Libertarians want absolute freedom in all circumstances, even if this means reducing governmental amenities and retracting technological advances.

Libertarians by nature detest impositions by governments and financial institutions.

Right wing libertarians such as Ron Paul dislike complex economic systems and have called for a return to the gold standard a financial arrangement removed in the 1930s.

The gold standard was system where the value of a currency was defined in terms of the amount gold represented by the exchange of paper currency a system discarded by many countries in the Depression era.

These days, bankcards and computer-generated apps are replacing cash and the libertarians are typically upset.

Bankcards and ATMs have a long history in Saskatchewan dating to the 1970s.

Saskatchewan and Alberta had the first financial institutions on the Canadian Prairies to use card-based, networked ATMs beginning in June 1977.

Later, credit unions in Saskatchewan introduced debit cards, which were usable wherever credit cards were accepted in 1982.

By the 1990s, most of us were carrying bankcards in our wallets and purses. Bank websites were supplanting personal interactions with tellers at regional branches since the early 2000s.

Digital payments gained partiality over banknotes in the 2010s, as recorded in article by the Independent in May 2015.

PayPal, digital wallets like Apple Pay, contactless and NFC payments by electronic cards and smart phones are preferred for transactions in 2020.

Electronic payments can be insecure, mismanaged and data can be easily stolen.

Yet, the convenience of electronic cash is obvious, even if the libertarians dont agree.

Security measures for electronic payments are improving, as we buy groceries, gas, cigarettes and other goods with bankcards and apps, instead of pulling out masses of coins and bills from our pockets to spread over shop counters.

Electronic cash transfers are the bedrock of modern personal finance, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when cash is considered grimy and disease-bearing.

Although COVID-19 is a genuine threat, the growing apprehension over physical cash is ridiculous.

According to SCOOP Business in June 2020, There is no evidence linking cash to the transmission of COVID-10. Cash is sanitized before being delivered by cash companies to venues and ATM operators.

To have cash as an option for buying goods and services, instead of being solely reliant on electronic payments, will always be desirable.

Sometimes, cash is the only option with services such as coin laundromats.

Cash is defended by a libertarian group known as Cash is Legal Tender, but these Luddites are more than champions of banknotes and coins.

From reading several posts, these libertarians on the far right share French philosopher Michel Foucaults ideal of personal ethics in favour of the collective a development founded upon Nietzschean self-creation.

Foucault believed all human-led organizations had grown far beyond the needs of the individuals who were engaged with them.

Thus, Foucault decided the participants in society were trapped in games of power.

But the pro-cash libertarians arent gathering online to discuss French poststructuralism and German nihilism. More exactly, the online, anti-bankcard sect are using social media to disperse the views of American pop culture paleoconservatives like Tucker Carlson, who once shared their libertarian ideas on economics long before he became a Trumpist.

The Cash is Legal Tender sect are right in defending cash but their denunciation of organized societies is alarming and meaningless.

Society funds libraries, schools, roads, electrical grids and other public aims. Without communities, weve returned to the Hobbesian age of fear, loathing and self-interest.

Governmental organizations on all levels often misrepresent society but the outright rejection of society is short-sighted and founded on ignorance.

Critical theorist Jrgen Habermas accused Foucault and other like-minded postmodern libertarians as uncaring individualists disguised as philosophers who disdained the constraints of governments, but in turn scorned progressive ideals such as emancipation and equality in a 1981 paper he wrote titled Modernity versus Postmodernity.

Habermas disliked Foucaults libertarianism but like Foucault, the German philosopher and sociologist hated dictatorships. Habermas promoted the idea of a public sphere, where societies were occupied in public debates and where every citizen had access to forming public opinions a superior ideal compared to Foucaults nihilistic individualism.

Cash is Legal Tender are spot-on for defending banknotes and coins we still need cash for payment alternatives, but the groups libertarian-based fears about governments, societies, technology and globalism are mistaken and conspiratorial.

Read the rest here:

We're a cashless society now and the libertarians are nervous - Assiniboia Times

We have reached the end of privatized prisons in Hamilton County.

The governor wants to take down the Capitol's Nathan Bedford Forrest statue.

Area leaders continue to call for the resignation of county Sheriff Jim Hammond.

And, in a mandate I never imagined in my lifetime, the county mayor declared citizens must wear a mask in public or risk jail time or a $50 fine.

All this in the last seven days.

There is so much to discuss, applaud, criticize.

Today, however, I want to talk about something else.

Nothing.

Today, I want to say nothing.

***

These feel like Tower of Babel times.

There are so many different voices saying so many different things.

We hear medical experts who say one thing.

We hear more medical experts who say another.

We hear conspiracy theorists, politicians, libertarians, activists, Trump supporters, Democratic Socialists, researchers, anti-maskers, mask-wearers, pundits, preachers and fools.

They all say different things.

Like this:

In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said every American should wear a mask.

Days later, the World Health Organization said masks aren't necessary for healthy people.

Who do we listen to? What do we believe?

Each day, we are buffeted by a dozen winds.

It is exhausting. Everywhere, megaphones. Everywhere, noise.

***

Recently, I have been thinking about this Gospel scene:

Jesus stands before Pilate, his executioner. He is hours away from crucifixion.

Pilate asks Christ: what is truth?

Jesus doesn't answer.

He just stands in silence.

Why?

Why not speak out? Why not answer?

Why say nothing?

***

Jesus could have criticized him. Converted him. Tried to change his heart. Cut him down to size. Even begged for his life.

Christ wasn't a church mouse. His voice his non-silence put him on death row. You don't challenge The Man like he did and get away with it.

He stood before Pilate the head of the region's systemic injustice.

Think of all he could have said. He could have gone viral.

Instead, he goes quiet.

What is truth?

Tell us.

Silence.

***

"Silence is violence," protesters chant.

This is true. The cold violence of silent complicity encourages hot violence to occur.

Picture the coward. He's afraid. He won't speak. His silence allows violence to remain unchallenged.

Yet also picture the monk.

Her silence is different. It's rooted not in fear, but contemplation and reflection.

By staying silent, does she also say something?

If silence can lead to violence, can it also lead to peace? Can silence become justice?

Or truth?

***

Years ago, my mind was so troubled, I began doing something strange: I sat in silence.

With my body.

My thoughts.

My emotions.

Not as they should be.

But as they are.

This is meditation.

My mind? I saw it is often like a housefly on acid: darting this way, that way, inventing, imagining, never resting.

My emotions? I want the world to be a certain way, but it was often another. The result? I feel anger, fear, rage, elation, excitement, deflation.

Oh, my opinions! My beliefs! I have so many, all of them connected to judgment, criticism, wanting the world to be like this. And not like that.

Sitting in silence, I began to see beyond opinions and beliefs.

"Go beyond right and wrong," my teacher says.

But how?

***

Think of a ping pong game. The ball goes back and forth, back and forth.

Now think of your opinions and beliefs.

And someone else's.

Your opinion.

Theirs.

Back.

And forth.

All opinions and beliefs create an opposite: you believe this, I believe that.

Right.

And wrong.

Beliefs and opinions can be beautiful things: they help us envision the world as it should be. Justice, fairness, love for neighbor and self all these come with a set of beliefs about how life should be.

If only Trump

If only my neighbor

If only my body

That's the allure. The trap.

We get lost in thinking, judging, wishing how the world should be.

We stop experiencing the world as it is.

Our lives become daydreams, fantasies, all giant desires: please, world, be like this and not like that.

What happens when we step away from the ping pong table?

What happens when we move beyond right and wrong?

***

I could tell you my opinions about privatized prisons, mask mandates or Confederate statues.

In doing so, I would pick up the ping pong ball.

Our game would begin all over again.

But the game isn't life.

It sure as hell isn't truth.

I'm so tired of megaphones. So tired of ping pong.

How do we speak about things that matter without adding to the noise?

How can silence lead to peace?

David Cook writes a Sunday column and can be reached at dcook@timesfreepress.com.

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Cook: Megaphones, everywhere: how to find silence in loud times - Chattanooga Times Free Press

When Anthony Kennedy retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018, he enjoyed the unique distinction of having been denounced by every major political faction in the country. For conservatives, Kennedy was the activist judge who "invented" a right to gay marriage. For progressives, he was the corporate shill who authored Citizens United. For libertarians, he was guilty of both enabling eminent domain abuse and squashing the rights of local medical marijuana users in favor of a national drug control scheme. At one point or another, it seemed like everybody had cause to hate on Anthony Kennedy.

