Category Archives: Libertarian

By Daniel Nardini

There seems to be no real political center anymore. The Democratic Party in so many ways has been infiltrated by organizations on the political left. The Republican Party has largely been infiltrated by the political right and what is being called the alt-Right (alternative Right meaning extremists such as neo-nazis, Ku Klux Klan, White Supremacists, White Nationalists, etc.). Now it seems that the alt-Right (or alt-right) has taken over the third largest party in the United States; the Libertarian Party. The Libertarian Party, which has existed since 1971, had called for laissez faire capitalism, complete freedom for the individual, protection of private property, a strictly non-interventionist foreign policy, the rights for gays and other minorities, and fiscal conservatism. In fact, the Libertarian Party had called for the rights of gays and trans-people decades before this issue had gone mainstream. At the Libertarian National Convention held in Reno, Nevada, in late May, a radical alt-right faction called the Mises Caucus (according to high ranking former members of the Libertarian Party Joseph Bishop-Henchman and Andy Craig) took total control of the party.

According to Henchman and Craig, the Mises Caucus will completely take the Libertarian Party into a very dark alt-right direction. Already, the Mises Caucus has stripped away the platform on abortion, and there are many members in the Libertarian Party who are in fact anti-gay and anti-trans-people. Just as equally telling were tweets against gay people by some party people in various state party branches, and the recent removal of the party platform against discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or sexual orientation (this is a dog whistle for bigots and racists to join the party). But this takeover is much more than just about the takeover of the Libertarian Party. It is the alt-right on the march as the Democratic Party and the political left are in retreat. Indeed, as I pointed out in last weeks article that the Texas Republican Party has cast doubt on the very 2020 presidential election. In my view, if anything, it was one of the most monitored and freest elections in Americas history. But there is a growing movement among Republicans and the alt-right that the election was totally fraudulent, and therefore must be overturned. But what I am seeing and what Henchman and Craig are seeing is the attempted effort to change America into an alt-right hell on earth.

In some ways I am personally seeing that now. I am seeing more and more Confederate flags appearing throughout my area of Illinois. In the Land of Lincoln, where our 16th President Abraham Lincoln came from, I am seeing ever more Confederate flags. When I was growing up, no one in Illinois ever flew a Confederate flag. That would be like flying a Nazi flag in Israel. But it is happening now, and I sincerely doubt all of the Confederate flags being flown fro peoples homes is due to Southern pride. Likewise, my poor wife had been subjected to racism at work by being given work schedules with either too many work days (like seven days in a row), or too few days. We have had to complain to higher administration that this was unacceptable, and only after that did my wifes work schedule return to something that was within a 40-hour work week. No one else at her job is treated this way, and we both know that racism plays a part in this. There is no doubt in my mind that when one political extreme or another comes into play, we all suffer from where the political winds blow. Now it seems that the extreme political right and alt-right is gaining the ascendancy, and it is coming back with a vengeance.

See the original post:

Alt-Right On the March - Lawndale News

After a truly surreal 36 hours, British politics has some clarity: The prime minister, Boris Johnson, will resign, thus triggering the third Conservative leadership contest in six years. His successor (due to be picked from a field of hopeful Tory parliamentarians which could easily stretch to a dozen people) is expected to take office this autumn. The race begins now.

For British libertarians, the end of the Johnson premiership is a bittersweet moment. For all his association with liberty-crushing lockdowns, many of us still remember when Johnson was a darling of the freedom-loving right. He used to be the politician who made his career rallying against the excesses of the nanny state while thumbing his nose at bores and bureaucrats alike.

It was this penchant for freedom and optimism that made Johnson such an effective campaigner for Brexit. Unlike the nativist grievance peddling from the likes of Nigel Farage, Johnson painted Brexit as a chance to build a more outward-looking and ambitious Britain. All we had to do first was "take back control"and end the supremacy of European Union regulation. It was a theme that went on to power both his leadership and general election campaign of 2019.

But shortly after the newly-crowned prime minister broke the political deadlock around Brexit, there came a new crisis: COVID-19. At first, Johnson's much-heralded libertarian instincts held up nicely. In one of his early press conferences about the pandemic (in which he encouraged a nervous public to minimize social contact and keep physical distance), Johnson laughed off a question about calling in the police to enforce common sense. Within weeks, he had been persuaded by his advisers to order a full lockdown.

It was this heavy-handed approach that would go on to shape 18 months of British politics, as the country veered from punitive lockdowns (at one point opting for the most stringent measures in Europe) to equally invasive lockdown-lite measures like the "rule of six." As backbench libertarian members of Parliament raged, Johnson's acolytes sought to assure the public that these measures flew in the face of his political instinctsand would disappear as soon as possible. But many of us weren't convinced.

The truth is that, even as the pandemic faded, Johnson's newfound "big state" instincts did not. One of the first warning signs was when, after Johnson had been hospitalized with COVID-19, he announced an expansive anti-obesity agendapromising to ban multibuy deals on unhealthy food; end television advertising of sweets and crisps; and even make calorie counts compulsory on all restaurant menus (a move that would have placed a disproportionate burden on small businesses).

