides of the [Canadian] border attended a convention in Cleveland, where they elected one Smith, a resident of that city, President of the Republic of Canada."

Who was this Smith person, and how did he get elected by a bunch of carousing yahoos aspresident of a neighboring country? Why had she never heard of him before? Surely such a colorful figure should have made it intosometextbooksomewhere; surely his whole legacy was recorded in an obscure dissertation, some old journal article, or at least a beefy footnote. Something out there must explain this guy and his role in what became a major international affair.

But nonot even close. No one had ever bothered to write this man into history. Now Dunley had a dissertation to write.

The Lost President: A.D. Smith and the Hidden History of Radical Democracy in Civil War Americais the result of that work. Besides his Canadian adventure, Dunley found, Smith was the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who struck down the national Fugitive Slave Act in his state in 1854. His name was also briefly floated for the vice presidency on Abraham Lincoln's 1860 ticket. Smith's life would be lost to time but for the efforts of a single historian.

Salvaging the record was no easy task. First off, the phrase "one Smith" from Van Deusen was not much to go on. After checking a variety of Ohio archives, Dunley concluded the man's initials were "A.D." But that made for a bittoo muchto go on. With 6,294 different necrology files linked to the name, she experienced both ends of the research historian's constant dilemmas: the hopeless dearth of useful evidence and the crushing mountain of clutter. Dunley took hours to comb through baby-naming books for possible combinations, entering them fruitlessly into Google; she checked just about every type of archive; she found suggestions that he may have been a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, but nothing terribly specific; she called on waves of archivists and librarians.

To make matters worse, the election that attracted her attention in the first place was a highly secretive affair, conducted by an underground militia of rowdy radical republicans intent on invading Canada to stir up revolution. These "Brother Hunters" or "Patriots" communicated in secret or by cypher, using their true names as infrequently as possible. Dunley went so far as to enlist an anonymous "hacker" to decode the Hunters' documents. Still no leads.

She learned A.D. Smith's address in Cleveland, but that went nowhere. She learned that he'd served as a justice of the peace there for some time, and she hoped to find a complete name amid the documents he signed. Maddeningly, however, "he had signed nearly every one of the fifteen hundred or so pages of his docket bookssome pages twicebut always with just his initials." Her hands were black with Jacksonian-era ink, but still she had no full name: "Not only did the world know nothing about A.D. Smith, but now, as his would-be biographer, neither did I."

And then Dunley did what any enterprising young graduate student might: "I went back to the Internet." After several more hours of digging, she uncovered a brief biography of one Abram D. Smith of the Wisconsin state Supreme Court. A few sources later, she found in an 1897 publication calledThe Green Baganother explosive scrap of evidence in the evolving mystery of his life. It read: "Before coming to Milwaukee [Abram D. Smith] was a justice of the peace in Cleveland, Ohio." Our author-hero's project finally started to come together.

Once Dunley discovered the essential components necessary to identify "one Smith," she slowly but steadily reconstructed his biography, the ambling and quixotic story of a 19th century "knight errant for republicanism." He was constantly in motion, moving from one place to another, staying just long enough to make a mark yet still disappear without much of a trace. He celebratedAmerica and Americanism in some of the most libertarian ways imaginable: As a young law student, he kept the Fourth one year by firing salutes to revolutionary heroes, drinking in their honor, and napping the day away in a rowboat, isolated on a lake island in New York's mountain country. He dreamed and spoke of universal progress borne across the globe on electrified telegraph lines, railroads, and steamships everywhere. He devoted his professional life to upholding the constitutional system as he understood ita series of fail-safes between would-be tyrants and the people's libertiesand he seized critical moments to shape events as they came to him.

He was a crusader for those weaker than himself, an advocate for the voiceless, a radical reformer. In the Canadian rebellions, he and others hoped to liberate a downtrodden and exploited people from the world's most powerful empire. Nearly 30 years later, in the South Carolina Sea Islands, he oversaw the redistribution of planter land to the freed people who had worked it.

Smith exhibited all the best (and worst) qualities of early libertarians. He was hopeful, tireless, radical, and passionate. He was also naive, prodigal, headstrong, and romantic. The Canadian rebellions were largely a homegrown affaira reaction growing out of the place's long history as part of the British empire yet deeply connected to the United States. As Canadians imbibed Jacksonian political rhetoric, separatist leaders such as William Lyon Mackenzie found greater and greater support for dismantling British class legislation and colonial spoils. As it happened, though, far more Americans like Smith supported the cause than actual Canadians.

Smith was lucky enough to avoid battle in the Canadas, but plenty of his fellow Hunters and Patriots suffered or died for their cause at the hands of a British court-martial. James Gemmel was one such captured Patriot, convicted and sentenced to transportation to Tasmania. Gemmel survived and wrote up his experiences, urging his peers to "avoid all frontier movementsthe best weapon in the hands of this great republic, with which to revolutionize the world, is surely a strict adherence to that wise, just, and honest policy, which carries in its train prosperity and peace." Smith, meanwhile, spent the next few years marveling that one country (the United States) could peacefully and voluntarily absorb another (Texas) into republican sisterhood. But that wonder of diplomacy was soon outshined by a slaveholder's war for Mexico and the Pandora's box of slavery's expansion in the territories.

