I saw the Chris Rock movie Head of State on DVD over the weekend. Not a very good movie - certainly more of an attempted laugh-fest than a biting political satire.
But it did make me reflect on one thing. It is a very libertarian thing to do to condemn politics and politicians, preferring the more socially useful private sector. But, deep down, who wouldn't want to be President? The drawback is the invasion of privacy, which will stay with you and your family even beyond the grave (not that it will matter to me personally at that point.)
But you become President, you are waited on hand and foot for the rest of your life, and you have a pen mightier than all swords - the veto pen. That's the great leverager (if leverager is a word), which would force compromises from Congress in the direction of liberty and smaller government.
Libertarian Democrats (and Republicans) often end up supporting non-libertarian politicians. We have to start running for offices ourselves, in the primaries.
James Leroy Wilson's one-man magazine.
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I disagree - the system is so corrupt that you would waste more time getting ballot access and jumping through articial hoops than you would party building - and people running for office typically don't have party vision beyond that particular election.
ReplyDeleteThe way is to run and win local offices and change the manner in which your town/city/burgh is run. water board, fire board, any citizen oversight committee. start restricting all partisan spending at the local level by just running for office and not party building at all, getting elected and then holding people responsible. start with oneself.
deal only with people that hold themselves responsible for their actions while you keep responsibility for yours. Functional committees at all levels that work by consensus and trust move mountains once that trust is firmly established.
Treat the grubbermint as staff and use the consensus process to hear out all objections, rather than stifling debate. Stakeholders is a bureaucratic term - when people represent their own interests on these committees, they automatically represent the organizations that they belong to defacto. So rather than being bound to the point of view on the appointed lable - convince the other committee memebr that only people have voices and they are themselves, not representative of some mindless organization.
Then as soon as we do this - let's remove people status from all corporations and accept personal responsibility for every decision at every level.
(if you want to blog this instead of just having it be a comment - i'd be pleased to trade guest cross-blogging privileges - delete this via edit once you've read it)
I meant that libertarians should run in the primaries of the Democratic and Republican parties - where ballot access rules are the same for everybody. Thus, we would not need to be involved in "party building" at all.
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