Mediaboss Marketing

The Commonwealth of Virginia is set to elect a new governor in November. There are three candidates qualified to be on the ballot but the Republican and Democratic parties are blocking the Libertarian candidate Cliff Hyra from participating.

The voters are entitled to hear from all eligible candidates not just those of the two majority parties. I would like the Bluefield Daily Telegraph and its readers to ask that Mr. Hyra be included in all future debates as the citizens of Virginia need to know all of the options that are available in November.

As three newspapers in Virginia have endorsed this idea as well as this issue being addressed by WVTF-TV in Roanoke as well as Virginia public radio. I think that the Bluefield Daily Telegraph should have the courage to take such a stand.

Greg Gruchacz

Bluefield, Va.

View post:
Let the Libertarian candidate have a say - Bluefield Daily Telegraph

July 25 at 5:37 PM

Again, the establishment political parties have used their influence with the bar association to reduce participation in the electoral process, this time in Virginia.The Posts July 22 Metro article Libertarian candidate not invited to debate reported that the Virginia Bar Association found a reason to exclude the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate from debating the Democratic and Republican candidates. Any thoughtful person knows the real reason for making this decision: There are only downsides to the major-party candidates having to debate a person who will clearly demonstrate that they do not and cannot have much to offer the voters.

Given the recent presidential race between major candidates with extremely high unfavorable ratings, I would think the Virginia Bar Association would be interested in supporting all reasonable opportunities to provide alternative information and candidates to the Virginia (and in three years, the national) electorate.

David Griggs, Columbia

Continued here:
The real reason the Libertarian gubernatorial candidate was shut out of a debate - Washington Post

The history of Koch-style libertarian economics is steeped in racism.

The intellectual theorists of white race privilege recognized that such head-on confrontations wouldnt protect the old Jim Crow order for long. The problem was democracy itself: American opinion was turning against Southern racism.

Democracy often comes down to honest math. After the 1965 passage of the federal Voting Rights Act, 20th century America seemed to be on a path toward the democratic ideal of one person, one vote. Yet the 21st century has seen enormous reversals of this hard-won progress. Not only have two oligarchic GOP presidents been elected without the popular vote, but crude efforts to suppress ballot access at all levels have become commonplace.

What set the machinery of formal democracy lurching backward so dramatically? InDemocracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean traces the origins to the backlash against Brownv. Board of Education. White supremacists vowed massive resistance, with Virginias Prince Edward County going so far as to shutter its entire public school system for several years.

But the intellectual theorists of white race privilege recognized that such head-on confrontations wouldnt protect the old Jim Crow order for long. The problem was democracy itself: American opinion was turning against Southern racism.

Thats where the intellectual antihero of MacLeans book, James Buchanan, comes in. A Tennessee-born free-market fundamentalist who chaired the economics department at the University of Virginia (UVA), Buchanan launched a new center of political economy at the school in 1956 to break the powerful grip [of ] collectivist ideology.

In 1959, the fire-breathing libertarian theorists at UVA thrust themselves into the heart of Virginias desegregation battle by proposing a now-familiar libertarian ploy: privatization of the states public schools. The proposal elevated racial discrimination into a neutral-sounding quest for economic efficiency. The market would see to inequalities via the logic of parent choice; it was simply a matter of letting the chips fall where they may.

This was unalloyed bullshit, of course. Given the generations-old imbalance of wealth and power between the races, any laissez-faire approach to compliance with Brown would inevitably reinforce racial inequalities. The state assembly eventually voted down the radical plan, but as MacLean notes, the underlying logic has since burrowed into nearly every facet of our madly privatizing public lifefrom the Flint water crisis to the attacks on Wisconsins public unionsin a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and local level, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.

A major force behind this transformation was the libertarian true believer, oil baron and megafunder Charles Koch. When Buchanan launched another hard-right institute at George Mason University, then a backwater suburban commuter school, in 1982, Kochs largesse helped bulk it up into a conservative intellectual bulwark. Buchanan and his Mason cohorts minted a new generation of ideological foot soldiers who led the libertarian Right in a steady antidemocratic and oligarchic drift.

After Buchanan had a falling out with Koch in 1998, the hack libertarian economist Tyler Cowen kept hammering away at the Buchananite gospel from his perch atop George Masons Koch-funded Mercatus Institute. The freest countriesin the laissez-faire sensehave not generally been democratic, Cowen wrote in a 2000 essay, citing as exemplars of freedom Augusto Pinochets Chile (whose plutocratic constitution was essentially ghostwritten by Buchanan), Singapore and Hong Kong. The hard truth, therefore, is that if American political institutions render market-oriented reforms too difficult to achieve, then perhaps these institutions should be changed.