Downing Street didn't just come after our diets. One of the government's flagship legislative proposals was the much-criticized Online Safety Bill: a sprawling manifesto on internet regulation that would see web hosts fined vast sums for failing to remove "legal but harmful" content (the exact meaning of which would be subject to the judgment of government ministers). Free speech advocates saw it for what it was: a censor's charter.

His supposed libertarianism didn't add up to much when it came to taxation and spending, either. Having used his leadership campaign to define himself against the austerity measures of previous Tory governments, Johnson spent his time on Downing Street going even furtherdriving up state spending in pursuit of lofty policy goals (including using taxpayer cash to protect the assets of millionaire pensioners by introducing a socialized cap on privately-provided elder care).

Under big-spending Boris, tax levels reached the highest level since WWII. A sneaky decision not to inflation-proof tax thresholds meant that 2 million people just got pushed into a higher tax bracket, even though their real-terms earnings have not necessarily increased. Businesses didn't fare much better eitherjust look at the recent decision to levy a short-notice "windfall tax" on the increased profits of energy firms (which comes on top of the planned hike in corporation tax).

Inevitably, this profligate attitude was going to bring trouble for a maverick like Johnson. And so it did last month when a mooted plan to ignore World Trade Organization rules in order to unfairly subsidize British steel (a move designed to appeal to Johnson's protectionist "Red Wall" voters) led to the resignation of Christopher Geidt, the prime minister's ethics adviser. Although, of course, none of those scandals came close to Partygatethe lockdown-breaking spree that hastened Johnson's downfall.

For all his promise, the truth is that Johnsonthe supposed savior of the Tory rightwill end up leaving behind a Britain considerably less free than the one he inherited. Many will continue to praise him for delivering Brexit, but this misses the point. While the U.K. may be out of the E.U. legal orbit, we've done almost nothing to take advantage of it, retaining the vast majority of the regulations that Johnson used to rail against so persuasively.

If there's one positive, it's thatas the Johnson premiership goes down in flamesperhaps the Conservative Party will finally rediscover its commitment to liberty. There are already signs that at least one serious candidate (the current foreign secretary, Liz Truss) plans to run on a more libertarian-oriented platform in the upcoming contest. Others are likely to follow in the coming weeks.

If Conservative voters have paid attention during the Johnson premiershiprather than remaining blinded by party or Brexit loyaltythey will have observed the folly of "big state" conservatism. Let's hope this summer they vote in a way that reflects that.

More:

Boris Johnson Leaves Behind a Bigger, Bloated State - Reason

LAWRENCE Kansas advocacy groups and Democrats are working to broaden outreach to unaffiliated and young voters this summer to get Kansans to vote against the anti-abortion constitutional amendment on the Aug. 2 ballot.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the League of Women Voters of Kansas and the Kansas Democratic party have seen an increased interest in voting on the amendment. Rep. Christina Haswood, a Lawrence Democrat and member of the Navajo Nation, said anti-abortion policies disproportionately affect American Indians and is canvassing to encourage voter turnout.

Martha Pint, co-president of League of Women Voters of Kansas, and Rebecca Perkins, Dickinson County Democratic chairwoman, say they are confronting the challenges created by legislators who placed the constitutional amendment on the primary ballot in an attempt to favor passage of the amendment. The primary is otherwise closed to independent voters, and few Democrats typically participate in comparison to Republicans.

There is this huge hurdle that we have to overcome, to get it out there, to let people know you can vote, you just have to be registered, you dont have to affiliate with any party to vote on this issue, Pint said. Now, if you want to vote on the candidates, different story. But on this issue, be registered and vote.

Pint said the League of Women Voters Kansas found that some counties, including Sedgwick and Wyandotte, offer applications for advanced mail-in ballots that only list Republican and Democrat as options for party affiliation. Pint said this may mislead some unaffiliated voters to believe they cant vote on Aug. 2.

Pint said the league brought this issue to the attention of officials. Sedgwick County adjusted its application for advance mail-in ballots to include unaffiliated and Libertarian as options. Wyandotte Countys advance mail-in ballot has not changed.

According to the Kansas Secretary of States Office, as of April, 44.3% of registered voters in Kansas identify as Republican, 28.8% identify as unaffiliated, 25.7% identify as Democrat, and 1.1% identify as Libertarian.

Perkins said her favorite story while handing out Vote No yard signs was when she went to deliver a sign to a rural home in Dickinson County. She said she approached a man in a pickup truck who told her he had been waiting for the signs to arrive.

And they said, I am probably the only Republican-slash-Libertarian youll find voting no on this question. And I said, You will find you are far from the only Republican voting no, Perkins said.

The amendment vote will be the first referendum in the U.S. pertaining to abortion rights following the U.S. Supreme Courts overturn of Roe v. Wade. Those who vote yes support amending the Kansas Constitution to make it clear that women have no right to terminate a pregnancy. Those who vote no support a Kansas Supreme Court ruling in 2019 that determined the state constitutions right to bodily autonomy applies to a womans decision to terminate a pregnancy.

Perkins said she has seen a growing interest in voting no on the amendment from people in both political parties, men and women, and an uptick in the number of younger people participating in the Democratic Party in Dickinson county.