John Roberts is the new Anthony Kennedy. As the Supreme Court's 2019-2020 term came to its dramatic close this week, the chief justice not only solidified his role as a swing vote in highly charged cases, but also managed to annoy practically everybody along the way.

Will the religious right ever forgive Roberts for siding with the Court's Democratic appointees to strike down an anti-abortion law? In Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), the chief justice dissented when the Court overturned a Texas statute that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. But in this term's June Medical Services v. Russo, Roberts did the opposite, concurring in a decision that voided a nearly identical abortion regulation from Louisiana.

"I joined the dissent in Whole Woman's Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided," Roberts wrote in a lone concurrence. However, "stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike," he continued. "The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana's law cannot stand under our precedents."

Plenty of progressives praised Roberts for that. But their cheers quickly turned to jeers when the chief justice delivered a huge victory just one day later for both school choice and religious liberty advocates in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. "A State need not subsidize private education," Roberts wrote. "But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious." The Court has "long recognized the rights of parents to direct 'the religious upbringing' of their children," he observed. "Many parents exercise that right by sending their children to religious schools, a choice protected by the Constitution."

And then there was Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in which the chief justice led the Court in declaring the single-director structure of the Elizabeth Warren-invented Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to be unconstitutional. "The CFPB Director has no boss, peers, or voters to report to," Roberts wrote. "Yet the Director wields vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory authority over a significant portion of the U. S. economy. The question before us is whether this arrangement violates the Constitution's separation of powers." Roberts held that it did. Not exactly a happy outcome for supporters of the so-called administrative state.

Libertarians, of course, were criticizing Roberts before it was cool. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), Roberts characterized his vote to uphold Obamacare as an act of conservative judicial restraint, invoking the early 20th century jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who once declared, "if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job." Here's how Roberts put it: "It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices." To say the least, that deferential approach is the antithesis of the libertarian legal movement's vision of the proper role of the courts in our constitutional system.

To be sure, Roberts is not the only swing vote on the Supreme Court these days. Justice Neil Gorsuch actually had a record that was more "liberal" than Justice Kennedy's when the two sat on the Court together in 2017-2018. In this term's Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, Gorsuch led the Court in extending federal anti-discrimination protections to gay and transgender employees. That ruling was widely celebrated as a liberal victory, though Gorsuch did base his reasoning on the textualist principles championed by the late Antonin Scalia, a conservative legal icon.

Still, it was Roberts who was truly at the center of the SCOTUS storm, having cast key votes on some of the most contentious issues in modern American life, from COVID-19 lockdowns to the subpoenaing of President Donald Trump's financial records.

Like it or not, it's the Roberts Court now.

More here:

John Roberts Just Annoyed Everybody. Is He the New Anthony Kennedy? - Reason

LOUISVILLE, Ky.A tax increase for schools appears poised to face Louisville voters this November.

A group behind apetition to put a Jefferson County Public Schools tax increase to a vote says it has nearly 5,000 more signatures than needed likely clearing the bar to get on the November ballot.

The Jefferson County clerk will validate the signatures within the next 30 days and ultimately determine if the petition was successful. JCPS then has 10 days to appeal.

The petition needed at least 35,615 signatures by Friday to force a vote. The group said itturned in 40,320 signatures.

School board members, on a split vote, approved a 7-cent property tax increase in May about an extra $70 a year for a $100,000 home.

Kentucky school boards can raise property taxes enough to boost property tax revenue 4%. Since the increase would raise district revenue past thatcap, it was subject to a voter recall an ultimately successful effort.

Other news: Colorado superintendent to be next Kentucky education commissioner

"We still have a lot of work to do, but I hope we will be able to look back on this effort and say this was a turning point, when the citizens of Jefferson County stood up and demanded that JCPS do the job it is paid to do, which is to provide a good education to every student," Theresa Camoriano wrote on the No JCPS Tax Hike Facebook page Friday. "No more excuses!"

Camoriano, who lives in Anchorage, spearheaded signature collection for weeks. She reserved the website NoJCPSTaxHike1.com ahead of the school board vote and managed multiple Facebook pages updating supporters and explaining their rationale.

In the weeks before signatures were due, libertarian advocacy groups including the Bluegrass Institute and Americans for Prosperity backed the petition. Kentucky Secretaryof State Michael Adams, who lives in Jefferson County, also encouraged voters to sign the petition.

JCPS, which has around a $1.65 billion budget, should better manage the money it already has, Camoriano and others opposing the increase said. Raising taxes during a pandemic is not ideal, they've said.

Reducing transportation spending by ending "busing" the district's practice of creating diverse classrooms by assigning West End kids to schools across the county would be one way to save money, some opposing the tax increase argued.

JCPS is proposing a student assignment model that would allow West End students to go to school closer to home effectively ending its lauded and criticized diversity plan but it said it would need about $139 million to build new schools in the West End to make it happen.

Read more: Mandatory masks could mean 'a shot' at schools opening, Beshear says

And that money is supposed to come from the tax increase, district officials have said.

In the final days before signatures were due, one of the most vocal pro-JCPS groups Dear JCPS said it also wanted the tax increase to be put on the ballot.

While understanding the money is expected to go to the district's high-needs students and classrooms, Dear JCPS said the coronavirus may have shifted budget priorities. The district needs more time to determine how the money should be spent, it said.

"Giving our community until November to have these necessary but difficult conversations will not only increase community buy-in as solutions are developed, but it will increase the likelihood that new tax revenues will be spent in the best ways possible," the group wrote on Facebook on Thursday.

New revenue would help the district provide more supports for its most disadvantaged students, who often find themselves on the losing end of academic gaps, and the schools they attend, JCPS said.

It could also help to make up for past opportunities in which school boards did not take the full tax increase they could, shortchanging kids in the process, officials argued.

JCPS' property tax rate, 73.6 cents for $100 of assessed value, is among the lowest in the area. An increase to 80.6 cents would bring it closer to peer districts like Fayette County that serve large groups of students living at or near poverty.

What dostudents want?Parents, teachers have been vocal about reopenings

Reach Olivia Krauth at okrauth@courierjournal.com or 502-582-4471, and on Twitter at @oliviakrauth. Support strong local journalism by subscribing: courier-journal.com/subscribe.

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JCPS tax hike likely to be on ballot after opponents gather thousands of signatures - Courier Journal

Letter to the Editor:

The Choice

Since the 2008 election, American voters havent been choosing business as usual. We are fed up, sick of the status quo of the state and its never-ending hunger for more power and control.

Obama in 2008 and 2012 provided that choice. He was a community organizer and a young, inexperienced senator who campaigned on a platform of hope and change. I think Americans were desperate for this message after eight years of homeland terror, financial turmoil and foreign disputes.

After Obamas first term, and in my opinion not fulfilling his promises, I believe many voters deviated from him but could not vote for Republican Mitt Romney and were disaffected enough to become independent, third-party or nonvoters.

In 2016, Trump for many voters seemed to provide that choice. He was a rich businessperson and a blunt, transparent, red-blooded American with a platform of Make America Great Again. Americans were desperate after eight years of eroded individual liberties, soaring poverty in small communities and the amplified, continuing foreign entanglements.

Now, after seeing how Trumps policies have led to further erosion of liberty and justice for all, perpetual deficit spending, continuing foreign disputes and an authoritarian approach to everything, many are looking for another way.

This year, the Libertarian Party offers that choice. Dr. Jo Jorgensen a business and leadership psychologist, is intelligent, educated and rational. Her platform All Your Freedoms, All the Time aligns strongly with the core Libertarian principles of a smaller government held accountable for and by the people.

She stands with all people and communities, meeting with members of many of Americas most vulnerable communities to work toward better solutions together. We are desperate as a nation for all our voices to be represented and for all of us to live our best possible lives, free of oppression and arbitrary control. We are desperate for our government to respect our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Jorgensen offers everyone that chance. We can win this November, and together, we can take back our nation from those who have been deceiving us into submission for generations.

Tony Moen

Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin

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Letter to the Editor: The Choice - Door County Pulse

In a political first, Pueblo County delegates played a part in the Libertarian Party's first online convention recently.

This convention marked the first time that any American political party that is organized and active in all 50 states has held all or part of its national nominating convention online.

About 1,000 Libertarians from across America convened in the first 3-hour session to determine who will be the Libertarian presidential candidate in the November election.

