One issue that we should consider is opening the local transit market to competition. It has been suggested that doing so might reduce local urban auto emissions by as much as 50-75%. While I think those numbers are high we should be able to see a reduction of about 30% over time as well as slowing the growth of cities and roadways along with the environmental problems that are associated with them.

How do we get the LP to put as much effort into this as other issues becomes the question.

Secondly we need to point out that the U.S. military is one of the largest users of oil products on the globe. Reducing our overseas commitments would help in reducing the military’s consumption of oil products.

Oh, great… What are they doing now?!?

That said, for it to be a true moment of reflection it would be more proper for it to either last 1.5 minutes (the length of a moment of time according to the medieval definition), or 5/114 of a second (as defined by the Hebrew calendar).

It is highly unlikely in this case, but it could be the mean of the nth powers of the deviations of the observed values in a set of statistical data from a fixed value.

Either way, one minute is the wrong length.

See all of you in Nashville!!!

For a toolbox of handout literature and other activist resources, see http://libertarianmajority.net/tools

It includes my favorite handout, a 4×9 rack card with space to add your contact info, and that costs about 5 cents each when you order a couple thousand:

I’ll mail you a batch of a couple hundred if you want to try them out on your campus.

I’m a student at one of the nation’s most liberal schools. We do have a number of people on campus who support Ron Paul or tax simplification or want to end the wars.

What we don’t see when we look at the LP website is up to date information.

Some of us have talked about starting a campus group but there doesn’t seem to be much literature that you have to hand out. Why?

Moment of Reflection 1 minute

WTF??? When did the LNC start doing this?

The LNC has been doing the moment of reflection at least since Dixon’s term as chair (2004-2006). When I chaired a meeting in Las Vegas I tried to dispense with the moment of reflection as silly, but all the other LNC members seemed to want it.

If that was true Pat Buchanan would have become President in 2000 and Ron Paul in 2008.

I don’t think we are necessarily speaking about the same people, Brian. How many OPH booths have you done at colleges? I’ve done hundreds, with tens of thousands of data points. I’ve collected many thousands more signatures at colleges. During the course of that work, I’ve had occasion to discuss issues beyond those on the quiz with many people.

I’ve spoken about political issues to numerous people in that age group. There are many, many people that age who just don’t know or care much about economic issues at all; the issues that motivate them tend to be peace and civil liberties issues. On the quiz, they generally score left-center-libertarian, which just so happens to be THE largest cluster at colleges.

There are other people that age group who have big government views on economic issues, but only because they are associated with “the left” – that is, people who agree with them on the other issues, which they care more about. There are still others who hold free market views, but generally keep quiet about them because those are not the issues most important to them.

Alex Peak tried to make the same point when he wrote here a couple weeks ago that liberals “only ever start supporting government control over the economy because (A) they are convinced that a person who opposes homosexuality must also be wrong about everything else, including economics; and (B) because the democratic socialists seem (and usually generally are) genuinely concerned about people’s well-being”.

Excellent point, and true of many people.

But if this thesis were true, then recruiting Libertarians from the left would be as easy as letting them know that the LP exists and that we care about people. Mary Ruwart would be leading an army of ex-liberals into the LP.

I don’t believe the effort has ever seriously been made, and to the limited extent it has, when they go to LP meetings, join libertarian discussion groups, etc., they quickly get dissuaded. There has been a great deal of effort made to make the LP make disgruntled conservatives feel at home. Unfortunately, a lot of that makes other people – like the people I am talking about – NOT feel at home.

So where are they?

Many were supporting Ron Paul, strangely enough. This was after he stood up to Giuliani on the war, and he actually succeeded in educating many young people on economic issues after that.

I don’t buy the theory that it’s “because we have positioned ourselves so as to be more welcoming to disgruntled older conservatives”.

It’s not a theory. I’ve heard the feedback from more people than I can count. It is a fact. Most of them just don’t see that we are different from far right Republicans, and are not shy about saying so. Many don’t even know that we are against the war, against torture, against the drug war, pro-gay rights, anti-censorship, anti-espionage, etc.