According to a survey conducted by The Docking Institute of Public Affairs at Fort Hays State University, 60% of Kansans believe abortion should not be completely illegal in Kansas. The survey found 50.5% of respondents agree the Kansas government should not regulate the circumstances under which women can receive an abortion, while 25.4% believe the opposite.

You know, there was a lot of naivete on the part of the Kansas legislative Republican leaders thinking that they could just get their way by putting this on a primary and thinking politics as usual would prevail, Perkins said. I think the overturning of Roe upends politics as we know it.

Pint and Perkins said the demand for Vote No yard signs has increased in both the Wichita and Dickinson county areas. Both also said theyve seen an increase in the number of young people who are participating.

Pint said she was among 600 others at the U.S. League of Women Voters biennial convention in Denver when the decision ending Roe was issued.

You want to talk about some upset women, Pint said. Oh my goodness, you couldnt have asked for a better place to be, and you couldnt have asked for a worse place to be, because we just all felt so upset and angry and defeated.

Pint said convention goers joined a march for abortion rights in Denver.

Haswood said on the Kansas Reflector podcast she is p***ed about the possibility of Kansans losing reproductive rights. Because Haswood is running unopposed she said she is able to partially shift her campaign focus to voter turnout for the amendment.

She also expressed concern for American Indians who will be affected if Kansans lose their right to choose an abortion.

You know, its not going to stop abortions, only safe abortions, Haswood said. And thinking about my Indigenous folks, we have one of the highest rates of maternal mortality, morbidity, preeclampsia, you know, we can go down the list on all that.

American Indian and non-Hispanic Black women are approximately three times more likely than white women to die of pregnancy-related issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Haswood said the Hyde Amendment has affected American Indians rights and access to abortions.

The Hyde Amendment was passed by Congress in 1976 and forbids federal Medicaid funding to be used for abortion services, while some exceptions were added in 1993. Indian Health Services regulations follow the Hyde Amendment.

According to the National Library of Medicine, many American Indian women living in the U.S. rely on IHS facilities for reproductive health services. Data suggests the majority of these facilities lack resources to provide abortions under any circumstances.

According to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, in 2018 Medicaid covered 1.8 million American Indian and Alaskan Native people. Of American Indian and Alaskan Native adults under the age of 65, 36% were covered by Medicaid in 2018. Of all adults in the United States, 22% are covered by Medicaid.

Data shows that 46% of American Indian women give birth to their first child before the age of 20.

Haswood said reproduction and sex education was interwoven in American Indian creation stories, until the colonization of American Indian land when American Indian women began to be sexualized.

She said American Indians historically practiced family planning and used herbal medicines for abortions.

For me, Im just so lucky to have my summer interns who are all as angry as I am, Haswood said. We are training folks who want to volunteer and make this voter engagement because that is what the other side is doing, and theyve been doing it since Roe v. Wade was (put) in place. So, now we have to help folks have voting plans.

The deadline to register for the primary election is July 12. Starting July 13, advance ballots will be mailed and in-person voting opens.

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Kansas abortion rights advocates and Democrats work to boost voter turnout - Kansas Reflector

Data from the N.C. State Board of Elections show that 41,795 N.C. voters have changed their party affiliation since the beginning of 2022. More than half of those, 23,374, are now unaffiliated voters, instead of a Democrat, Republican, or Libertarian.

Republicans are the only N.C. party to gain more voters than theyve lost so far this year, with nearly 5,000 Democrats becoming Republicans.

Of political parties, Democrats have lost the most voters since January 2022 with nearly 20,000 registered Democrats leaving the party and only 6,253 joining. The data show that of those who left, one quarter (4,999) became Republicans, 14,447 became unaffiliated, and 207 switched to the Libertarian Party.

About 9,830 voters have left Republican affiliation, and 11,341 switched to it. Of the Republican voters who changed their affiliation, most (8,348) became unaffiliated, 1,211 became Democrats, and 271 switched to Libertarian.

Libertarians lost 936 affiliated voters. Of those, 579 became unaffiliated, 220 became Republicans, and 137 became Democrats.

This year seems to have a slight uptick in registration changes when comparing it to the election years of the last decade, said Jim Stirling, research fellow at the John Locke Foundations Civitas Center for Public Integrity. 2020 had a massive number of registration changes, totaling 237,611 changes.This includes the now removed Green and Constitutional parties only having received 2,477 registrant changes.While we may not reach 2020 registration changes, we will likely see a large uptick in registrations as we get closer to November.

There has been speculation that voters are switching parties to manipulate another groups primary race and might switch back in time for the general election.

Short-term party switching is often talked about but is pretty rare in practice, said Andy Jackson, director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity. It was popularized by Rush Limbaughs Operation Chaos in 2008, when he encouraged Republicans to change registration to vote in Democratic presidential primaries. More recently, there was an effort by progressives to change party registration to vote in the Republican 11th Congregssional District primary against Madison Cawthorn.

Only an estimated 2,000 Democrats made the switch in that race, likely not enough to have swayed the outcome.