I am John Pickerill, one of the registered Coloradans from the area who took part.

Some parts of this session were difficult since the whole online process was entirely new to all of us, but today, we established our schedule and procedures for the rest of the weekend and got to practice how to interact with each other online.

Everything was uncharted territory -- all of our partys previous 20 national conventions since 1971 were conducted face-to-face.

I am a Libertarian because I want people to be left alone to live their lives peacefully in whatever manner they choose. A vote for a Libertarian is a way to tell the world that you dont consent to the theft of your liberties or wallets by the parasitic political class.

Whenever our ideas are given a fair hearing, we win. Thats why the Democratic and Republican parties never allow Libertarians into debates -- because they know that on the day the philosophy of limited government is allowed to be heard, that is the day their grip on the American voter will slip away.

The daunting odds dont deter Libertarians. There are two times as many Libertarians now than five years ago. There are now almost half a million voters registered Libertarian across the country.

In another five, years we will be even bigger.

The big-government parties will eventually have to deal with us. And when they do, they will lose.

We will continue to persuade more of their supporters that less government is always better. The contributors and voters they depend on are going to continue abandoning them to join us.

In the last century, all of the ancient ideas for governing societies with huge, bloated, bossy, expensive governments have been tried. They have all failed.

Big governments dont protect their own people very well; nor can big governments and their teeming bureaucracies be trusted to mind their own

business. In the last century, governments were the biggest killer of people -- with about 200 million deaths to their credit -- most of those being their own citizens.

Its time to turn away from that Leviathan. Time has proven that only a frugal, limited government that is asked to do almost nothing is the only kind that brings about more justice, more peace, and more prosperity.

Only Libertarians are working toward those things.

Voters interested in learning more about the Libertarian Party are invited to visit the website at http://www.LP.org.

Those interested in finding out more about libertarianism in general can find several bibliographical resources at https://lpedia.org/wiki/List_of_Books.

Here are the top seven Libertarians who have been seeking the Libertarian Party nomination for president:

Jim Gray http://www.GraySharpe2020.com/

Jacob Hornberger https://JacobForLiberty.com/

Jo Jorgensen https://JOJ2020.com/

Adam Kokesh https://KokeshForPresident.com/

John Monds https://Monds2020.com/

Vermin Supreme https://VerminSupreme2020.com/

Arvin Vohra https://www.VoteVohra.com/

John Pickerill is a Pueblo County resident who has run for public office.

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Less government is the solution - Pueblo Chieftain

By Rich Lowry

Its 2009 again, or feels like it.

That was when spontaneous, grassroots protests against overweening government sprang up and were widely derided in the media as dangerous and wrong-headed.

The protesters then were inveighing against Obamacare; the protestors now are striking out against the coronavirus lockdowns.

The anti-lockdown agitation shows that, despite the revolution in Republican politics wrought by President Donald Trump, opposition to government impositions is deeply embedded in the DNA of the right, and likely will reemerge even more starkly if former Vice President Joe Biden is elected president.

The tea party that was so powerful in the Obama years, roiling Republican Party politics and making stars out of the likes of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, sputtered out and was subsumed by the Trump movement in 2016.

The emphasis on constitutionalism, opposition to deficit spending, and American exceptionalism gave way to an emphasis on American strength, opposition to immigration, and nationalism.

The differences shouldnt be exaggerated the tea party was opposed to amnesty for undocumented immigrants and Trump has faithfully nominated constitutionalist judges. The tea party, like Trump, hated the mainstream media with a passion. But the shift from an overwhelming focus on fiscal issues to Trumpian cultural politics was very real.

The change was exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus, founded in 2015 and defined by its hard line on government spending, reliably lining up behind Donald Trump who has pursued a notably expansionary fiscal policy with huge budget deficits even before the coronavirus crisis.

The intellectual fashion among populists and religious traditionalists has been to attempt to establish a post-liberty or post-liberal agenda to forge a deeper foundation for the new Republican Party. Instead of obsessing over freedom and rights, conservatives would look to government to protect the common good.

This project, though, has been rocked by its first real-life encounter with governments acting to protect, as they see it, the common good.

One of its architects, the editor of the religious journal First Things, R.R. Reno, has sounded like one of the libertarians he so scorns during the crisis. First, he complained that he might get shamed if he were to host a dinner party during the height of the pandemic, although delaying a party would seem a small price to pay for someone so intensely committed to the common good.

More recently, he went on a tirade against wearing masks. Reno is apparently fine with a much stronger government, as long as it never issues public-health guidance not to his liking.

Reno has published vituperative attacks on the conservative writer (and my friend and former colleague) David French, supposedly for having a blinkered commitment to classical liberalism. But it is the hated French who has actually tried to thoughtfully balance liberty and the common good during the crisis, favoring the lockdowns at first and favoring reopening now that the lockdowns goals have been achieved.

Whats happened during the lockdowns is that the natural distrust that populists have of experts has expressed itself in opposition to government rules. Being told what to do by epidemiologists and government officials wielding all-caps SCIENCE as their authority has been enough to bring tea party-era liberty back in vogue.

Weve also seen a return of the glue that has held moral traditionalists and libertarians together in the conservative coalition for so long the belief that big government is a threat to traditional institutions. Hence, the focus on resuming church services.

In retrospect, the tea party wasnt as much a purely liberty movement as it seemed at the time. A populist anti-elitism was an enormously important factor, which is why it faded into the Trump movement so seamlessly. On the other hand, Trumpian populism has a big streak of liberty to it.

All it has taken to bring it to the fore is extraordinary government intrusion into our lives. If Biden is elected president, theres more where that came from.

Rich Lowry has been the editor of National Review since 1997. Hes a Fox News political analyst and writes for Politico and Time. He is on Twitter @RichLowry.

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COMMENTARY: A pandemic prompts the return of the tea party - The Daily World

My colleague Iain Murray has a great essay up at Law & Liberty today on why some groups of Americans are perceiving quarantine policies so differently from others. The reason is largely because different Americans have different value hierarchiesthat is, they prioritize different values when it comes to public policy. Some consider order and tradition most important (hierarchists), some consider equality to be number one (egalitarians), and some prefer to maximize freedom and individual autonomy (libertarians). As Iain writes:

When these values clash, we see political polarization at its worst. When they align, we see consensus and reform. Today, when consensus is probably most needed, they are clashing hard.

Egalitarians think an end to the lockdowns would hurt the vulnerable. Libertarians view the lockdowns as threatening freedomand even contact tracing as threatening civil liberties. Hierarchists particularly oppose restrictions on religious gatherings.

Persuading groups of people with different value orientations to agree on a single best policy is often a difficult enterprise. But we should still do the best we can to seek out the most relevant facts. When our friends and neighbors values lead them (and us) to focus only on certain factors and ignore others, good communicators should supply the perspective that our cognitive orientations are disposed to ignore. Sometimes that means being made aware of factors we failed to educate ourselves about entirely, but sometimes it means introducing nuance to a false binary. Iain again:

In thinking through this, we need to remember that risks are often relative. If we focus exclusively on the risks we are most concerned about, we can miss the other risks that obtain should our demands be met. It requires a degree of humility about the importance of our values to recognize this.

Nothing in life is entirely risk-free, but as human beings we have an unfortunate tendency to put things in safe and unsafe mental buckets. Were likely to think of driving a passenger sedan with multiple airbags a few miles to the nearest grocery store as being categorically safe, but driving a motorcycle all the way from Sturgis, South Dakota, to Daytona Beach, Florida, as being terribly risky. But of course there are hazards and pleasures to be found in each experience. One could get into a fatal accident pulling out of ones driveway on the road to Safeway or end up perfectly healthy after a cross-country bike tour as you turn onto Ridgewood Avenue in Daytona. Its a matter of chance, driving skill, and many other factors ranging from the weather to traffic conditions.

Thus, it was fascinating for me to read this article from Politico this morning that polled Americans on certain common behaviors during the coronavirus quarantine. They didnt just ask respondents and public health experts whether they thought something was safe or not, they asked how safe (or unsafe) they thought it was. So, on a scale from one (extremely low risk) to 10 (maximum risk), Americans thought that going for a run outside without a mask on was a 4.3 out of 10. The public health experts, on the other hand, thought that running without a mask was more like a 2.9 very low risk. On the other end of the spectrum, Americans thought attending a baseball game in a stadium full of people was a 7.7 out of 10, while the health experts scored it all the way up at 8.6.

