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Former U.S. Rep. Justin Amash will be keynote speaker for the NH Libertarian Partys annual convention. Courtesy Photo

CONCORD, NH The Libertarian Party of New Hampshires annual convention is taking place this weekend March 19 21 at the Holiday Inn, North Main St. in Concord. Party members will elect Executive Committee members for the coming year, as well as considering changes to the Bylaws and Platform.

Justin Amash will be the Keynote Speaker during the Banquet Saturday night. He will be speaking remotely from Michigan and his keynote will be followed by a Q&A session. Amash, former U.S. Representative from Michigans 3rd Congressional District was elected and served as a Republican for nine years before joining the Libertarian Party in 2020. Amash was the highest-seated Libertarian in the partys history. He was the founder and chair of the House Liberty Caucus, saying his votes reflect Limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty.

Tara DeSisto, Development Director of the National Libertarian National Committee, and Cara Shultz, Candidate Recruitment Specialist for the LNC, are slated to be featured speakers.

A social mixer is open to all Friday night and media is welcome to attend the business sessions of the convention Saturday & Sunday.

Related

Read more:
March 19-21: Libertarian Party of NH convention with keynote from former US Rep. Justin Amash - Manchester Ink Link

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The Republican Committee for Armstrong, Butler and Indiana counties has nominated Abby Major as their candidate to run for former state Rep. Jeff Pyles seat.

The Democrats committee was scheduled to vote on its candidate Thursday evening.

A special election for Pyles seat will be held on the same day as the primary election, May 18. The winner of the special election will serve through next year.

A longtime lawmaker from Ford City, Pyle retired suddenly because of health issues earlier this month. He had just begun his ninth, two-year term in January.

Pyle endorsed Major, his chief of staff.

Obviously I am so honored that they picked me and grateful to be given the opportunity, said Major, 36, of Ford City. Prior to her working for Pyle, Major was an Iraqi war veteran who served as an Army intelligence analyst.

Major said she already started her campaign. She looks forward to meeting constituents and getting them out to vote.

She was among five candidates considered Wednesday night by the Republication committees. The candidates included Armstrong County Commissioner Don Myers, Anthony Shea, Jack Bowser and North Buffalo Township Supervisor Michael Valencic, according to Michael Baker of East Franklin, chair of the Armstrong County Republican Committee.

Baker said the turnout of five candidates so quickly after Pyle announced his retirement shows the enthusiasm for the Republican Party.

The committee conferees, with about 25 voting by secret ballot Wednesday night, unanimously endorsed Major, according to Baker. The conferees were impressed by Majors 12 years of experience in a state legislative office and her military background, he said.

Libertarian candidate named

On Tuesday night, the Libertarian Party endorsed Drew Hreha, 22, of North Apollo to run for the seat.

The Libertarian Party of Armstrong and Butler counties met Tuesday night online. They interviewed and nominated Hreha, said Sam Robb of Frazer, the Western vice chair for the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania.

Hreha is a senior at Waynesburg University and editor of the campus newspaper, The Yellow Jacket.

We spent about 45 minutes asking Drew questions and learned how well he lined up with Libertarian values, and we are very satisfied, Robb said.

Libertarians account for about 1% to 2% of registered voters in most counties, he said.

Hreha said he hopes to bring a younger perspective to the General Assembly.

As a Libertarian, I can work both sides of the aisle, he said.

Hreha is looking to limit the state governors powers and to better protect the Second Amendment at the state level.

Mary Ann Thomas is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Mary at 724-226-4691, mthomas@triblive.com or via Twitter .

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Former state Rep. Jeff Pyle's staffer wins GOP nomination for special election, Dems choose Thursday night - TribLIVE

A grade six classroom awaits students at Hunters Glen Junior Public School in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, September 14, 2020.(Nathan Denette/Reuters)

Charlie Cooke is a friend and a treasured colleague, but I am finding it a little difficult to launch the next volley in the conversation about education policy, because I dont think Charlie has really written a response to my piece.

Instead, Charlie has offered up some simple-minded applause lines (Thereis nothing wrong with the Department of Education that could not be solved with a tactical nuclear strike) that do not address the substance of my argument and that are based on an unmerited metaphysical certitude that the U.S. government simply cannot produce or implement useful education policy. The United States is not an especially well-governed country, and I do not expect it to achieve the level of bureaucratic competence that we might expect of a Denmark or a Switzerland, but it has from time to time shown itself able to develop and implement policy in a programmatic way. It isnt Norway, but it isnt Pakistan, either.

That the United States could address in a meaningful way the complex issue of education simply by shuttering a federal department and patting itself on the back for a job well done is precisely the kind of thinking that has made todays Republican Party the intellectual powerhouse we all know and admire so deeply. If I were in the market for that kind of thing . . . I think I have a number for Rick Perry around here somewhere.

The U.S. government has a rich and complex relationship with education, especially with institutions of higher education. That means it has to make decisions about what sorts of things it will fund, encourage, or, at certain extremes, even allow. There are better and worse ways to make those decisions. Pretending that these issues can simply be ignored out of existence is the worst kind of nave libertarianism.

For example, Chinas rising eminence as a funder of and collaborator in research around the world, including in partnership with such important U.S. allies as the United Kingdom, presents real questions and challenges for the U.S. government challenges that are not going to be resolved by saying, Let the free market take care of it. I am a big, big fan of letting the free market take care of economic questions, but there are non-economic questions in play, too.

