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FreedomFestThe 10th year of FreedomFest, the world's largest annual gathering of libertarian and free-market thinkers, activists, and policymakers takes place in Las Vegas between July 19 to July 22 at Bally's Paris resort.

Confirmed speakers include Star Trek's William Shatner talking about space exploration and the cultural staying power of Star Trek. Newscasting legend John Stossel will be there and there will be a celebration of the life and ideas of Steve Forbes, longtime FreedomFest "co-ambassador." There will also be a slate of special "Reason Day" sessions that deliver cutting-edge views on "Free Minds and Free Markets." You want to "boldly go where no man, woman, or child has gone before?" Then come to Reason Day, where we will be talking about rockets, hyperloops, radical self-evolution, and the next stages of disruptiveand libertatingchange.

To add to the excitement, FreedomFest impresario Mark Skousen has teamed up with Newsmax magazine to produce a list of "the 50 Most Influential Libertarians" in each of eight different categories such as business and finance, entertainment and the news, freedom-movement organizations, media, politics, and academia.

Among the Reasoners in the hunt are Ronald Bailey, Brian Doherty, and Virginia Postrel (authors); John Stossel, Matt Welch, and myself (media); and Katherine Mangu-Ward, David Nott, and Robert W. Poole (think tanks and educational institutions).

You can vote for up to five candidates in each category and the survey is open until March 15.

Go here now to cast your ballot and get $100 off your FreedomFest registration fee.

Over the past years, Reason TV has interviewed dozens of libertarians ranging from P.J. O'Rourke to Penn Jillette to John Mackey to Crossfit creator Greg Glassman to LP presidential ticket Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. Go here for a complete list.

And click below to watch last year's raucous debate among Matt Welch, Jeffrey Tucker, Dan Magru, Wayne Allyn Root and me over whether libertarians should vote for Donald Trump. Called the most controversial and intense panel ever at FreedomFest, it's something to behold.

Continued here:
Who Are the Most Influential Libertarians? FreedomFest Wants To Know! - Reason (blog)

Libertarian Party(Photo: Courtesy/Special to Poweshiek County CR)

The Iowa Secretary of State has announced that the Libertarian Party of Iowa has obtained official political party status in Iowa, effective March 1. The Libertarian Partys presidential nominee, Gary Johnson, received 59,186 votes, which was 3.8 percent of the vote in the November 2016 general election, surpassing the two percent threshold required by Iowa Code to obtain official political party status.

Johnsons 3.8 percent of the vote in Iowa was slightly more than the 3.3 percent he received nationally

I would like to congratulate the Libertarian Party of Iowa on being recognized as an official political party by the state, Secretary Paul D. Pate said. I encourage all Iowans to become and remain active in the political process.

Prior to the 2016 election, the Libertarian Party in Iowa was considered a non-party political organization (NPPO) and did not have some of the privileges granted to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, two parties with political party status.

NPPOs must have their presidential or gubernatorial candidate receive more than 2 percent of the vote to be recognized as a full-status political party. If a partys nominee does not receive two percent of the total votes cast, the partys status is cancelled.

Political party status gives the Libertarian Party the ability to participate in primary elections in 2018. The Libertarian Party will be included as an option for Iowans on voter registration forms as well.

Libertarian Party state chair, Keith Laube, stated, Having our candidates be part of the Primary Election will allow voters to become familiar with our candidates earlier in the election season. Our candidates will know they are on the November ballot in early June rather than late August. This will help organize stronger campaigns and provide voters more opportunity to understand Libertarian views. Laube added, Having more candidates share their ideas by being involved in the entire election cycle is good for Iowa.

The last instance when a non-party political organization was successful at gaining political party status in Iowa was in the year 2000. Iowa Green Party nominee Ralph Nader received 29,374 votes, or 2.2 percent of the total votes cast for president.

The current number of voters registered as Libertarian in Iowa is 9,100.

Iowa voters could start registering as a Libertarian in. Since January 2016, voters are able to register to vote and change their political party affiliation on the Iowa Secretary of State website. Major party status will become effective 21 days from the filing.

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Iowa Libertarian Party official party - DesMoinesRegister.com

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan speaks on the proposed American Health Care Act.