These relative risk scores tell us a lot about both public perception and (assuming we respect the credentials of the health experts recruited by Politico), actual disease transmission hazards. This is, to put it lightly, much more useful and informative than simply being subject to a quarantine order with a long list of forbidden behaviors.

Any cityor household for that matterhas limited enforcement bandwidth, and when it comes to phased reopening plans, which most state and cities have embraced, we need to know which behaviors are less risky so that they can be permitted, while only continuing to restrict the very highest risk behaviors and activities.

But in most public policy and law enforcement cases, we never receive an explicit acknowledgment that there is anything like a risk spectrum or hierarchy; there are only permitted and forbidden categories. When activities that are actually low risk are included on lists of forbidden activities, it brings the entire enterprise into suspicion and disrepute.

Witness decades of government anti-drug propaganda that suggest that every illegal substance is equally hazardous. Anyone who has ever smoked marijuana knows that it doesnt immediately lead one into a soul-destroying Reefer Madness-style spiral of doom, countless televised public service announcements to the contrary. A widespread realization of this kind makes every other public health message issued by a government agency that less believable.

This doesnt mean that the government should publish a recreational drug shopping guide, but it does mean that public policy should acknowledge the relative risks of various behaviors, substances, and products, as well as the varying risk tolerances of its citizens.

If Americans knew that one thing they wanted to go out and do during the pandemic was four times more dangerous that another similar thing that they also wanted to do, I believe that the vast majority of them would voluntarily choose the activity that put their families and neighbors at less risk. But when we only have a long unranked list of do not activities, people are going tothe longer quarantine and stay-at-home orders stay in placeincreasingly disregard the entire list. And that makes us all less safe.

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There Is No Such Thing as Safe - Competitive Enterprise Institute

Wise King Ralph keeps a face mask at the ready.

by James A. Bacon

Im still digesting Governor Ralph Northams face-mask mandate, but my initial reaction is that it could be worse. I dislike the coercive aspect of his executive order. But requiring Virginians to wear face masks in public buildings and places of commerce is less intrusive than compelling businesses and workplaces to shut down. If ordering people to wear face masks allows Northam to feel better about loosening other restrictions, then its a net gain.

Theres an element to the face mask debate that I find curiously neglected in the conservative/libertarian commentary Ive seen. Conservatives and libertarians tout the virtue of personal responsibility. Regardless of whether or not face coverings protect you from getting the COVID-19 virus, they do reduce the chances that you will spread the virus. If we believe in personal responsibility as an alternative to government coercion, conservatives and libertarians need to live their values by acting responsibly.

I would go one step further: If conservatives and libertarians want to see Northam release his Vulcan Death Grip on Virginias economy, they should do everything within their power to ensure that the coronavirus does not spread. If Virginia sees a significant uptick in the spread of the virus, thats all the Governor needs to back peddle on his timid reversal of emergency shutdown measures.

There are good reasons to oppose the mandate. The Richmond Times-Dispatch actually gives a decent summary here:

Clark Mercer, Northams chief of staff, said health inspectors at the agency had the power to pull a license to operate if a business is found out of compliance with health regulations.

The Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police earlier Tuesday strongly opposed a face mask requirement, arguing that it could force businesses to enforce it, potentially exposing them to dangerous encounters.

The police chiefs association said the order turns good advice into a mandate that will be enforced with trespassing citations and by physically removing violators from businesses.

The group argued it destroys police/community relations and puts business owners in a no-win situation: either be prepared to confront people you value as customers, or avoid the risk of a potentially violent confrontation by keeping your business closed.

I fully share those concerns, and they are worth highlighting in the hope of reversing the mandate. But at the end of the day, Northam has virtually limitless power to rule by emergency decree. While we should work to limit that power legislatively and constitutionally, that is a long-term project. In the short term, we need to reopen the economy, and given Northams mindset and the fact that he has the power and we dont, that means doing what we can to drive the COVID-19 infection rate down.

Exercise personal responsibility: Wear masks and protect others from the virus.

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You Dont Have to Like the Decree, But Wear Face Masks Anyway - Bacon's Rebellion

WASHINGTON From Harvard Law School comes the latest conservative flirtation with authoritarianism. Professor Adrian Vermeule, a 2016 Catholic convert, is an integralist who regrets his academic specialty, the Constitution, and rejects the separation of church and state. His much-discussed recent Atlantic essay advocating a government that judges the quality and moral worth of public speech is unimportant as a practical political manifesto, but it is symptomatic of some conservatives fevers, despairs and temptations.

Common-good capitalism, Sen. Marco Rubios recent proposal, is capitalism minus the essence of capitalism limited government respectful of societys cumulative intelligence and preferences collaboratively revealed through market transactions. Vermeules common-good constitutionalism is Christian authoritarianism muscular paternalism, with government enforcing social solidarity for religious reasons. This is the Constitution minus the Framers purpose: a regime respectful of individuals diverse notions of the life worth living. Such respect is, he says, abominable.

He would jettison libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology. And: libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights also will have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources. Who will define these duties? Integralists will, because they have an answer to this perennial puzzle: If the people are corrupt, how do you persuade them to accept the yoke of virtue-enforcers? The answer: Forget persuasion. Hierarchies must employ coercion.

Common-good constitutionalisms main aim, Vermeule says, is not to minimize the abuse of power but to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well. Such constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy because the law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits, wielded if necessary even against the subjects own perceptions of what is best for them. Besides, those perceptions are not really the subjects because under Vermeules regime the law will impose perceptions.

He thinks the Constitution, read imaginatively, will permit the transformation of the nation into a confessional state that punishes blasphemy and other departures from state-defined and state-enforced solidarity. His medieval aspiration rests on a non sequitur: All legal systems affirm certain values, therefore it is permissible to enforce orthodoxies.

Vermeule is not the only American conservative feeling the allure of tyranny. Like the American leftists who made pilgrimages to Fidel Castros Cuba, some self-styled conservatives today turn their lonely eyes to Viktor Orban, destroyer of Hungarys democracy. The prime ministers American enthusiasts probably are unfazed by his seizing upon COVID-19 as an excuse for taking the short step from the ethno-nationalist authoritarianism to which he gives the oxymoronic title illiberal democracy, to dictatorship.

In 2009, Orban said, We have only to win once, but then properly. And in 2013, he said: In a crisis, you dont need governance by institutions. Elected to a third term in 2018, he has extended direct or indirect control over courts (the Constitutional Court has been enlarged and packed) and the media, replacing a semblance of intragovernmental checks-and-balances with what he calls the system of national cooperation. During the COVID-19 crisis he will govern by decree, elections will be suspended, and he will decide when the crisis ends supposedly June 20.

Explaining his hostility to immigration, Orban says Hungarians do not want to be mixed ... We want to be how we became eleven hundred years ago here in the Carpathian Basin. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, authors of The Light that Failed, dryly marvel that Orban remembers so vividly what it was like to be Hungarian eleven centuries ago. Nostalgia functioning as political philosophy Vermeules nostalgia seems to be for the 14th century is usually romanticism untethered from information.

Last November, Patrick Deneen, the University of Notre Dame professor whose 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed explained his hope for a post-liberal American future, had a cordial Budapest meeting with Orban. The Hungarian surely sympathizes with Deneens root-and-branch rejection of classical liberalism, which Deneen disdains because it portrays humans as rights-bearing individuals who can fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life. One name for what Deneen denounces is: the American project. He, Vermeule and some others on the Orban-admiring American right believe that political individualism the enabling, protection and celebration of individual autonomy is a misery-making mistake: Autonomous individuals are deracinated, unhappy and without virtue.

The moral of this story is not that there is theocracy in our future. Rather, it is that American conservatism, when severed from the Enlightenment and its finest result, the American Founding, becomes spectacularly unreasonable and literally unAmerican.

Will is a columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group.

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Will: The rise of conservative authoritarians - Roanoke Times

Two Republicans and three Democrats are seeking their respective parties nominations for Indianas Sixth Congressional District in Tuesdays primary.

The seat is currently held by Rep. Greg Pence, R-Indiana, who is seeking a second term.

Pence is being challenged in the GOP primary by Mike Campbell of Wayne County, according to candidate filings.

In 2018, Pence defeated Democratic challenger Jeannine Lee Lake, winning his first term in Congress.