North Carolina has more than 7 million registered voters, with about 2.5 million Democrats, 2.2 million Republicans, and 50,000 Libertarians. There is a meeting at the State Board of Elections scheduled for Thursday June 28, that would consider adding the Green Party to N.C. ballots. Controversy has erupted lately, though, that citizens whove signed the Greens petition are being contacted by a group associated with national Democrat operative Marc Elias. The group is encouraging them to remove their names from the petition. If the Green Party is allowed on N.C. ballots for November, it could erode Democrat affiliations even further.

The data illustrate a national trend with more voters switching to the Republican Party ahead of 2022 general elections. Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that 1 million voters in 43 states have switched to Republican affiliation this year, while only 63,000 switched to become Democrats. AP cited Raleigh as one of the key cities in the study where Republicans are gaining ground.

Democrats are hoping that last weeks U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wades constitutional right to an abortion will change the voter exodus from their party and force Democrats focus onto the state legislative races, where abortion law would now be set.

I think this is an earthquake in the midterms, said N.C. Democrat political strategist Morgan Jackson on Front Row with Marc Rotterman over the weekend, calling it a base motivator.

Both sides of the aisle think the Roe decision from the U.S. Supreme Court could benefit Democrats, with a recent Civitas Poll of likely N.C. voters finding that 40% of respondents identified as pro-life, while 43% of respondents said they are pro-choice. Among women 18-34 years old, 22% say they are pro-life, while 63% say they are pro-choice.

One of the reasons Democrats are having trouble in polls right now is because Democrats are not motivated, Jackson said. This changes all of that.

Republicans are working to wrest control of Congress from Democrats after losing majority power in 2020. They say that historic inflation in food, housing, energy, and gasoline costs combined with dropping wages will set the pace for November elections, giving Republicans the wind at their back. In Junes Civitas poll, only 41% of respondents say they plan on voting for Democrats at the national level and 39% at the state level.

Unaffiliated voters were the second-largest group to change parties, behind Democrats. Of the 11,376 unaffiliated voters to change, 6,122 became Republicans, 4,905 became Democrats, and 349 became Libertarians.

The general election is scheduled for Nov. 8. Voters must be registered by Oct. 14.

Read this article:

More than 40000 NC voters have changed their political party this year - Carolina Journal

I used to line up an article every month for Econlib, from 2008 to 2019. My favorite was one by Jeff Hummel in 2018. Its titled Benefits of the American Revolution: An Exploration of Positive Externalities.

Here are the opening two paragraphs:

It has become de rigueur, even among libertarians and classical liberals, to denigrate the benefits of the American Revolution. Thus, libertarian Bryan Caplan writes: Can anyone tell me why American independence was worth fighting for? [W]hen you ask aboutspecificlibertarian policy changes that came about because of the Revolution, its hard to get a decent answer. In fact, with 20/20 hindsight, independence had two massive anti-libertarian consequences: It removed the last real check onAmerican aggression against the Indians, and allowed American slavery to avoid earlierand peacefulabolition. One can also find such challenges reflected in recent mainstream writing, both popular and scholarly.

In fact, the American Revolution, despite all its obvious costs and excesses, brought about enormous net benefits not just for citizens of the newly independent United States but also, over the long run, for people across the globe. Speculations that, without the American Revolution, the treatment of the indigenous population would have been more just or that slavery would have been abolished earlier display extreme historical naivety. Indeed, a far stronger case can be made that without the American Revolution, the condition of Native Americans would have been no better, the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies would have been significantly delayed, and the condition of European colonists throughout the British empire, not just those in what became the United States, would have been worse than otherwise.

Another excerpt:

[Historian Gordon] Wood concludes that Americans had become, almost overnight, the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern people in the world. The Revolution not only radically changed the personal and social relations of people but also destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western world for at least two millennia. The Revolution brought respectability and even dominance to ordinary people long held in contempt and gave dignity to their menial labor in a manner unprecedented in history and to a degree not equaled elsewhere in the world. The Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power.

Heres a comment Jeff made in 2018 in response to some commenters:

Even after military conflict broke out in April 1775, a majority of the Continental Congress did not favor independence until February 1776, and it was a slim majority. The first colony to actually instruct its delegates to vote for independence was North Carolina the following April. Thus we have nearly a year of hard fighting during which a majority of Patriots favored and expected to achieve reconciliationwithinthe British Empire. It was Thomas Paines Common Sense, published in January 1776, that ultimately tipped the scales in favor of secession.

Also the difference between the French and American Revolutions can be overdrawn. The American Revolution admittedly had no reign of terror, but the treatment of Loyalists could be quite appalling, with disturbing instances of brutality and killing. Given that many Loyalists fought for the British, some historians have started referring to the Revolution as a civil war, a term neither of you [the two people hes responding to] consider. At the end of the War for Independence, an estimated 50,000 Loyalists left the United States, out of total population of 2.5 million. The French Revolution generated as many as 130,000 migrs and deportees, out of a total population of 25 million. Thus the American Revolution produced refugees at almost four times the rate of the French Revolution. And while many migrs eventually returned to France, very few Loyalists returned to the U.S.

I still maintain that the American Revolution brought momentous benefits, but let us not overlook its costs and excesses.

The picture above is of me with my Betsy Ross flag in front our house. I will be carrying it in the July 4 parade in Monterey later today.

Happy, happy July 4.

