Category Archives: Libertarianism

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RAW VIDEO: US Senator Rand Paul launches his 2016 presidential campaign with a combative address against both Washington and his fellow Republicans, declaring "we have come to take our country back."

Washington: As supporters cheered and waved banners reading "Defeat the Washington Machine", Rand Paul, a senator and son of a congressman and presidential candidate, announced his own candidacy for the Republican nomination for the White House at a rally in Kentucky on Monday.

Despite his long and powerful ties to the capital and its politics, Senator Paul insisted he would be an outsider candidate.

Senator Rand Paul, in Kentucky on Tuesday, announces he would like to be president of the US. Photo: AP

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Rand Paul: 'I will run for president'

For Rand Paul, it's all led to this moment.

Since riding the tea party wave into the Senate in 2010, Paul has carefully built a brand of mainstream libertarianism -- dogged advocacy of civil liberties combined with an anti-interventionist foreign policy and general support for family values -- that he bets will create a coalition of younger voters and traditional Republicans to usher him into the White House.

The test of that theory begins Tuesday when the Kentucky senator is expected to make official what has been clear for years: He's running for president.

The formal announcement will come at a rally in Louisville and he'll immediately hit the campaign trail, swinging through New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada -- the states that traditionally vote first in the primaries and caucuses.

In a preview of his likely message, Paul's political operation released a video saying that on Tuesday, "one leader will stand up to defeat the Washington machine and unleash the American dream."

So far, Paul joins only Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as a declared candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. But the field is certain to grow in the months ahead with Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham and others eyeing a campaign. Marco Rubio, a Florida GOP senator, is expected to launch his campaign next week.

For now, the nomination is up for grabs with no clear front-runner. Paul came in third place at 12% in a CNN/ORC International Poll of Republicans. Bush led the pack at 16% while Walker came in second at 13%.

Ron vs. Rand Paul

Paul, the son of former Texas congressman and three-time presidential hopeful Ron Paul, will build on his father's legacy as a candidate eager to bring civil liberties to the forefront of the national dialogue. He's already used his perch on Capitol Hill to draw attention to those issues, including a 13-hour filibuster two years ago blasting the Obama administration's drone policies and a lawsuit against the National Security Agency's phone metadata collection effort.

But Paul, 52, will split from his father in one important way: his approach to the campaign. Where Ron Paul often focused on creating a libertarian movement, Rand Paul is planning a more strategic, less purist operation that could have a hope of competing in a general election.

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Rand Paul poised to launch presidential bid

Since riding the tea party wave into the Senate in 2010, Paul has carefully built a brand of mainstream libertarianism -- dogged advocacy of civil liberties combined with an anti-interventionist foreign policy and general support for family values -- that he bets will create a coalition of younger voters and traditional Republicans to usher him into the White House.

The test of that theory begins Tuesday when the Kentucky senator is expected to make official what has been clear for years: He's running for president.

The formal announcement will come at a rally in Louisville and he'll immediately hit the campaign trail, swinging through New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada -- the states that traditionally vote first in the primaries and caucuses.

A poster from the Rand Paul for President campaign.

READ: Can Rand Paul escape his father's shadow?

In a preview of his likely message, Paul's political operation released a video saying that on Tuesday, "one leader will stand up to defeat the Washington machine and unleash the American dream."

So far, Paul joins only Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as a declared candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. But the field is certain to grow in the months ahead with Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham and others eyeing a campaign. Marco Rubio, a Florida GOP senator, is expected to launch his campaign next week.

For now, the nomination is up for grabs with no clear front-runner. Paul came in third place at 12% in a CNN/ORC International Poll of Republicans. Bush led the pack at 16% while Walker came in second at 13%.

Paul, the son of former Texas congressman and three-time presidential hopeful Ron Paul, will build on his father's legacy as a candidate eager to bring civil liberties to the forefront of the national dialogue. He's already used his perch on Capitol Hill to draw attention to those issues, including a 13-hour filibuster two years ago blasting the Obama administration's drone policies and a lawsuit against the National Security Agency's phone metadata collection effort.

But Paul, 52, will split from his father in one important way: his approach to the campaign. Where Ron Paul often focused on creating a libertarian movement, Rand Paul is planning a more strategic, less purist operation that could have a hope of competing in a general election.

Read more from the original source:
Rand Paul: 'I am running for president'

Sen. Rand Paul, the eye doctor turned politician, officially kicks off his long-awaited campaign for the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday in his home state of Kentucky, intent on waging a 50-state campaign that marries the small-government libertarianism championed by his father and the millennial generation with the traditional forces of the Republican Party.