In Bartholomew County, Pence received 16,161 votes (60.86%), while Lake received 9,607 votes (36.18%), and Libertarian Thomas Ferkinhoff, 56, of Richmond, received 782 votes (2.95%). All sought political office for the first time in 2018.

Lake is running for the Democratic nomination again. She is being challenged by Barry Welsh of Hancock County and George T. Holland of Rush County, according to candidate filings.

The winners of the Republican and Democratic primaries will face each other in Novembers general election.

The Republic reached out to all five candidates to talk about why they are running and how they would address major issues affecting voters in their district. Only Pence and Lake responded.

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Candidates seek party nominations for Indiana's Sixth Congressional District - The Republic

With less than two weeks left before 1,000 or so Libertarian Party delegates select their 2020 presidential and vice presidential nominees in an unprecedented online-only vote, you could probably forgive Jacob Hornberger for being a little irritable.

Hornberger, the 70-year-old founder of the Future of Freedom Foundation, has, after all, won a clear majority of the party's presidential primaries and caucuses, nonbinding though they may be. He has been in and out and back in Libertarian politics for more than two decades now. And yet ever since Rep. Justin Amash (LMich.) threw his hat into the ring on April 28, Hornberger has been all but ignored by the mainstream media, while Amash galivants on cable news networks and HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

So it came as little surprise Saturday night that when the formerly Republican and independent congressman participated in his first Libertarian presidential debate, it was Hornbergerauthor of an eight-part blog series titled, "Justin Amash, LP Interloper"who came out swinging hardest.

"Even the libertarian-leaning conservative members of Congress have websites that direct children to the website of the CIAthe most evil agency in U.S. history," Hornberger charged in his opening statement, reiterating his critique of a student resource page at amash.house.gov. "Conservatives love free enterprise, but have long supported the evil, immoral, socialist, central-planning, Republican/Democratic system of immigration controls, which has brought death and suffering to countless people, as well as a brutal police state consisting of highway checkpoints and other initiations of force against innocent people."

Running as he is a "campaign of principle for the party of principle," in a cycle where many Libertarians seem particularly eager to shed their image as a refuge for ideologically alienated and/or politically opportunistic ex-Republicans, Hornberger portrayed Amash as someone merely tinkering around the edges of the welfare/warfare state.

"Conservatives love to 'reform,'" he said. "But reform of tyranny is not freedom. Freedom is a dismantling of tyranny.In this election Libertarian Party members are asked to trade away our principles for a conservative/progressive/libertarian mush, all for the sake of big publicity and the hopes of garnering votes. If we make that trade, we become like them. We become conservatives and progressives. We become the party of expediency."

Those who assume Amash will waltz to a first-ballot nomination over Memorial Day weekend should take a look at the Libertarian Party of Kentucky's post-debate voting exercise among one-quarter of confirmed L.P. convention delegates. In the first round of polling, Amash received just 33.3 percent of the vote, compared to runner-up Hornberger's 21 percent. (The party requires winning candidates to earn 50 percent plus one vote, using an instant runoff process in which the last-place finisher in each round, and everyone under 5 percent, gets lopped off for the next.)

Amash eventually won the informal vote, but it took him six rounds. Here's how the totals went, as reported:

Round 1: Amash 33.3 percent, Hornberger 21 percent, Jo Jorgensen 16.6 percent, Vermin Supreme 7.7 percent, Judge Jim Gray 6.6 percent, Adam Kokesh 6.2 percent, John Monds 5 percent, Arvin Vohra 1.5 percent.

Round 2: Amash 35.1 percent, Hornberger 23.3 percent, Jorgensen 18.5 percent, Supreme 9.3 percent, Kokesh 7.7 percent, Gray 7 percent.

Round 3: Amash 37.3 percent, Hornberger 22.4 percent, Jorgensen 21.6 percent, Supreme 10.1 percent, Kokesh 8.6 percent.

Round 4: Amash 39.3 percent, Jorgensen 24.8 percent, Hornberger 22.9 percent, Supreme 13 percent.

Round 5: Amash 43.8 percent, Jorgensen 30.5 percent, Hornberger 25.7 percent.

Round 6: Amash 55.6 percent, Jorgensen 44.4 percent.

Jorgensen, the 1996 Libertarian vice presidential nominee who caught Hornberger from behind in Round 4 and eventually elbowed him out, is campaigning in a sort of third lane between the no-holds-barred radicalism of Hornberger and anarchist Adam Kokesh, and the more pragmatic approach favored by Amash and Judge Jim Gray. "I'm offering something that's principled and practical," she said in her closing statement Saturday night.

Jorgensen was the only other debate participant to significantly challenge Amash, albeit in a much less abrasive way than Hornberger (who said that he could not commit to endorsing the congressman should he win the nomination). In her opening statement, she asked Amash a series of questions, most of which he didn't address.

"Would you use your authority as commander-in-chief to end our involvement in foreign wars, stop subsidizing the defense of wealthy allies, and bring our troops home? I will," Jorgensen said. "Would youuse your pardon power to free people convicted of exposing government corruption, violating unconstitutional laws, or committing so-called crimes when there's no victim? I will. Would you immediately stop construction on President Trump's border wall boondoggle, and work to eliminate quotas on immigration so that anyone who wishes to come to America could do so legally? I will. And last, where do you stand on one of the most divisive issues in America: abortion? Do you support the Libertarian Party platform? I do. It's not enough to be better than Trump or Biden. Our nominee must be deeply principled with a long commitment to our party."

Amash did address abortion in the debate, saying at first: "I'm pro-life. I believe that the pro-life position is a Libertarian position, and my goal is to work outside of the Libertarian Party to convince people of that. I work with pregnancy resource centers, for example, here in West Michigan, to try to get the message out and spread the message about life. I don't think that the government is most effective at doing that sort of thing. As a president, the Libertarian Party supports the idea of not funding abortion providers. So, the Libertarian Party is aligned with my position on that."

Hornberger then grilled the congressman further:

Hornberger: You of course pride yourself on being a strict constitutionalist, a supporter of the Constitution. And you supported a bill that calledI think it was in the past couple of yearsthat called for a nationwide criminal ban on abortion, in which people who were caught engaging in an abortion would be convicted of a federal felony involving a five-year jail sentence. Can you tell me where in the Constitution you rely on to support this federal felony offense for abortion?

Amash: So I'm not sure about the particular bill you're referencing, because it was in the past and I don't know exactly which bill

Hornberger: It's House bill 36.

Amash: But I can answer the question. The 14th Amendment provides the power to have the federal government address state violations of people's rights. And as someone who's pro-life, I believe that a baby inside the womb is a life. And if I believe that that person is a life, then I think it's appropriate for the federal government to tell states that it is not okay to discriminate against these lives.

Now, as a presidential candidate, as a presidential nominee, I won't be making the legislation; the legislature will decide that. Congress decides on the legislation and sends things to my desk. With the parties very divided over this issue, nothing's going to come to my desk that does that.

That's my view of it, and when I'm voting in Congress, that's how I would vote. But as a presidential candidate, with respect to people who are concerned within the party because there is a split within the party between pro-life people and pro-choice people, the president will have very little opportunity for that kind of thing, because there is a huge divide within the party. So the only thing that is likely to come to my desk as president is a bill to not fund abortion providers, no federal funding for abortion providers, and that is something that all Libertarians within the party agree on. At least, the vast majority of them agree on that.

Hornberger's most influential backers, at the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus and on the podcasting airwaves, have dinged Amash for backing the "Deep State" in the impeachment of President Donald Trump (despite Amash's lead role in nearly de-funding the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance operations back in 2013), and for potentially being another in a lengthening line of ex-Republicans who fail to ignite a lasting ideological fire.

"I even think that in some scenarios 1 percent might be better than 4 percent," libertarian comedian Dave Smith said to Hornberger on an episode of his Part of the Problem podcast last month. "I think those votes are worthless if you didn't actually convert people or introduce them to liberty or change their way of looking at the world at all."

Or as Ludwig von Mises Institute senior fellow and popular podcaster Tom Woods, with whom Smith taped an Amash-criticizing podcast last week, said at a Mises Caucus-sponsored event down the street from the 2018 Libertarian National Convention: "So yeah, we won't get the 70 million votes, but maybe we get 1 million people who say, 'I never looked at the world the same way again after I listened to those people.'"

Amash's answer to the broad critique is to remind people that most Americans are not self-identified libertarians, no matter how intrinsically libertarian they may be without knowing it, and that political actors wishing to have any kind of influence need to acknowledge the fallen world around them.