See more here:

The Positive Externalities of the American Revolution - Econlib

A Google Deep Mind project (Democratic AI) ended up redistributing virtual wealth in ways that were voted as the most popular methods, according to a vote taken by human players participating in an online game-based experiment.

The research was based on an algorithm that learned from different models of human behavior via an online investment game. Participants (biological and silicon) had to decide whether to keep or give away monetary gains from a communal pot. The AI ended up gradually redistributing the wealth it won and redressing some of the imbalances in economic fortunes among the players. But it achieved this in a way considered by participants to be the fairest way possible.

The reason for the research was not, as our clickbait headline suggests, to prove that computers, software, or AI researchers are inherently socialists but instead to develop better value alignment between self-learning computer models and their human bosses. Because theres a wide range of behaviors exhibited by humans, an AI should be able to align its behavior in such a way that it appeals, on balance, to a majority of the population.

The researchers aimed to maximize a democratic objective: to design policies that humans prefer and thus will vote to implement in an [] election.

The study measured human monetary contributions during the game under three redistribution principles: strict egalitarian, libertarian and liberal egalitarian. In political; terms, these might translate into socialism, free market-ism, and social democracy hard left, hard right, and somewhere in between.

The egalitarian model divided funds equally between players regardless of their contribution, while the libertarian returned a payout proportional to the monetary contribution those with the most gained the most. The liberal egalitarian measured contributions proportional to any inherent imbalance in wealth that players entered the game with.

It was found that generally, humans disliked the extremes of each model. The pure egalitarian model was seen as aggressively taxing the wealthiest and supporting freeloaders. The libertarian model saw money flow to the wealthiest disproportionately. Researchers wanted to know whether an AI system could design a mechanism that humans preferred over these alternatives and that would be more acceptable than the liberal egalitarian modeling that one might think was the natural middle ground.

The AI was trained to imitate behavior during the game, voting the same way as human players over the course of many rounds. The model was optimized using deep RL (reinforcement learning) and then took redistribution decisions with a new group of human players. Players voted on the AIs suggestions for redistribution. Iterating on these processes obtained a mechanism that we call the Human Centred Redistribution Mechanism, the papers authors state.

Throughout the experiments, radical redistribution of wealth from the top down was found to be unpopular as it eventually led to the wealthiest players not wishing to contribute collectively at all. Nor were those at the bottom of the virtual economic pile happy with seeing just a few players gain disproportionally.

The report states, the redistribution policy that humans prefer is neither one that shares out public funds equally, nor one that tries to speak only to the interests of a majority of less well-endowed players.

Smart AI systems learning from the full gamut of human behaviors mean systems can be trained to satisfy what researchers called a democratic objective, that is, to find the most popular way forward. The AIs winning model was voted the best by a few percentage points, beating the liberal egalitarian, pure egalitarian, and pure libertarian. In brief, the AI found a better compromise than any humans could devise by simply learning to imitate all available human behavior.

AIs learning from human behavior is a fiercely complex area of study, and some of the more public experiments have ended in, at best, derision. Earlier experiments, like the very public disgrace of the Microsoft Twitter personality, ended badly. Given a cross-section of the cauldron of human opinion expressed by an opaque algorithm, Tay learned to be racist, sexist, and generally unhinged after a few hours. As a Microsoft spokesperson told CNN at the time, [Tay] is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical.

When biased learning materials are given to an AI, it simply recreates that bias and, in some notable cases, exaggerates by being given similar input often. However, improving methods of machine learning are helping matters, as is the awareness of inherent human bias in just about every expression and utterance. Economics is one area where the nuances of human behavior can literally be quantified and, therefore, are a fertile ground for research.

In 50 years, will we refer to AIs decision-making abilities to decide human affairs? Having AIs making decisions over human conduct is a standard trope in science fiction, where silicon rulers can be fully benign (The Polity series of books, by Neal Asher, for example) or something very much more malevolent (Terminator et al.). If there is a better way that pleases most of the people most of the time, it may have just germinated.

See original here:

The AI algorithms that believe in equality, from Google's Deep Mind - TechHQ

Is there a pro-freedom progressivism? Im not certain, but Matthew Yglesias sure seems to think so. In the past hour, he has tweeted the following:

1. Criticism of a Really outrageous attack on free speech by law enforcement in Arizona.

2. Argued Lets make it easier to get permits to build houses An hour earlier he made the pitch more overtly political, Own Ron DeSantis by making it easier to build houses in California.

3. Argued Lets make clean energy deployment easier

4. Argued Lets increase the supply of doctors and other medical professionals by weakening the AMA cartel.

5. Five hours ago he suggested that freedom was the best way to sell the pro-choice argument:

As Ive said many times, theres no such thing as public opinion. It depends how you frame the question. I.e., the question creates the opinion.

6. Six hours ago, he tweeted, YIMBY is about freedom, not apartment buildings.

7. Twenty hours ago he tweeted on vaccines and nuclear power. In both areas he has written more extensive essays, sometimes advocating the removal of regulatory barriers that slow the development of vaccines and prevent the construction of (low carbon) nuclear power plants.