The scope of the challenge and the ambition of the candidate displayed themselves in full Monday when the first-term Kentucky senator released his campaign slogan Defeat the Washington machine. Unleash the American dream designed to position him as an anti-Washington crusader able to attract new voters to the traditional Republican coalition.

Campaign advisers also told The Washington Times that Mr. Paul planned to compete in every primary election and caucus in all 50 states, all five territories and the District of Columbia, a feat that only two GOP candidates achieved in 2012.

SEE ALSO: Kentucky GOP may change from primary to caucus to help Rand Paul in 2016

Its time for a new way. A new set of ideas. A new leader, one you can trust. One who works for you and, above all, its time for a new president, Mr. Paul said in a video released by his campaign as a prelude to Tuesdays announcement.

The Kentucky senators all-chips-in message was enhanced by his winning preliminary commitment from his home state GOP to convert Kentuckys planned presidential preference primary next May into a presidential caucus earlier in the calendar.

The move will allow Mr. Paul to circumvent Kentuckys election law requirement that a candidates name may appear on the ballot for only one office. He plans to seek nomination for a second Senate term in case his presidential aspirations go south on him.

SEE ALSO: Rand Paul unveils presidential preview: Its time for a new leader, a new set of ideas

The state party, not the state government, runs the caucus.

And the challenge for a politician bred in the shadows of his famous father, former Texas congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, also came into clearer focus. The elder Mr. Paul gained enormous popularity among millennials but struggled to gain mainstream support from traditional Republicans, who worried about some of his views on eliminating some government agencies and his reluctance to intervene militarily abroad.

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Rand Paul launches 2016 White House bid, plans ambitious 50-state campaign

That the masters of the tech universe jumped so forcefully into the middle of the Indiana gay rights imbroglio was, as many have noted, a marked change from business as usual in Silicon Valley, where the digerati had previously been reluctant to involve themselves in political issues not directly related to their bottom lines.

As Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of the cloud computing behemoth Salesforce, told the New York Times, Were wading into territory none of us is comfortable in, which is social issues, he said. But it was crystal clear that, by all of us going in together, it was going to be O.K.

Only time will tell, of course, whether this was a harbinger of political activism to come, and, if it is, whether or not thats a good thing. The engineers of Silicon Valley are far from the first of their kind to have been relatively uninterested in the nitty gritty of political engagement.

In the early decades of the 20th century the growing powers of industrialism bestowed upon engineers previously thought of as the guys with greasy overalls whose expertise extended only as far the workshop door a new measure of power and prestige. Academia responded with a massive increase in engineering programs. The number of American engineering graduates increased from 100 a year in 1870 to 4,300 a year in 1914. What had been a trade became a profession.

Meanwhile technological advances were producing growing political, economic and social complexities that politicians seemed increasingly unable to handle. What was needed was better planning and efficiency, which is what technicians did best. A rising chorus of opinion suggested it was time to let the engineers take the helm of the ship of state, and some agreed. One of them was the engineer, editor and manufacturer Henry Goslee Prout, who in 1905 lectured Cornells first class of civil engineering graduates on the enormous responsibility they carried on their shoulders.

My proposition is that the engineer more than all other men will guide humanity forward until we come to some other period of a different kind, Prout said. On the engineer and on those who are making engineers rests a responsibility such as men have never before been called upon to face, for it is a peculiarity of the new epoch that we are conscious of it, that we know what we are doing, which was not true in either of the six preceding epochs, and we have upon us the responsibility of conscious knowledge.

Among the more forceful technocratic voices to emerge during this period was that of the economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen. Best known today as the man who coined the phrase conspicuous consumption, Veblen relentlessly attacked the wastefulness of American business. Overproduction and overselling of useless goods were ruining the country, he argued. The solution was to turn policy and administration over to skilled technologists who would exercise systematic control over the economy.

Somehow the ascent of the engineers that Veblen and others envisioned never materialized. Despite their growing professional confidence, they seemed personally reluctant to pursue broader political power. Veblen couldnt conceal his disdain. [B]y settled habit, he fumed, the technicians, the engineers and the industrial experts, are a harmless and docile sort, well fed on the whole, and somewhat placidly content with the full dinner-pail, which the lieutenants of the Vested Interests habitually allow them.