"I've been a libertarian my entire life, a small-l libertarian," Amash said Saturday. "And I believe that when you work within government, you have to make those changes that will convince people to come to your side.You have to present libertarianism to them with the issues that they care about or are concerned about right now. It can't be some kind of overnight experiment where we re-work all of society or re-work all of our government."

"In fact," Amash continued, "that's arrogance in the form of central planning of another sort, to come in and say, 'We're just going to throw out everything we have overnight and start anew.' We have to do things gradually and carefully, and we have to trust the people to make decisions through our constitutional system of government."

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The Libertarian Party Critique of Justin Amash - Reason

A group of 35 independent gyms and fitness centers is suing the state, saying they could reopen for business safely but theyre not being allowed to.

In a May 11 filing with the Lake County Court of Common Please, attorney Maurice Thompson argued that gyms "pose a significantly lower risk of harmful infections than nearly any alternative operation."

He said the gyms maintain private memberships, control who can come in and often operate by appointment. He added that, while "nearly 100% of deaths" from COVID-19 are people over 60, the same percentage of his clients' customers are under that age.

Thompson argued these gyms should never have been closed because they could have been operating safely all along.

"In prohibiting healthy behavior through exercise at Ohio gyms, Defendants continue to obstruct rather than advance Ohioans health, all the while having continuously overinflated the risk of harm to the general public," the complaint reads.

The lawsuit names Ohio Department of Health director Amy Acton and the Lake County General Health District as defendants.

Thompsons libertarian 1851 Center for Constitutional Lawfiled an earlier suit for a Columbus bridal shopclaiming it was unfairly shut down as a non-essential business. Thompson lost that case, but says this one is even stronger because the original stay-at-home order has changed.

The newStay Safe Ohio order, in basically opening80% of the economyand leaving gyms out, is much more arbitrary and much more unequal," Thompson says.

Asked about the lawsuit, Gov. Mike DeWine said he gets "sued a lot." On Thursday, the governor announced that gyms and fitness centers would be able to reopen May 26, with new guidelines developed by a state working group.

Excerpt from:

Libertarian Group Sues Ohio Again On Behalf Of Closed Gyms - WOSU

Dont these orders go beyond the Commerce Clause, infringe the Privileges or Immunities Clause, or violate one of the other constitutional provisions Im constantly banging on about? Surely Icant approve such extreme impositions on economic liberty, the right to travel, and just the basic freedom to go about your daily life as you choose so long as you dont get in the way of others freedom to do the same?

Well, thats the rub. As Iexplained during Catos online forum on Coronavirus and the Constitution, in apandemic when we dont know whos infected and infections are often asymptomatic, these sorts of restrictions end up maximizing freedom. The traditional libertarian principle that one has aright to swing ones fists, but that right ends at the tip of someone elses nose, means government can restrict our movements and activities, because were all fistswingers now.

This isnt like seatbelt mandates or soda restrictions, where the government regulates your behavior for our own good, becausesetting aside the issue of publicly borne health care coststhe only person you hurt by not wearing aseatbelt or drinking too much sugar is yourself. With communicable diseases, you violate others rights just by being around them.

The federal government is one of enumerated and thus limited powersat least in theory, if observed largely in the breach since the New Dealbut states have police powers to govern for the public health, safety, welfare, and morals (the last one having fallen away in recent decades). Accordingly, in light of the best epidemiological data we have, state and local executives ordered shut downs to prevent people from being around too many other people and thus spreading the disease.

Interestingly, despite the infamous pictures of springbreakers and St. Patricks Day revelers, these government actions were lagging indicators. Restaurant traffic and airline travel fell off acliff before any official action. Airports are still open, even though the president has total authority to shut them down, as George W. Bush did on 9/11.

People began socialdistancing and wearing masks without any edicts. Sports leagues canceled their seasons without so much as a dont play ball from state umpires.

Not being satisfied with this largescale recognition of the threat we face and compliance with commonsense rules for the new normal, however, governors and mayors have begun to overreach. Although Ihad been telling reporters that nobody was going to get arrested for reading in the park or enjoying wildlife with her family, police were indeed telling people to move along if they were in apublic space, even if they were nowhere near anybody else.

When we got questions at that Cato forum about restrictions on the sale of nonessential products or prohibitions on fishinga right going back to Magna Carta!I thought these were farfetched hypotheticals, but it turns out they were all too real.

Then came the bans on parking at achurch and staying in your car to hear asermon, ahead of Easter Sunday, no less, which led toone of the best district court opinionsIve read in along time, reversing such an order in Louisville. (Full disclosure: Judge Justin Walker is afriend, and Im advising the Mississippi Justice Institute on one of these cases in Greenville, Miss.)

Look, this isnt about religious liberty, or any other constitutional right in particular. Assuming that socialdistancing is required to flatten the curve and fight COVID-19, such rules are fine so long as theyre applied equally everywhere, whether to yoga studios or churches, hackathons or street protests.

But theyre not fine when theyre arbitrarily targeted at some businesses and not others, as if coronavirus spreads more in gun shops than liquor stores. Theyre also not fine when they have nothing to do with socialdistancing, as with the fatwas against drivein liturgy or closing only aisles three and five of abigbox store. Or when tennis courts are closed even if the players wear allwhite masks and promise not to both go to the net at the same time. Or that video of the cop chasing that poor guy going for arun on the beach by his lonesome.

These ridiculous examples of petty tyranny led to mymost viral tweet ever: Angered by citations for being in park with nuclear family, or in car at church, or running on the beach. Or nonessential goods roped off in stores. These things have nothing to do with fighting the virus and everything to do with powerhungry politicians and law enforcement.

Just because significant restrictions on our daytoday lives are warranted doesnt mean its afreeforall for government coercion. To borrow alegal standard from adifferent context, the rules have to be congruent and proportional to the harm being addressed. As amatter of law, judges will give executives awide berth to deal with acrisis, but their enforcement measures still have to pass the constitutional smell test.

More fundamentally, any regulations that dont make common sense, that arent seen as reasonable by most people, are simply not going to be taken as legitimate, and they wont be followed. The American people will decide what restrictions are reasonable, and for how long. Just like they decided when to shut down, they have total authority to decide when to reopen.

Originally posted here:

The Government Has a Lot More Emergency Powers Than Libertarians Like, but It Still Can't Control Everything - Cato Institute

The libertarian-leaning Illinois Policy Institute has tried reaching out more to Democratic legislators since Gov. Bruce Rauner lost his reelection bid. Rauner at one point was so close to the group that he fired several of his longtime staffers and replaced some of them with IPI staff, which did not work out well, to say the least.

The organizations political wing has contributed money to more than a few legislative Democrats campaign funds in recent months, and they were able to introduce some bipartisan legislation last year and this year although the spring session is now mostly a bust because, as I write this, the General Assembly has no set plans to return amid the pandemic.

An IPI staffer even posed for a picture with Gov. J.B. Pritzker and posted it on Twitter last year. Looking forward to working with his administration, the caption read. Its been on a serious mission to change its image.

If you go to its website, youll see the IPI has devoted an entire section to empathetic interviews with small business owners about how theyre faring during the pandemic. Theyre well-written, including one featuring the owner of a Chicago restaurant.

In general, everyone is standing, waiting in the wings until were allowed to open back up regularly, which obviously no one knows when thats going to be yet, the owner was quoted as saying.

The organization claimed this week in a private Facebook group it runs that it wants the state to begin planning to reopen the economy and give people visibility on what that might look like.

But then it tipped its hand in the comment section.

As an owner of 2 small businesses, one essential (radon mitigation), one a restaurant ... nothing I can say will express the absolute disdain I have for this man or his policies, a commenter complained about Pritzker.

A Policy Institute staffer replied to her comment asking if she would be open to speaking to a member of the IPI team. Weve been doing our best to give our community a voice on our site and pressure JB to reopen the states economy.

Another commenter predicted that Pritzker and his boss lori lightfoot will kill Illinois. An IPI staffer replied with the same request to speak with her about her story. Weve been featuring small business owners on our site to try to pressure the governor to reopen the states economy.

The IPIs privately admitted agenda did not go over well with the governors press secretary, as you might imagine. She let it fly.

COVID-19 has left a trail of devastation across the globe. There is no country, no city, no community that is immune, wrote Jordan Abudayyeh. Every day, we grieve with the families who have lost loved ones in this battle. And we yearn for the time when life can return to normal.

