The following post is not about Maryland per se or about the law, but about my own evolution in political perspective. I put it here in a spirit of good faith and fair disclosure, so that my libertarian friends and others will get fair notice and hopefully will keep me in their friendship and warm wishes. If this sort of thing bores you, skip this one.I have been active or affiliated with the Maryland Libertarian Party (LPMD) for most of the past ten years of my life. Two libertarian stalwarts were in my wedding party in 1999 and I served briefly (thank goodness briefly) as Treasurer of the LPMD in 1998. I enjoyed the fellowship of LPMD members and the excitement of being part of a close-knit small organization of activists pursuing a difficult but inspiring vision of how the country might be better governed with greater liberty and respect for the individual. Among Libertarians, there are differences in style and approach. My own views were more moderate/centrist than most but I generally found the more radical party activists to be a source of inspiration, vision and plain old guts - qualities lacking in the K Street Mafia-government of George Bush and Tom DeLay. Many a spirited discussion took place on Friday evenings at the Libertarian Drinking and Debating Society in Canton - old beat-up broken nose Canton before Canton became yuppified and overpriced.Recent years have led me to ask, however, whether fighting for the extreme edge of individual liberty - and more specifically, the extreme edge of the electorate - should be the primary focus of political activity. I hate the drug war, consider it a waste of valuable money and a gross misuse of criminal procedure to prosecute possession of drugs by adults. Legalize the peaceful private use of street drugs by adults tomorrow at 9 AM, I say, and transfer the drug cops into sex crime investigation team or auto theft units at 9:01. But in terms of my focus, do I fear a drug war more than I fear the wholesale takeover of government - all branches - by the cronied Republican Right? And is my fear of libertarian circular firing squads even greater?The Republican Party has:- ballooned the deficit through unfunded wild spending beyond the wildest drunken dreams of the last Texan president, Lyndon Johnson, yielding a risk of inflation, increased interest rates on loans from the People's Republic of China (who develop their economy by lending to our economy);
- put forth a nominee for the Supreme Court whose judicial "merits" seem to be limited to professional acquaintanceship with the President and membership in an evangelical Protestant church (per President Bush's own comments last week); perhaps after Roberts' easy ride Bush felt entitled to pick the next nominee "the Texas Way";
- spent a massive amount of money getting rid of Saddam Hussein over a known lie (while Hussein is a murderous thug, Castro's thuggishness 90 miles off the coast of Margaritaville for 50 years has not justified an invasion, even though we have a military base already on the island!);
- created and enjoyed a Congressional cash-and-carry pay-to-play lobbying machine the likes of which would be imaginable in Mexico or Indonesia;
- created a jobs program for Republican stalwarts that would appear to rival Yahoo HotJobs in size and effectiveness, resulting in a massive demonstration to the international community (including terrorists) of American administrative incompetence during Hurricane Katrina.
One thing was clear about Bill Clinton - he liked his job. One gets the idea that Bush would rather be clearing brush in Texas; that's why he spends so much time in the "Western White House."
So what does this have to do with libertarian poltics? Nothing, and that is exactly the point. Libertarians can do nothing to contribute to the solutions of the country's real problems because they have been losing market share, not gaining, in the last several presidential elections. While the LP is good for a few press releases, they have been in existence for 8 presidential election cycles and have been losing ground. The Greens have been gaining, winning local elections, building a powerful farm team. Where is the LP?
Part of the problem lies in the inconvenient fact that government sometimes is more economically efficient. What libertarian really wants to see the DC or New York subway privatized and de-subsidized? Where is the LP plan or Cato Institute plan to end the DC Metrorail? It doesn't exist because the DC Metrorail is the only thing that makes the DC commute tolerable. The LP and similar libertarian institutions in DC do not want to be picketed in front of their DC offices; they want their employees to be free to take the government subsidized public transit service and get to work on time.
I have an autistic two year-old; how exactly should he participate in a strict libertarian society? What is the libertarian plan to handle sewage when the government gets out of the sewage business? How will the Libertarian Party see that roads from local streets to international expressways are built and maintained without taxation and without eminent domain - a function that (a few toll road public-private partnerships and a few turnpikes aside) government has handled in practically all societies and economies since the earliest Chinese and Babylonian dynasties?
One is reminded of a libertarian joke - How many libertarians does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer - zero; the invisible hand of the market will take care of it.
Most of the classical liberal (i.e. libertarian-leaning) thinkers - Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, etc. - believed in sharp limits on government power but did not really want a government so small that one "... can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Some of us libertarian moderates see government in a less comprehensively hostile light on some issues in limited circumstances.
One might argue that in the main, moderate libertarian ideas and policies are mostly sound. I would agree, but the Libertarian Party has made it as difficult as possible for libertarian-leaning moderates to join or stay in the club. To join the LPUS, one must sign a pledge abjuring the initiation of force to achieve social or political goals, and the party's statement of principles with its Soviet-style awkward, screeching dictation has been a source of embarrassment for a very long time. A frequent source of amusement at national conventions, of course, is the biennial attempt to slay both of these documents, but the party constitution requires 7/8's majority of all registered delegates to modify either, or 7/8 to adopt a lesser majority for those topics. Better hope no delegates took a late lunch.... The Democrats, Republicans and Greens, for their faults, are a little more willing to facilitate moderates, sometimes with beer in fact, but obtuse fanaticism has been written into the very organizing documents of the LPUS itself. Meanwhile its market share declines.
What's changed for me is my gradual loss of my hope that this sort of political Jim Jones Kool-Aid suicide pact was a temporary phenomenon, an embarrassment to be corrected promptly somehow. I attended the LP convention in 1996 in DC; these problems predated that convention and will survive the next one in 2006, no doubt. In other words, political suicide is not a developmental phase but a fundamental design defect of the party. Other countries have classical liberal parties that aim for restrained government across the board but do not engage in mass political suicide. The FDP of Germany and the FDP of Switzerland, Shinui in Israel , ACT New Zealand and other parties in other countries pursue free market, pro-individual liberty policies while acting like grown-ups. When I was in law school, I took an excellent course on antitrust law. In that course, we discussed cartels like OPEC, and I mentioned to the professor that eventually cartels tend to fall from "cheating" internally or from external competitors or substitutes. The professor asked me how many generations of patience would a government have to have to "wait out" a price-fixing cartel. In a similar vein, how many generations must libertarian moderates - people who want government quite small but bigger perhaps than a bathtub on some issues - wait for the LPUS to grow up and show some maturity, act like they want to win rather than just strut alone in the dark? So while I will keep my LP registration, I will be supporting certain Democrats aggressively in multiple races in 2006 and will be politically active generally in new ways in coming years. If an LP member runs and I can vote for her in my precinct, I will, but life is too short to wait for the LP to get out of the anal stage. In the meanwhile, I would commend an anti-libertarian FAQ site to the reader. I disagree with much of that site's content but it makes some good points and is quite well organized.-- Bruce Godfrey
, so the topic intrigued me.