A decade later, a runaway slave named Joshua Glover escaped to Smith's Wisconsin, and slave catchers apprehended one of Glover's abolitionist assistants, Sherman Booth, as retribution. In Booth's case, Smith declared the Fugitive Slave Act null and void in his state. Virginians might render human beings into property, but Wisconsin would recognize the humanity ofallpeople.

His stance made Wisconsin the first state to outright refuse cooperation with the national fugitive slave law. It was a major moment in the immediate prehistory of the Republican Party.

Yet by 1860, the Supreme Court had overturned his decision. Smith was rocked by a local bribery scandal, dumped from the Democratic Party, rebuffed by the Republican Party, and left without any vehicle for his constant stream of causes.

He must have leapt at the chance, then, to join the Direct Tax Commission in organizing newly freed slaves in the Sea Islands. There, he spent his final years enjoying the former slaves' new liberties with them, helping them toward literacy, subsistence, security, and equal citizenship. But even then, bureaucracy won the day; Smith's fellow commissioners convinced the Lincoln administration that he was doing more harm than good.

And perhaps he was. Smith died on a steamer from South Carolina to New York, the victim of a life of alcoholism and maybe harder drug use as well. He had reportedly been drunk on the job for years.

Throughout his life, contemporaries remarked that Smith's name was likely to go down in history bolded, underlined, and italicized. They thought that posterity would surely remember a man who lived life to such great effect. But historical memory is a fickle thing, and few libertarian heroes will be remembered unless we do the labor of history. Smith died in obscurity and was almost immediately forgotten. Now, thanks to Ruth Dunley and her tireless quest to unravel the Great Smith Mystery, we once again have memories of this man.

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Meet A.D. Smith, Forgotten Libertarian Abolitionist Hero and Would-Be President of Canada - Reason

A Libertarian walks into a bar. He sits down next to a socialist just as the 10 oclock news comes on the TV. There is a man poised to jump off the ledge of a very tall building.

Do you think hell jump? asks the socialist.

I bet he will, says the Libertarian.

Well, I bet he wont.

At that the Libertarian slaps a $20 bill on the bar. Youre on.

Just as the socialist puts down his money, the man swan dives off the ledge.

Upset, the socialist says, OK, I lost. Heres your money.

I cant take it. I saw this earlier on the 5 oclock news and I knew he would jump.

Oh, I saw it, too, says the socialist, but I didnt think he would do it again.

I laugh because this illustrates to me what Aristotle called the willing suspension of disbelief, something I find common among those who tout the wonders of socialism despite its obvious failure in every country where it has been tried, the most recent being Venezuela.

If you point out socialisms failure to anyone who believes in it, they will tell you that true socialism has never been tried. Ask them what true socialism is and they will have no answer. At least that has been my experience whenever I engage in an argument with someone on the left.

My father was a devout member of the Socialist Labor Party. Having been raised hearing names like Babeuf, Owen (who coined the term socialism in the 19th century), Marx and DeLeon, it is difficult for me to take seriously fauxcialist Bernie Sanders, a veritable dingleberry on the hind of capitalism, a millionaire with three houses who, while promising free stuff to everybody, neglects to mention the fact that as in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that free stuff comes at the cost of their freedom. (Yes, Virginia, communism grew out socialism.)

There are those on the left who love to point to Social Security as socialism. Actually, it is a social-welfare program buttressed by a capitalist economy, a descendant of Bismarcks attempt to head off socialist appeal in the First Reich. The only resemblance to socialism is the fact that it is run by the government and will, according to a 2018 SSA Trustee report, not only run out other peoples money by 2034 but other people as well because of declining birth rates. So, yeah, that sounds like socialism. Still, the illusion of the socialist ideal appears to grow in popularity.

According to Gallup, some 51% of Americans aged 18-29 (that is 51% of millennials) have a positive view of socialism. I believe they are the 51% raised on Ritalin and participation trophies. I wonder if the drugs and unearned accolades created a group of people without any impulse to succeed, let alone compete. That may explain their attraction to Bernie and his participatory benefits. Or do they see him not as an angry old commie but as the kindly old gramps who always had lint-covered butterscotch in his pockets for them. Perhaps not the candy they were hoping for, but what-the-heck, it was free. And unlike Dad, Gramps didnt tell them to mow the lawn first.

In the opening sentence of his book, The Totalitarian Temptation (1976), Jean-Francois Revel writes, The world today is evolving toward socialism. So, who knows?

For those who insist real socialism has never been tried, I suggest they read Joshua Muravchiks Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. In the epilogue he writes about the kibbutzim of Israel. He ends by writing: Only once did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it.

And that about says it all.

Community Editorial Board member Romaine Worster lives in Greensboro with her wickedly funny and brilliant husband. Contact her at virichrosie@gmail.com.

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Romaine Worster: The illusion of the socialist ideal - Greensboro News & Record