We usually ignore the Illinois Policy Institutes institutionalized and reflexive partisanship, but in this time of crisis, we cannot afford to let this dangerous ideology go unanswered. We all want the economy to reopen no one more than the Governor, Abudayyeh continued. But to suggest that should happen before the science says it is safe is not only foolish, its dangerous.

In Illinois, more than 500 people have succumbed to the virus and more than 16,000 people have been sickened. Those numbers climb every single day and because of that fact, an overwhelming majority of Illinoisans are working together to flatten the curve. The IPI has lobbied for some atrocious policies in the past, but this time their efforts could mean the difference between life and death for many Illinoisans. They need to stop lying to people about whats at stake in this crisis and own up to the public responsibility we all have to be committed to a truthful and honest conversation about our collective public health.

Yikes.

A spokesperson for the IPI said they want the governor to establish a process and timeline to safely and effectively open the economy, so we are not only protecting lives but also safeguarding livelihoods.

But a timeline simply isnt possible right now because literally nobody can say with certainty when this will all end.

The spokesperson went on to say that the governors refusal to discuss this is causing uncertainty, which is making residents wary.

Wary of what, he didnt say.

We will continue to tell their story, he said. And continuing the pressure, no doubt.

Im thinking there will be no more photo-ops with the governor.

Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.

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Libertarian Illinois Policy Institute wants a timeline for reopening businesses thats just not possible - Chicago Sun-Times

captionA woman holds a sign during a protest over concerns related to coronavirus disease (COVID-19), after attending an Easter Sunday church service organized by libertarian activist Ammon Bundy, at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise, Idaho, on April 12, 2020.sourceReuters/Jim Urquhart

Idahos coronavirus-related restrictions are under attack throughout the state as residents organize public gatherings and rallies demand businesses reopen.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little issued a stay-at-home order on March 25, banning all nonessential gatherings and shuttering all nonessential businesses. He recently extended the order until the end of April, angering some who have argued that the rules violate their constitutional rights.

You have to disobey, urged Wayne Hoffman, the president of the libertarian Idaho Freedom Foundation, in a Facebook Live broadcast on Wednesday. You have to do whats best for your business, you have to do whats best for your employees and your customers. You have to do whats best for your livelihoods and your families.

He continued: There are more of us than there are of them.

The restrictions have also sparked the ire of Ammon Bundy, the famed rancher and libertarian activist who led the armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon in 2016.

Bundy, who lives in Idaho, has organized a number of gatherings, including an Easter service that drew what appeared to be dozens of residents in a venue for a church service.

Photos showed the attendees sitting close together on fold-up chairs, none of whom wore masks or kept a distance of six feet, as public-health experts have recommended.

Bundy has argued to media and in Facebook videos that governments around the world are using the coronavirus as an excuse to destroy the agency of man.

I want the virus now, Bundy said, according to The New York Times.

The state has so far reported more than 1,400 cases of the coronavirus and 39 deaths from the disease, according to Johns Hopkins tally.

One Idaho lawmaker, State Rep. Heather Scott, urged residents to push back against the states stay-at-home order and exercise their constitutional rights to peacefully assemble.

In a letter titled The virus that tried to kill the Constitution, Scott warned that citizens were facing increasing restrictions of civil liberties during a climate of relentless fear mongering and media hysteria.

Some members of law enforcement, too, have questioned Littles order. Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler released an open letter urging Little to change course.

In the spirit of liberty and the Constitution, you can request those that are sick to stay home, but, at the same time, you must release the rest of us to go on with our normal business, he wrote. I do not believe that suspending the Constitution was wise, because COVID-19 is nothing like the Plague. We were misled by some Public Health Officials, and now it is time to reinstate our Constitution.

Idaho medical experts have reacted to the backlash with distress, saying the stay-at-home order was meant to slow the virus transmission and thereby protect vulnerable residents and reduce the pressure on hospitals.

Dont take legal advice from a doctor, Dr. Benjamin Good of Bonner General Health told The New York Times. And dont take medical advice from a sheriff.

Continue reading here:

Idahos stay-at-home order has sparked a rebellion, and outraged activists are urging people to disobey coronavirus restrictions - Business Insider

Why would two libertarian-leaning legislators vote against an anti-lynching law? Because lynchings are already illegal, and the law would further federalize crime and give prosecutors more powerincluding what amounts to an expansion of the federal death penalty.

On Wednesday, the House passed H.R. 35, the Emmet Till Antilynching Act, by a vote of 410 to 4. Those opposed included libertarian-leaning Reps. Justin Amash (IMich.) and Thomas Massie (RKy.); the other two voting "no" were Rep. Louie Gohmert (RTexas) and Rep. Ted Yoho (RFla.).

The Senate version of the bill passed unanimously last year. There are slight differences between the new bills, but The Washington Post reports that House Democrats are optimistic their version the legislation will be quickly passed by the Senate. Supporters of the measure expressed incredulity that it took so long to pass federal anti-lynching legislation:

Some of the bill's backers turned their fire on the four House members who dared to vote against it:

But they weren't voting "FOR lynching." As Amash notes, killing people because of their race is already a federal hate crime:

What H.R. 35 does is criminalize a conspiracy to violate existing federal hate crime laws or certain sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.It would also attach to these conspiracies the same punishment as the underlying crimes themselves, except in the case where the current crimes come with a maximum sentence of fewer than 10 years. In that case, the conspiracy to commit those crimes would be punishable by up to 10 years.

This, as Amash notes in a Twitter thread explaining his vote against the bill, would effectively expand the federal death penalty, which he would like to see abolished:

Amash also argues that the bill criminalizes conspiracies to commit crimes that the Constitution leaves to the states, thus doubling down on the federalization of criminal law. That, he points out, has not usually been a great development for the people anti-lynching legislation is supposed to protect.

Massie likewise raised constitutional concerns about the bill, while making the broader case against hate crimes as their special kind of criminal law.

"I voted against H.R. 35 because the Constitution specifies only a handful of federal crimes, and leaves the rest to individual states to prosecute," he tells Reason. "In addition, this bill expands current federal 'hate crime' laws. A crime is a crime, and all victims deserve equal justice. Adding enhanced penalties for 'hate' tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech."

Gohmert took a different tack, arguingcontra Massie and Amashthat the bill doesn't do enough to punish lynching at the federal level.

"A version of the bill released on January 3 of this year stated that anyone who assembles with the intention of lynching or who causes death by lynching 'shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.' The bill we voted on today does not include this clause," Gohmert argued in a statement. "Such a hateful crime deserves a severe sentence, and I could not in good conscience vote on a bill that addresses lynching on such a low level."

For his part, Yoho toldNewsweekthat H.R. 35 was federal overreach and that hate crimes should be handled at the state level.

There's good reason to be concerned about expanding the number of things the federal government can prosecute as hate crimes, given how zealously the feds use such laws to stick people with harsh sentences they would never have gotten at the state level.

A good example is the case of Tiffany Harris, a black New York woman who was arrested in December 2019 after slapping three Jewish women while saying "fuck you, Jews."

Harris was initially charged with a number of crimes by New York officials, the most serious of which was assault in the third degree, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. If she were convicted under New York's hate crime law, she could get up to four years in prison.

In January, the U.S. Department of Justice intervened in Harris' case, charging her with three hate crimes that could add an additional 10 years to any sentence she gets at the state level. Federal officials argued that additional punishment was necessary to deter a rise in anti-Semitic attacks.

"Federal hate crime laws invite this sort of capricious, politically motivated intervention, which is especially troubling given their weak constitutional basis," wrote Reason's Jacob Sullum at the time.

The anti-lynching bill that passed the House yesterday, whatever the good intentions behind it, will invite more federal prosecutions of this kind.

Read more here:

Why Libertarian-Leaning Reps. Massie and Amash Voted Against the House's Anti-Lynching Bill - Reason

Just yesterday, I was scrolling through Twitter and came across six separate tweets relating to the Libertarian perspective on government, particularly about what would be the lack of funding in a governmentless society. All six were criticizing the idea that our already failing infrastructure could be managed by anyone less than our current government system. When trying to debunk Libertarian theory, statists often mention infrastructure and highways, yet fail to see the fallacies in their argument. It is not complex nor complicated, yet here we are.

When I say government, I am talking about the forcible entity in which a series of officials are elected to rule over a group of people and use said peoples finances in order to maintain systems such as defense, infrastructure, etc. I am not talking about a private entity or a private group voluntarily formed for the betterment of a community.