The idea that engineers could successfully run government, even if they wanted to, took a beating with the presidency of Herbert Hoover, the nations first and so far only Engineer in Chief. A further blow to engineering credibility came several decades later when uber-technocrat Robert McNamara unleashed mountains of precision analysis against the pesky guerrilla fighters hiding in the jungles of Vietnam. In 1962 McNamara returned from his first tour of the Asian theater brimming with confidence. Every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning this war, he said.

Its likely that the hacker mind-set rebellious, but narrowly focused explains why the programming elite of Silicon Valley havent been, heretofore, especially active politically, which isnt to say the technocratic mind-set isnt alive and well there. Googles Eric Schmidt and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen are among those who believe that technology is well on its way to solving all our problems, if only government will get out the way, and government increasingly shows signs of agreeing with them.

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Beware the Silicon Valley elite: Ayn Rand, Google libertarianism and Indianas religious freedom

Libertarianism and Transaction costs
"If I own a private business, why shouldn #39;t I have the freedom to serve or not to serve who I want?" In short, because of transaction costs.

By: True Facts

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Libertarianism and Transaction costs - Video

Larry King on Drugs, Cryonics, Airplane Sex Orgies, Half-Libertarianism
Radio and TV legend Larry King has been broadcasting since the late 1950s. He #39;s best-known for his long-running CNN Show Larry King Live, which helped define long-form talk TV as he interviewed...

By: ReasonTV

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Larry King on Drugs, Cryonics, Airplane Sex Orgies, & Half-Libertarianism - Video

With the recent and continuing hulabaloo over conflicts between antidiscrimination laws and freedom of religion, the charge inevitably arises that anyone who is opposed to, or even skeptical of, antidiscrimination laws that apply to private partieswhich means most people who identify themselves as libertariansis effectively not pro-liberty, but pro-discrimination. I therefore thought it was a good time to reprint my rebuttal of that argument from Cato Unbound, published in 2010, below.

The most serious charge has been that libertarian skepticism of antidiscrimination laws that apply to private entities reflects, at best, insensitivity to race discrimination. One blogger, reflecting a significant swath of progressive sentiment, argued that no matter how committed to racial egalitarianism any individual libertarian claims to be, Libertarianism is a racist philosophy. Libertarians are racists.

This is a rather odd criticism. For both philosophical and utilitarian reasons, libertarians are presumptively strongly opposed to any government regulation of the private sector. It naturally follows that libertarians presumptively oppose restrictions on private sector discrimination. Its hardly an indication of racial animus, or even insensitivity, for libertarians to enunciate theexact same positionon antidiscrimination laws that they take in all other contexts.

The progressive libel of libertarians as racial troglodytes for their consistent defense of private-sector autonomy is ironic, given that similar illogic has so frequently been used against modern liberals. When liberals defended Communists free speech and employment rights in the 1950s, their critics accused them of being Communist sympathizers, if not outright Communists. More recently, progressives have been accused of being American-hating jihadist sympathizers when they stood up for the rights of terrorism suspects. Critics have even charged civil libertarians with abetting racism for opposing hate speech laws.

The hate speech example is particularly telling. Some progressives argue that if libertarians were more sensitive to the concerns of minorities, they would sacrifice their anti-statist principles to the goddess of antidiscrimination. If so, progressives should similarly sacrifice their support for freedom of speech.

Confronted with the hate speech analogy, progressives will typically reply that supporting freedom of speech is completely different from supporting the right to engage in discriminatory action. After all, speech is just speechsticks and stones, and whatnotwhile discriminatory actions cause real distress to the victims. And besides, they argue, the marketplace of ideas can be trusted to ensure that egalitarian views will emerge victorious.

This argument does not stand up to close scrutiny. Hate speech can directly harm members of minority by causing psychological distress or inciting violence. And indirect harms from hate speech can be catastrophic if advocates of racist views are able to win control of the government. While minorities can generally find productive economic niches in even highly prejudiced but market-oriented societies, there is no safe haven for minorities if racist ideas dominate politics and lead to harsh discriminatory legislation.

Also, a free economic market protects minorities from discrimination to some degree because businesspeople have an economic incentive to hire the most productive workers and to obtain the most customers. By contrast, individual voters and political activists have no corresponding incentive to overlook or overcome their personal prejudices. Concern for the financial bottom line mitigates the temptation of economic entrepreneurs to discriminate; concern for the electoral bottom line, meanwhile, often leads politicians to stir up resentment against minorities.