Matt Yglesias is certainly not a libertarian. But hes also not a typical progressive. Rather he advocates something called popularism, which is roughly the achievement of progressive goals via popular means (and in some cases compromises.) This differs from populism, which often aims at non-progressive policy goals such as trade barriers, immigration barriers, and the weakening of criminal justice protections. In Yglesiass view, unpopular woke excesses actually end up hurting the progressive cause.

I find it interesting that Yglesias often sees the freedom message as a way of making public policies more palatable. He spends part of the year in Texas, and seems to have a pretty good grasp of how middle Americans think, especially when compared to the typical coastal progressive.

PS. If I were pro-life, Id be infuriated by this misleading and manipulative video. But as Yglesias correctly suggests, it is probably quite effective.

PPS. Warning: If progressives keep using the freedom message because it works, they might eventually find themselves beginning to believe in freedom. Handle with care!

Here is the original post:

Popularism and freedom - Econlib

A broken clock is right twice a doomsday, I suppose.

After a ground-breaking Supreme Court Term eviscerating precedent and cementing novel legal theories invented from whole cloth in my own lifetime, many see the conservative legal movement triumphant. But Harvard Law Schools arch-conservative Adrian Vermeule took to the Washington Post to throw some water on that opinion.

Rather than the triumph of conservative legal thought, Vermeule is left wondering what the conservative legal movement even means:

But that framing rests on an error: In reality, as this case [West Virginia v. EPA] makes clear, there is no conservative legal movement, at least if legal conservatism is defined by jurisprudential methods rather than a collection of results.

Yeah well, thats not wrong.

Hes just pointing out what everyone (a) not in on the grift or (b) possessed of two working brain cells has said since at least the 1980s. But Vermeule is now starting to actually question the course of the movement hes danced with for decades. Its cute the same way you enjoy watching a child say, Hey, I dont think any of those three cards are the one I picked!

The conservative legal movement distinguishes itself from other approaches by declaring itself united not around results-oriented jurisprudence but rather around a set of supposedly neutral methods for interpreting legal texts. Conservative jurisprudence again, as advertised has four pillars: originalism, textualism, traditionalism and judicial restraint. Although different conservatives emphasize one or the other approach, all are staples of Federalist Society events and lauded in the opinions of conservative justices.

The use of the phrase as advertised is almost tragically on point. Conservative legal theory is and has always been a public relations campaign designed to dupe ordinary folks into thinking radical judicial activism is ordained by some connection to mythologized and infallible Framers. But at all times the movements lodestone remained whatever aligned with the policy preferences of the contemporary Republican Party.

When semantic games got there, its a highly stylized brand of textualism. Failing that, it beckoned to a cherry-picked account of the original public meaning at the Founding. When the history of the Founding proved inconvenient, they started basically only for gun laws reconfiguring originalism around the public meaning four score and seven years after the fact. Consistency is the hobgoblin of honest actors, and the conservative legal movement jettisoned those folks years ago for getting high on their own supply and actually believing this stuff.

But grounding the partisanship in a theory that sounds superficially reasonable bestowed a quasi-apolitical shield.

To Vermeules credit hes been complaining about the conservative legal movement for a while now. Though from his perspective, the big problem is that concepts like originalism arent compatible with his integralist worldview that the United States should junk the Constitution in favor of the eventual formation of the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and ultimately the world government required by natural law. Basically a transnational government of vaguely Catholic authoritarianism.

Which makes this jeremiad kind of rich: a guy who publicly dumps on originalism as an inconvenience on the road to theocracy is suddenly annoyed that conservatives dont seem moored to originalism?

So whats going on here?

If there is no conservative legal movement, what is there? The answer is not mysterious: There is a libertarian legal movement, a consistent opponent of federal regulation, supported and rationalized by an entrenched network of richly funded, quasi-academic and advocacy institutions in essence, a resurrection of the Liberty League of the 1930s.

Ah, the Court hiding beneath all these artificial theories is simply too libertarian!

Frankly, its impossible to watch the Supreme Court write the Establishment Clause out of existence and think thats the result of a libertarian legal movement. Barry Goldwater, Americas proto-libertarian was outspokenly pro-choice and yet we got Dobbs, an opinion so steeped in pre-Founding traditionalism that it cited witch hunters approvingly. These are the opinions that lay the groundwork for Vermeules preferred order.

But originalism and textualism are conceits pliable enough to open the door to religio-fascism, but also invite too much championing the individual to the party to reliably get all the way there.

Unless hes wildly naive, Vermeule isnt really offended that this Court treats established conservative legal theories as playthings as much as he sees an opening to pierce the apolitical veil protecting jurists he considers too libertarian.And if accepted legal theories are a mirage wielded by right-wingers who dont really appreciate a good auto-da-f, maybe this is a chance for conservatives to try his own common-good constitutionalism on for size. Its just as intellectually bankrupt but its just a little harder to be one of those RINOs justifying heliocentrism!

Because Im not buying that the guy who titles his works Beyond Originalism is really shedding tears that the Court isnt appropriately deferential to original public meaning and no one else should either.

But Vermeules specifically writing for the audience that bought into originalism in the first place, so he knows hes got a bunch of easy marks.

There is no conservative legal movement [Washington Post]

Earlier: Hey, Can Someone At Harvard Law School Check In On Adrian Vermeule?