Businesses

Business would most likely be the largest contributor to the cost of our roadways/infrastructure. While they wouldnt be coerced into paying their fair share through taxes, they would be pushed to contribute through the laws of economics and business. In order to sell their goods, they must have customers, and they must have a supplier. In order to reach their supplier and customers, some degree of infrastructure is highly necessary, otherwise no money is made.

In fact, businesses initially paid for much of our current railroad system, as private companies built them and maintained them. There would be many incentives to have infrastructure from a logistical standpoint, so why wouldnt businesses contribute?

Suppliers

In the business world, your company either sells a service or supplies those businesses with the essential tools needed to sell a service. In order to sell a service, you have to have the supplies required. Such supplies are made and transported by outside companies that manufacture products for businesses, and those supplies are also delivered via infrastructure. That is why Libertarian theory also mentions the suppliers in the chain of payment to private industry. Companies like UPS, FedEx, DHL and many more would all have to contribute in order to make a profit and sell their services.

Salesmen

Do you like buying new clothes or shoes? Do you have private insurance? Do you like ordering pizza? If you do, then you understand that someone has to sell those. Typically, salesmen work for a much larger operation than just themselves, but every so often, they are part of a small-scale business. Either way, they have to move their product, so sales people would be more likely to contribute an amount, however small compared to larger corporations.

Tourists

Indirectly, tourists would pay for a small portion of the infrastructure through the costs of traveling and expenditures. Sure, that money would come directly from the business, but where did the businesses get their funds? From the tourists, who also need some source of infrastructure in order to travel from place-to-place.

Homeowners/Common People

While the business world requires infrastructure through profit-motive, the everyday person will have to contribute in order to live their lives appropriately and comfortably. We use roads every day, whether it be for traveling to work, getting groceries, going shopping and so much more. In order for the common people to pay their share voluntarily, there could be sources such as GoFundMe or Kickstarter.com that allow someone to do the math on a project and its cost, and consumers could join those groups to pay a specific portion to ensure that the infrastructure is cared for and built appropriately.

Private companies would have many incentives to build, maintain, and repair our roads and infrastructure. To start, it is highly profitable. For our failing system, billions of dollars are expedited every year. Construction and base companies could make major amounts of money from building bridges, buildings, roads, etc.

Next, private companies would be held accountable by the consumer, who pays and uses the roads, to keep the infrastructure maintained and repaired as needed. Currently, this is where our government falls the shortest in the infrastructure category. You can hardly drive anywhere without seeing potholes, cracks, and other broken aspects of our highways, despite there being constant construction. If you switch over to the railways, private companies almost always uphold their rails, and keep them in the most usable shape possible. That is because of accountability.

If the people are happy, they will keep paying for roads to be placed, maintained, and repaired, so that itself should be enough of an incentive.

Otherwise, there would be no money going to the roads and companies/businessmen in charge of building such systems would go bankrupt.

In a privatized, free market system without a coercive government in place, our infrastructure will be cleaner, safer, and more efficient than our current system. This is because the owners of the road would have their own self-interest at heart, along with profit-motive.

Why, though? Because of economic competition and financial motivation. If Company A has a reputation for having the highest-quality, safest roads, then they will be making more of a profit than Company B, who makes roads that arent as dependable. If Company B wants to catch up with A, they will have to invest more time, money, and effort into their systems. If there are roads that are entirely unsafe, then you can simply not use them and they lose money, along with popularity.

Privatizing infrastructure would also introduce new technology, similar to some things used by private businesses. You could have apps like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and much more.

While most people cannot imagine a society without a gun to your head, it is not as complicated as it may seem. It just comes down to whether or not you want to cut out the middleman and keep asking yourself, But Muh Roads?

Continue reading here:

Without Government, Who Will Build The Roads? - The Libertarian Republic

Updated at 10 a.m. March 4 As the race for the Democratic presidential nominee narrows, Missouri voters will weigh in on Tuesday with their preference.

While most of the attention is focused on the heated Democratic primary, voters can choose to cast a ballot for the Republican, Libertarian, Green or Constitution party nominee. Heres what you need to know about your vote.

Who is on the ballot?

Heres what the ballots will look like:

Do I need to register my party affiliation?

Nope! Missouris primary is open, meaning you dont have to declare your party affiliation ahead of time. Just show up to your polling place and ask for the party ballot you want.

How many other states are voting Tuesday?

Five. So expect campaigns attention to be divided, with a lot of focus on Michigan, a swing state with 125 delegates, and Washington with 89.

How many delegates does Missouri have for each party?

Democrats have 68 pledged, 10 at-large (or superdelegates). Republicans have 54 delegates.

What happens after I vote?

Democratic delegates are allocated proportionally to the vote. Candidates have to meet a 15% vote threshold to get delegates. Pledged delegates are bound by the election results.

Republican delegates are winner-take-all if a candidate secures more than half of the votes.

Who have Democrats supported in the past?

Missouris Democratic presidential primary has been competitive in previous elections. In 2016, Hilary Clinton squeaked out a win over Bernie Sanders by less than 2,000 votes. The 2008 primary was also close, with Barack Obama beating Clinton.

History of Missouri's Democratic PrimaryInfogram

Where do I vote?

You can find your polling place on the Missouri Secretary of States website. Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. (although if you are in line at that time, you will be able to cast your ballot).

Do I need to bring anything to the polls?

Bring some form of identification like a drivers license, passport, college ID, utility bill, bank statement, paycheck or government check. The Secretary of States website has more information on what counts; unlike previously, you will not need to sign an affidavit if you dont provide a passport or government-issued ID.

If you dont have an ID, you can cast a provisional ballot, which will count if the signature matches the one on your voter registration record or if you come back to the polling place with a photo ID.

Im still making up my mind.

Politico has a handy voter guide to sort by candidates or issues like health care and taxes.

Editor's note: This story has been updated throughout to reflect that the Missouri Democratic Party has canceled its candidate forum that was set for Sunday.

Aviva Okeson-Haberman is the Missouri government and politics reporter at KCUR 89.3. Follow her on Twitter: @avivaokeson.

Follow this link:

Missouri's Presidential Primary Is March 10 Here's What Voters Need To Know - KCUR

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North Carolinas primary electionis Tuesday. In case youre new to casting a ballot, here are tips before you head to your polling place, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections:

1. Whats a primary?

In a primary election, voters select a political partys candidate to appear on the ballot for the November general election.

2. Who can vote?

Voters who are registered with one of the five recognized parties (Constitution, Democratic, Green, Libertarian, or Republican) can cast a ballot in that partys primary election.

Unaffiliated voters can ask for a Democratic, Libertarian,orRepublican ballot, or nonpartisan ballot, if available.

Non-affiliated voters cantvote in the Constitution or Green parties primary, as those they are closed to independents.

3. When can you vote?

Polls across North Carolina are open from 6:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Voters in line at 7:30 p.m. will be able to cast a ballot. Lines tend to be longer before and after normal business hours.

4. Where to vote

Determine your polling place at the State Board website: https://vt.ncsbe.gov/PPLkup/.

5. Which contests and candidates are on your ballot?

Sample ballots are available online athttps://vt.ncsbe.gov/RegLkup/.

6. Casting a ballot:You can fill out a paper ballot or use a ballot marking device that produces a paper record.

If you hand-mark a paper ballot, completely fill in the oval to the left of each candidate or selection using a black pen.

If you tear, deface or wrongly mark the ballot, you can ask for a replacement. Be sure to verify your selections before putting the ballot into the tabulator, and make sure youve voted all pages of the ballot.

7. No same-day registration

Same-day registration is not available on Tuesday. Verify your registration status and political party affiliation at the state or local board of elections website.

8. Help for voters

If you need assistance at the polls, you can ask for it. Voters who cant enter the polling place can vote curbside. Once inside the polling place, voters who experience difficulties should request help from a poll worker.

9. No photo ID necessary

A federal district court blocked North Carolinas voter photo ID requirement in December and the injunction will stay in place until further notice.

The State Court of Appeals also temporarily blocked the law on Feb. 18.

10. Behave yourself

Voter intimidation is a crime. Voters who feel harassed or intimidated should alert an election official immediately or submit a report to the State Elections Board online at:https://goo.gl/v1yGew.

Will

See the article here:

What to know ahead of Super Tuesday primary in North Carolina - Charlotte Post