On Monday, congressional Republicans rolled out their new health care plan, which is supposed to repeal and replace Obamacare. Donald Trump hailed our wonderful new Healthcare Bill. But his enthusiasm for the proposed American Health Care Act is not widely shared. In addition to the expected critiques from the left, the bill has been forcefully condemned by a wide range of conservative and libertarian health care experts. These leading critics of Obamacare argue that the GOP proposal is just as bad, and possibly even worse.

Michael Cannon, well-known health care analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute, offered a particularly harsh appraisal, denouncing the new bill as Obamacare lite or worse:

This bill is a train wreck waiting to happen The Obamacare regulations it retains are already causing insurance markets to collapse. It would allow that collapse to continue, and even accelerate the collapse.

Republicans dont seem to have any concept of the quagmire they are about to enter with this bill.

If this is the choice, it would be better if Congress simply did nothing.

As Cannon explains,the new GOP plan has a similar structure to Obamacare, fails to address most of its flaws, and may well make some of them worse. Republicans should take note: If one of Obamacares leading critics concludes that your repeal and replace bill is even worse than Obamacare, and worse than doing nothing, thats a pretty damning indictment.

Other right of center economists and health care experts have offered similarly damning assessments, including Megan McArdle, Peter Suderman, Scott Sumner, and Avik Roy. Roy argues that the proposal includes some valuable reforms for Medicaid, but concludes that this benefit is outweighed by the many harmful aspects of the plan. Sudermans bottom line is even more negative: In general, its not clear what problems this particular bill would actually solve.

I am no fan of Obamacare myself, and was involved in helping develop the constitutional case against it that led to the Supreme Courts controversial ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius. But I find it sobering that even many of the ACAs toughest critics fear that the GOP alternative is likely to be worse.

A crucial point emphasized by many of these critics is that the GOP plan does little or nothing to constrain health care costs or open up the insurance industry to wider market competition. As Cannon puts it, Congress needs to enact reforms that make health care more affordable, rather than just subsidize unaffordable care. The GOP plan, he explains, does mostly the latter, often even more inefficiently and coercively than Obamacare.

McArdle points out that the new plan is as much a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption as Obamacare is. She also notes that the GOP hopes to use many of the same procedural tricks to disguise its flaws as Democrats did with those of the ACA. It is far from clear they will manage to get away with it.

Because the plan is so enormously complicated and has so many moving parts, it could easily unravel in a wide range of unexpected ways, as the different components fail to interact as expected. For reasons F.A. Hayek famously explained, even the wisest of bureaucratic central planners lack the knowledge to foresee and offset such problems. And todays Republican Party is not exactly overflowing with wisdom and competence.

If the GOP plan falters like Obamacare has, its flaws will be exacerbated by another feature the two policies have in common: lack of bipartisan support. If it gets through Congress at all, the AHCA is likely to pass on a strict party-line vote or close to it, just like the ACA. From the standpoint of the opposition party, the optimal political strategy will be sit back, watch the trainwreck happen, and saddle the party that passed the plan with the blame.

Just as Republicans had no incentive to help Obama fix the flaws in the ACA, so Democrats will have no incentive to help fix problems with the new GOP plan. Partisan bias is a powerful and increasingly pernicious force, and it could potentially undermine the GOPs health care policy. Admittedly, Democratic opposition may not matter much if the Republicans expand their congressional majorities in 2018 and 2020. But recent history suggests that neither party can count on controlling Congress for long. And in the Senate, many bills are subject to filibuster, effectively requiring 60 votes to pass.

This entire sorry state of affairs is even more the fault of congressional Republicans than Donald nobody knew health care could be so complicated Trump. These had seven years to come up with an alternative to Obamacare, and so far their work product is far from impressive. Sad! Nonetheless, Trumps ignorance, reckless statements, and disdain for free market ideas have also contributed to the problem.

Despite GOP control of both houses of Congress, there is a very real chance that the new bill will not pass. It has already come under fire from both conservative and moderate wings of the party. Given the narrowness of the 52-48 Republican majority in the Senate and the unyielding opposition of Democrats, the plan will be defeated if even as few as three Republicans defect.