Note that Ron Paul is explicitly a constitutionalist, and explicitly not an anarchist. In Lew Rockwell’s speech at the Campaign For Liberty convention in 2008, Rockwell didn’t give the slightest hint of his anarchism. I’m confident not a single speaker there advocated anarchism. The C4L blog editor Anthony Gregory is an anarchist, but you don’t see him advocating anarchism anywhere on the C4L site. Ron Paul and the C4L are indeed a good example of how appealing minarchist libertarianism can be when it’s not so easy to dismiss as mere anarchism.

Well, yeah, I don’t generally sell libertarianism as anarchism to a mass audience, either. That’s generally a discussion to have with people who are already libertarians – in other words, libertarianism 201 or 301, not 101. The exception are people who are already anarchists or anarchist-friendly, of which there also happen to be a lot more than there are libertarians. Most of them don’t agree with the libertarian understanding of property rights, but some are at least open minded about it.

If American freedom has a future, that future will have to be green. Pollution is aggression, and libertarian economists and think tanks are nearly unanimous in supporting Pigovian taxes on such negative externalities, but the LP’s position on the environment is held hostage by those who deny the State’s authority to tax aggression. Green-/Eco-/Geo-libertarianism is the answer, if the LP can just bring itself to ask the question.

I agree that we should think more open mindedly about environmental issues. That’s an example of what I mean by the LP being perceived as not caring about the issues that matter to a lot of young people and coming off as being far right. Many libertarians use “environmentalist” and “green” as epithets, don’t take climate change theory seriously, and say a lot of things that come off sounding very ignorant on environmental issues (among other things). Often times this is because their background is in Limbaughland, and they still
use a lot of the same language and talking points.

However, that’s not to say that the only way for libertarians to be green is to advocate taxes (or regulations). For instance, Roderick Long lays out a harmonization of green goals and libertarian anarchist (non-initiation of force) means here:

http://aaeblog.com/?s=greensleeves

It’s not been my experience that young liberals aren’t committed to their collectivist economics. Alex Peak tried to make the same point when he wrote here a couple weeks ago that liberals “only ever start supporting government control over the economy because (A) they are convinced that a person who opposes homosexuality must also be wrong about everything else, including economics; and (B) because the democratic socialists seem (and usually generally are) genuinely concerned about people’s well-being”.

But if this thesis were true, then recruiting Libertarians from the left would be as easy as letting them know that the LP exists and that we care about people. Mary Ruwart would be leading an army of ex-liberals into the LP. So where are they?

I don’t buy the theory that it’s “because we have positioned ourselves so as to be more welcoming to disgruntled older conservatives”. When I’ve promoted the LP’s free-market economics to liberals, I don’t recall ever hearing a complaint that the LP is too closely tied to old men like Ron Paul or Bob Barr who are proud of the “conservative” label. Instead, the pushback I hear is that libertarians are against government provision of even basic services like streets and police, and believe that markets can regulate themselves against fraud without any government help.

I wonder where they got that idea?

The strawman of anarcholibertarianism is the scarecrow that leftist shepherds use to keep their flock out of the LP’s greener pastures.

Note that Ron Paul is explicitly a constitutionalist, and explicitly not an anarchist. In Lew Rockwell’s speech at the Campaign For Liberty convention in 2008, Rockwell didn’t give the slightest hint of his anarchism. I’m confident not a single speaker there advocated anarchism. The C4L blog editor Anthony Gregory is an anarchist, but you don’t see him advocating anarchism anywhere on the C4L site. Ron Paul and the C4L are indeed a good example of how appealing minarchist libertarianism can be when it’s not so easy to dismiss as mere anarchism.

Constitutionalism is indeed a meme the LP should be surfing, but there is an even bigger wave we need to catch. California is still a leading indicator for America, and as the father of three young Californians I can report that our government schools are shamelessly mass-producing young environmental activists. If American freedom has a future, that future will have to be green. Pollution is aggression, and libertarian economists and think tanks are nearly unanimous in supporting Pigovian taxes on such negative externalities, but the LP’s position on the environment is held hostage by those who deny the State’s authority to tax aggression. Green-/Eco-/Geo-libertarianism is the answer, if the LP can just bring itself to ask the question.