Whether there exists something called the Department of Education or whether these endeavors are organized in some other way, the policymaking and implementation are not going to be carried out by Smurfs, wizards, or libertarian unicorns with rainbows for manes. You could make education policy in the Department of Defense (one of the few federal departments that conservatives broadly trust), or you could make it at Treasury or Commerce or hand it off to the Federal Reserve, in which case you simply will have created an education department in disguise. The basic issues and the need for positive engagement with them do not go away, for the same reason that you cant cause an earthquake by shaking a desktop globe.

Dissolving the DOE as it exists might be a useful or even necessary administrative measure, but it would hardly render the underlying issues resolved. And conservatives are going to need something more than nuke-the-DOE banalities to deal with those issues if conservativism is to be something more than a rhetoric and a countercultural posture something more than words about words.

See the article here:
Education and Naive Libertarianism - National Review

History matters because it tells us that there will be another pandemic at some point and, due to certain features of the way we live now, this is more likely than it was a few decades ago. There are lessons to be learnt, and learnt fast, yet already we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. We are fixating on an inquiry that will be extremely costly and achieve little rather than focusing on what the last 12 months tells us about our society, our governance, and the alarming degree to which fear trumps freedom.

During the pandemic the government has exercised coercive powers over its citizens on a scale never before seen in modern-day Britain. And it has done so without opposition, not least from the Opposition, which has done little more than blithely suggest measures should have been tougher or brought in sooner. But it is the publics response that has handed government the legitimacy it needed to pursue a path of state authoritarianism.

93% supported the first national lockdown. Three in ten English people wanted the government to go further with the second. 46% supported the roadmap when it was announced on 22nd February, with 25% thinking the timeline was too rapid. When presented with a binary choice between freedom and safety the British public chose option three: more repression. Disregarding personal liberty when the risk is uncertain, immediate and absolute is defensible. Allowing government to "wrap its arms" around us while trampling on our freedom when that threat has manifestly been downgraded is not.

Professor Neil Ferguson told The Times in December that, in the chaos of February and March 2020, SAGE never thought the UK government couldnt get away with imposing Chinas lockdown policy. Then Italy did it, and soon thereafter we were all prisoners in our own homes. Will policymakers be so hesitant in shutting down social interaction in response to the next crisis? I doubt it.

Further, over the course of this pandemic the government has been engaged in a liberty-crushing side-hustle. No modern-day vice hasnt come under the microscope, scapegoated for its possible role in transmission or the severity of our symptoms. Alcohol, obesity, smoking, vaping. At the end of this month, the governments gambling consultation will draw to a close, and you can bet further legislation will be on the cards. Councils are introducing nil-caps for entertainment venues. Its an exhaustive, one-way ratchet, coming at a time when politicians are already stampeding on the fundamental principles that underpin our democracy.

It will be incumbent on us all to ensure the nation is unlocked as soon as it is safe to do so and there is a strong case for bringing the roadmap forward. But it is equally important that we become a freer society than we were pre-pandemic, not a more paternalistic one. Doing so will require that we all rediscover our libertarian spirit starting with the Prime Minister.

See the rest here:
If we don't rediscover our libertarian spirit, the next pandemic will crush us - Telegraph.co.uk

Join usat the 2022Libertarian Scholars Conference in Septemberin New York City.

The first Libertarian Scholars Conference was held in New York City in 1972 under the aegis of the Center for Libertarian Studies. The conference was held annually (except for 1973) throughout the 1970s in New York or Princeton, New Jersey (1977, 1978), with the 8th and last national conference taking place at the Hotel Diplomat in New York. In the early 1980s regional Libertarian Scholars Conferences were held in Chicago and other cities. The conferences featured papers by the founding fathers of modern libertarian scholarship, including Murray Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, Walter Block, Ralph Raico, Ron Hamowy, Roy Childs and Walter Grinder. Other prominent scholars who presented papers were Henry Veatch, Leland Yeager, Hillel Steiner, Douglas Rasmussen, David Calleo, Bruce Russett, and Samuel Brittain.

The Libertarian Scholars Conference was originally conceived as a forum for scholars from different disciplines to meet and exchange ideas on the study of liberty. The ultimate goal was to integrate their diverse insights and approaches into a broad interdisciplinary perspective on liberty, what Murray Rothbard called the discipline of liberty.The founders of the conference hoped that this discipline or systematic body of knowledge would give shape and direction to the growing ideological movement of modern libertarianism, much as British classical and French liberal political economy had guided the movement of classical (laissez-faire) liberalism. This series of conferences succeeded admirably in stimulating scholarly research from a libertarian perspective and attracting many new scholars, young and old, to the scientific study of liberty.

The libertarian movement has grown tremendously since the early 1980s and so has the need for intellectual guidance from experts in the social sciences and humanities, whose several disciplines help elucidate the nature of human liberty and its importance in nurturing and sustaining the social order that permits human civilization to flourish.

With this in mind, the Mises Institute, as heir to the Center for Libertarian Studies, has revived the Libertarian Scholars Conference, which will take place in September of 2022 in New York City.

Proposals for individual papers, complete paper sessions, and symposia are encouraged. Papers should be well developed, but at a stage where they can still benefit from the groups discussion. Preference will be given to recent research papers that are intended for submission to scholarly journals and have not been given at major conferences. All topics related to libertarian themes in the social sciences and humanities are welcome. Abstracts should be limited to 750 words. All proposals are peer reviewed by the Libertarian Scholars Conference Program Committee. Details on paper submissionsforthcoming.

Registration and venue details forthcoming.

See more here:
Libertarian Students Convention | Mises Institute - The Shepherd of the Hills Gazette