For starters, Cowen suggests, the weakening of the checks and balances in the U.S. constitutional order would increase the chance of a very good out-come. What constitutes a very good outcome? Nothing less than a wholesale rewriting of the social contract, with worthy individuals elevating themselves up the social ladder and the less fortunate consigned to shantytowns. Get ready, he counsels.

As well we should. One way would be to use MacLeans excellent expos to help mobilize an energized small-D democratic electorate. Its long past time to smite the libertarian Right with a kind of math that cant be bought.

We're launching a new In These Times magazine to take on Trump and build the Left. Are you in?

Continue reading here:
The White-Supremacist Roots of America's Libertarian Right - In These Times

Duke University historian Nancy MacLean's new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, combines conspiracy theories, accusations of racism, and dire warnings about a libertarian plot to create an American oligarchy. It's a historical story that's a "product of [MacLean's] imagination," with a reading of sources that's "hostile and tendentious to the point of pure error," as Reason's Brian Doherty put in a review we published last week.

In today's podcast, Doherty joins Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Andrew Heaton to discuss how MacLean fundamentally misunderstands her subject matter; this year's Freedom Fest (an annual convention for libertarians in Las Vegas that just wrapped up); conservative-leaning libertarians vs. left-leaning libertarians; the constitutional ramifications of Donald Trump potentially pardoning himself; and whether or not we're living in the panopticon.

Subscribe, rate, and review the Reason Podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Don't miss a single Reason podcast! (Archive here.)

Subscribe at iTunes.

Follow us at SoundCloud.

Subscribe at YouTube.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

Visit link:
Nancy MacLean's Libertarian Conspiracy Theory [Podcast] - Reason (blog)

If there's one person relishing in Washington's Trump-era dysfunction, it's Libertarian Party Chairman Nicholas Sarwark, who sees the tumult as a prime recruitment opportunity.

"I have to give thanks to Donald Trump and the Republican Party," said Sarwark, a former defense attorney who has led the Libertarian Party since 2014. "Their success in getting control of government and then showing that they can't do anything once they have that control has been a better argument for joining the Libertarian Party than anything I could say."

As part of his efforts, Sarwark joined more than 1,000 libertarians and conservatives recently here in Las Vegas for a free-wheeling annual gathering called FreedomFest, fertile recruiting grounds where attendees held a robust skepticism of government power and where opinions of President Donald Trump were mixed.

Activities at the four-day confab were varied: One could attend academic lectures on Adam Smith, discussion panels about whether space aliens would be libertarians, debates over open borders and a film festival. You could also listen to a dialogue between actors dressed as Ayn Rand and Benjamin Franklin, watch a speech by actor William Shatner and attend a blowout party for Steve Forbes' birthday.

FreedomFest has been a mainstay of the Las Vegas convention circuit for a decade. But this marked the first gathering of Trump's presidency, which has divided even like-minded communities, including attendees here.

Trump himself made a surprise appearance at this conference in 2015, making it one of his first public appearances after announcing his bid for the presidency. As an example of what was to come, the Republican candidate rambled over 50 minutes, complaining about the media, railing against trade, promoting a wall on the Mexican border and expressing a desire to get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Watching the speech at the time, Jeffrey Tucker, the content director at the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education, assumed the crowd would run Trump out of town. He was wrong.

"I thought, nobody's going to buy this. Everything he says is against everything we believe. But by the time he ended, he had won over a substantial number of the crowd, which was a shock," Tucker said. "Libertarians imagine themselves to be intellectually robust and have strength of character, they are as subject as anybody else to be manipulated by the cult of personality and a good sales pitch."

Indeed, reactions to Trump at the conference this year were varied.

There are those, like Sarwark, who have deep concerns about Trump's policies yet sense a opportunities amid the chaos.

Others, like former Libertarian Party Vice Presidential Nominee Wayne Allyn Root, can't get enough joy out of Trump's bombast.

"I love that he's driving liberals insane," said Root, who debated Trucker about Trump at the conference. "They need a straitjacket, a rubber room and a hug from mommy."

But for many who consider themselves libertarians, the main concern is systematic, and larger than the current president. The real issue, they say, is that the presidency has gained too much authority in the first place, and that Trump is merely taking advantage of an inheritance given to him by Republicans and Democrats alike.

To be a libertarian, after all, is to be almost constantly at issue with both ruling parties in some way. Trump may be different, but to them, he's just another American president with too much power.

"He is incompetent. He has passed no significant piece of legislation in 100 days despite his big promises. He is an embarrassment to the American people and around the globe. What we need to do as libertarians is not talk about people, we need to talk about systems and policies," said Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of the libertarian magazine website Reason.com. "If you are a libertarian you should understand that big government is the problem."

See more here:
Libertarians are wary, but sense opportunity under Trump - Woburn Daily Times