Joe Patriceis a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free toemail any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him onTwitterif youre interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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Arch-Conservative Law Professor Starting To Suspect Conservative Legal Movement Just A Bunch Of Pseudo-Law Made Up For Partisan Goals - Above the Law

Just as villains can be more compelling than heroes, are dissidents more intriguing than the leaders of history?

Ive been interested, in some ways, in the history of losers, Justus Doenecke tells The American Conservative.

Doenecke, who taught at New College of Florida from 1969 to 2005, made his reputation in the historical profession through an open-minded reappraisal of arguably the most prominent group of American losers in the twentieth century: the pre-World War II anti-interventionists. These were the middle Americans who saw Franklin Roosevelts foreign policy as the path to bankruptcy, chronic overseas war, and presidential dictatorship.

Its a story he was practically born to narrate.

I grew up in Brooklyn. People always think of New York as very liberal, but there are pockets of extreme conservatives, in fact you would call them reactionaries, Doenecke explained. My father was a building estimator, and he hated Roosevelt. He didnt like the regulations of the New Deal, he didnt like trade unions. You know, son of a bitch ruined America. And he had all these conspiracy theories. Every single book that came out trying to prove that Franklin Roosevelt planned the Pearl Harbor attack, my father owned.

Emerging from this heavy dose of Old Right upbringing, where his parents worshiped the newspaper columns of Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky, Doenecke sought to prove that the America First movement was not the bund of kooks, knaves, and antisemites theyd been smeared as ever since the Eastern press saw fit to label them isolationists.

In a series of extensively researched and balanced books, starting with Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era (1979) and culminating in Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941 (2000), Doenecke found the anti-interventionists to be astute American patriots, with coherent strategy and cogent criticism of Roosevelts path to war.

In the words of libertarian scholar Ralph Raico, Students of the greatest antiwar movement in American history, revisionists and nonrevisionists alike, are permanently in Justus Doeneckes debt.

Although he hasnt written on them as extensively, Doeneckes interest in losers extends to the Confederacy and the Loyalists of the Revolutionary War. When I first started teaching at New College I taught a course called Dissent in American History. Im also interested in all kinds of socialist and left-wing groups for that reason too. Things that deviate from the vital center, in a way, he said.

This focus on nonconformity is the through-line between his previous work and his newest arrival, More Precious Than Peace: A New History of America in World War I, published in March. Its the anticipated sequel to his 2011 book, Nothing Less than War: A New History of Americas Entry into World War I. The first book covers the years 1914-1917 and the second 1917-1918.

The past decade has seen numerous books related to the First World War published in conjunction with its centennial. What separates Doeneckes from its predecessors is his willingness to give a podium to dissent.

As one who has spent much of his career examining Americans who took a dim view of U.S. foreign policy from 1931 to the early Cold War, I am now continuing to examine foes of U.S. intervention, this time scrutinizing their opposition to the way the nation waged World War I, he writes in the introduction.

Almost every page is interspersed with opinions and objections from a broad cast of characters challenging the Woodrow Wilson administration as either too lenient or too harsh: the newspaper chain of iconoclast tycoon William Randolph Hearst; Socialist and New York City mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit; former president and Wilsons bitter bte noir Theodore Roosevelt; prolific and lifelong Germanophile George Sylvester Viereck; Wisconsin progressive and anti-imperialist Senator Robert La Follette; and magazine editor George Harvey, whose loathing of the German nation crossed into the genocidal.

This uproarious chorus reminds the reader that no public policy is made in a vacuum. From the enforcement of the Espionage and Sedition Acts to the pronouncement of war aims and his Fourteen Points, Woodrow Wilson wasnt having a one-way conversation but was both reacting to and attempting to lead a contentious and discordant body politic.

More than half the book concentrates on the homefront and domestic developments, the most engrossing of which is the American publics shift from being unsure of its participation in the European war to a frothing hysteria that could be satisfied with nothing less than unconditional surrender.

Despite a lopsided vote in favor of waronly fifty congressmen and six senators voted againstthere was uncertainty about how much involvement voters would countenance, and even whether the United States would meet Germany on the field of battle. Three out of every ten army conscripts were illiterate, many having no idea who the Kaiser was. When someone from the War Department appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to request the first appropriations for an American Expeditionary Force, Majority Leader Thomas S. Martin of Virginia (who voted for war) responded, Good Lord! You arent going to send soldiers over there, are you?

But as spring turned to summer, censorship carefully curtailed access to information through propaganda organs like George Creels Committee on Public Information and new laws like the Espionage Act of 1917. As Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler approvingly told his faculty, What had been tolerated before became intolerable now. What had been wrongheadedness is now sedition.

Postmaster General Albert Burleson, universally considered a man of profound ignorance, was given unilateral authority to decide what material constituted obstruction of the war effort and the ability to suspend it from second-class mailing rates; that way, actual publication was not barred but circulation would be impractical beyond a small local area. Thus the Wilson administration successfully shuttered the most popular socialist, Irish-American, and German-language dailies and journals without requiring armed men to smash printing presses.

Public attention was mobilized by semi-private organizations like the American Defense Society and the American Protective League, which Doenecke says have been neglected by historians and secondary sources. These quasi-military structures, led by elite members of business and former politicians, possessed hundreds of thousands of members each. The former was a project of Theodore Roosevelt, the latter nurtured by Wilsons Attorney General Thomas Gregory.