As suggested above, supporters of antidiscrimination laws typically focus on laws banning racial discrimination. They do so because opposition to race discrimination has great historical and emotional resonance in a nation that had institutionalized racial oppression, including chattel slavery, for hundreds of years. However, federal antidiscrimination laws also apply to discrimination based on religion, sex, age, disability (including ones status as a recovering drug or alcohol addict), pregnancy, marital status, veteran status, and even military recruiters. State and local antidiscrimination laws cover everything from sexual orientation to political ideology to weight to appearance to membership in a motorcycle gang.

The proliferation of antidiscrimination laws explains why libertarians are loath to concede the principle that the government may ban private sector discrimination. There is no natural limit to the scope of antidiscrimination laws, because the concept of antidiscrimination is almost infinitely malleable. Almost any economic behavior, and much other behavior, can be defined as discrimination. Is a school admitting students based on SAT scores? That is discrimination against individuals (or groups) who dont do well on standardized tests! Is a store charging more for an item than some people can afford? That is discrimination against the poor! Is an employer hiring only the best qualified candidates? That is discrimination against everyone else!

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Volokh Conspiracy: Explaining the libertarian position on antidiscrimination laws

Silk Roadthe darknet site that blended techno-libertarianism, unexpected pathos, drugs, and that sweet elixir of larceny Bitcoin into what has already been one of recent historys most entertaining legal proceedingsis not done with us yet! Like all Silk Road related news, the charges against DEA agent Carl Force and former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges are incredibly implausible and circuitous, but Sarah Jeong does as good a job explaining them as anyone could hope for. Keywords include, but are not limited to: murder for hire (simulated), intimidation (failed), theft (flagrant), and LinkedIn contact request (regrettable). Lauren Smiley has a step by step guide in Matter for Feds interested in catching the Bitcoin-laundering wave, and Kashmir Hill collected 5 of Forces wackiest side-projects for Fusion.

Facebook is in trouble again for algorithmically dredging up painful memories. Who could have predicted this?

In Pacific Standard, Susie Cagle makes a case that the VC funding system does more harm than good. If youre on the fence about that, please do see this Twitter thread where prominent venture capitalist Harry Potter, from the blue-chip Silicon Valley firm of Egg & Rapgenius, "argues with Twitter user "fart" about the definition of electricity."

April Fools is stupid, but its also the day Carnegie Mellons Association for Computational Heresy holds SIGBOVIK, which is one of those nerd events where there are so many layers of in-joke that you cant exactly tell how much (if any) of it is real, or what "real" might mean in this context, but the Proceedings, at least, are very funny. Notably, Tom Murphy made a portmanteau of every English word, which he calls a "portmantout." Just watch the video, its good.

I enjoyed this Colson Whitehead tab about our narcissistic culture because I love reading about myself. You do you, Cols! Alana Massey is right: "Chill" is stupid. The police must be huge Chris Rock fans! Across the land, the question rings out: Can a gay wedding even have pizza? If you dont already know what that post is about, trust me, youll be happier staying that way. And finally: read this boring tab.

Its intern Averys birthday! Today she turns 27! At 27 I was a married home owner and one year away from the birth of my first child, but being a newsletter intern is great too! Happy Birthday Avery!

Today is my twenty-seventh birthday (please, hold your applause). Two decades ago, on this date, I woke up and found a childs snooker table set up for me in our dining room. Not something Id asked for, but still one of the best gifts Ive ever received.

The popularity of snooker is a weird part of British culture. It hardly seems a thrilling spectator sport, but for weeks at a time in the winter you can switch to BBC2 and watch hours of snooker in the eveningtime slot after time slot of the same old static shot. We even had a bizarre snooker-based game show, Big Break, which ran for ten years.

My snooker table got a lot of use at first, but then I returned to the books one could always find me in as a child. I was not destined to be a Ronnie OSullivan, who is profiled in the New Yorker this week. Its a terrific featurea classic story of a shining talent dogged by vice and familial sin.

I remember looking at my snooker table in the garden with the trash, warped and broken-down by rain. Happy birthday.

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Today in Tabs: Facebook Presents Your Year in Tragedy

Sean Gabb: The Cultural Desert of British Libertarianism - A Study in Failure
A speech given on Tuesday the 17th March 2015 in London to the other Libertarian Alliance. Sean argues that libertarianism has had no impact in Britain since the 1980s because libertarians...

By: seangabb

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Sean Gabb: The Cultural Desert of British Libertarianism - A Study in Failure - Video