Vigilantism wasnt uncommon. Ordinary citizens rounded up draft dodgers (slacker raids), tapped phones, rifled bank accounts and medical records, and even entered neighbors homes in search of spies and Teutonic agents. In April 1918, when a German-born baker in Illinois was assaulted by a group of drunks who wrapped him in the American flag and hanged him, the Washington Post responded that enemy propaganda must be stopped, even if a few lynchings may occur. More did occur.

In many ways, the domestic repression of World War I was more participatory and grassroots than during any other conflict in American history.

Critical industries were cartelized and economically directed out of Washington, D.C., although in a much more rudimentary way than would occur during World War II. Doenecke relates a decision where, in order to cope with a coal shortage, Harry Garfield, son of the assassinated president and designated fuel administrator, decreed the closure of all non-essential factories east of the Mississippi River for a week in January 1918.

It was a heyday for political demagoguery. Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico, later of Teapot Dome infamy, feared that if the Germans reached Paris, theyaccompanied by 15 million Mexicanswould next reach Chicago and cut your great United States in two. Later on, Senator William S. Kenyon joked that if the Germans captured New York, his fellow Iowans would rejoice.

Even Warren G. Harding, known today as a laissez-faire conservative, said in August 1917, Not only does this country need a dictator, but in my opinion is sure to have one before the war goes much further.

By October 1918, when Wilson was attempting to hammer out an armistice based on his Fourteen Points and a vision of peace without victory, most newspaper editors were clamoring for unconditional surrender even if it meant driving the Boche all the way to Berlin.

On the military side, Doenecke covers all bases in this well-rounded account. General Black Jack Pershing competes with Wilson as the predominant figure in the last third of the book, which details both his determination to keep American doughboys independent of the European command structure and his inability to adapt to mechanized warfare. An early chapter summarizes the war at sea against German U-boats, while two enthralling chapters relate the United States extreme ineptitude and lack of perception toward the Russian Revolution and our subsequent decision to intervene militarily. This was the most difficult section to write, says Doenecke, because Russia is just a tangle of confusion.

The book concludes with the armistice on the Western front in November 1918. Although the negotiations at Versailles and Wilsons final pitch for the League of Nations are left up to other authors, the closing tone leaves no ambiguity of what direction the peace will take.

It has become a meme among portions of the political right, particularly libertarians, to label Woodrow Wilson the worst president, the man responsible for every ill of the twentieth century. Contemporaries both left and right, militarist and pacifist, expose this conclusion as simplistic and exaggerated.

I would say of people who would have a chance of being elected president, who would get enough mass support, I think Wilson far and away stands above the others, Doenecke tells TAC, eliminating non-viable alternatives he personally admires such as Robert La Follette and Frank Cobb, chief editorial writer for the New York World.

Its difficult to argue with his assessment. Charles Evans Hughes, the bearded iceberg and Wilsons 1916 opponent, had no experience or interest in diplomatic matters; Theodore Roosevelt favored outright martial law and would have gone much farther than Wilson toward a presidential despotism; Henry Cabot Lodge, the cornerstone of Republican foreign policy in the U.S. Senate, favored a Carthaginian peace as harshly as Lloyd George or Clemenceau.

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The reality of these circumstances is something any serious libertarian or conservative critic must address when reassessing the Wilson presidency.

Like in all his past work, Doeneckes method of historiography leans heavily toward the descriptive, eschewing any attempt to psychoanalyze or mentally deconstruct people nearly a century after their deaths. Ive never been taken with psychohistory at all. There are too many variables, too many things we dont know. What do we know about a person between the ages of three to five, for example? he asks. You can only go so far with this kind of stuff.

Most of my work is sheer narrative. And in that sense Im somewhat old-fashioned. I think narrative history is the only way were going to recover the discipline of history from the maelstrom it seems to be in now. And the most popular history, the history that the lay-person reads, is narrative history, he concludes. They want the story.

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The Dean of Non-Interventionism - The American Conservative

Below are a selection of responses from the candidates who filled out Ballotpedias Candidate Connection survey since July 1, 2022. To read each candidates full responses, click their name at the bottom of the article.

AJ Exner is running for election to the Missouri House of Representatives to represent District 135 and the Republican primary is on Aug. 2. Heres how Exner responded to the question What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

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John Hartwig is running for Missouri State Auditor and the Libertarian primary is on Aug. 2. Heres how Hartwig responded to the question What qualities do you possess that you believe would make you a successful officeholder?

As a Certified Public Accountant, I maintain my independence and seek the truth. These are two qualities that have always served me well.

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If youre a Missouri candidate or incumbent, click here to take the survey. The survey contains over 30 questions, and you can choose the ones you feel will best represent your views to voters. If you complete the survey, a box with your answers will display on your Ballotpedia profile. Your responses will also populate the information that appears in our mobile app, My Vote Ballotpedia.

If youre not running for office but you would like to know more about candidates in Missouri, share the link and urge them to take the survey!

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28 Missourian candidates completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in the first week of July Ballotpedia News - Ballotpedia News