In fairness, given the divisions within the party, it is not an easy task to cobble together a bill that is both an improvement over Obamacare and acceptable to all the key factions within the GOP. Whether Republicans can overcome these problems and come up with something better than this initial effort remains to be seen. At this point, it is hard to be optimistic.

Read the rest here:
Conservative and libertarian health care experts pan GOP's Obamacare lite plan - Washington Post

President Trump issued a new executive order this week that revises, rescinds, and replaces his prior order banning immigration from several majority-Muslim countries. The new order, which is scheduled to taked effect on March 16, is supposed to bolster the White Houses case in court, resolving legal defects that prevented the ban from prevailing the first time around.

In some ways, it accomplishes its goal, but in other ways, the new order undermines several legal arguments that the administration has been making.

While defending the president against a lawsuit brought by the state of Washington, the administrations attorneys justified his list of seven majority-Muslim countries by stating that they were previously identified as posing a heightened risk of terrorism by Congress or the Executive Branch. In fact, they said, Congress itself identified Iraq and Syria as countries of concern.

This argument was always weak because, although Congress did single out these countries for additional vetting, it still specifically provided for the ability of Iraqi and Syrian nationals to come to America so long as they had a visa. But now the president has excluded Iraq from the list, which means its justification that this list was something Congress put together is gone.

The whole point of the ban, as the administration put it, was to establish adequate standards to prevent infiltration by foreign terrorists. In other words, because the vetting process is inadequate, and these nationalities are (in the eyes of the administration) inherently dangerous, people from the selected countries cannot be allowed in.

The new order exempts current visa holders from these countries. But this change totally undermines the argument that these nationals are dangerous even if they are screened. By fixing one problem, the administration creates another one for itself. If these nationals are dangerous, why would it concede to allow any of them in?

Heres a more immediate concern for the administration. When the original order was challenged, the administration argued in court that any delay in implementation immediately harms the public by thwarting enforcement of an Executive Order issued by the President, based on his national security judgment. It is likely that they will argue the same when this one is challenged.

President Trump signed a new executive order on immigration Monday that revised his first one halted by the courts. Here's a look at what is different about this new order and whether it will face the same legal issues. Photo: Getty

Yet the new order delays the effective date for more than a week. It does so to resolve a potential legal concern tied to banning people without notice. But the delay effectively eviscerates the argument from the presidents legal team that a judges decision to suspend enforcement of it would impose irreparable harm. A judge could respond, If thats true, did the presidents delay also harm the United States?

The administration also claimed that this was not a ban intended to reduce admissions of immigrants from these majority Muslim countries. Instead, it was just a temporary 90-day pause on entries from these places to allow the government to review vetting procedures. But now the new order restarts this timeline.

Why would the clock on reviewing procedures stop ticking just because the old order wasnt blocking entries? This provides evidence that these timelines were in fact arbitrary and that the goal wasnt about giving the administration time to review, but rather about cutting legal immigration of peoplemainly Muslim immigrantsthat the administration simply does not like.

Despite all of the changes, the fundamental problems persist. The order still references 1952 law providing that the president can exclude any class of alien if he finds them detrimental. But this justification ignores a later-enacted 1965 law that bans discrimination against immigrant visa applicants based on nationality. While the 1965 law provides a list of exceptions, the 1952 law was specifically not included among them.

Congress did not want to allow the president this authority. In fact, it specifically debated the question of whether difficult-to-screen countries should be included under the 1965 non-discrimination rule and decided that they should be.

This means that the executive order re-boot is still legally suspect. Indeed, in some ways, because it undermines so many of the governments arguments, the order has become even more suspect than it was before, and the courts should tell the president to go back to the drawing board once again.

David J. Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institutes Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

Excerpt from:
A libertarian explains why Trump's new travel ban is still legally ... - MarketWatch

Now that we have a new regime in place (at the top of our political atmosphere), and the turmoil between angered voters has been put on a soft mute (for now), you cant help but take in the freshness of it all. Or can you?

Weve seen an about-face trend in the stock market from what was predicted but where is all this money? People are still living in a constant state of financial alertness, for good reason. We have seen this playout too many times in the past generation. Regime change equals economic redirection. Which side of the fence you are on depends how you are projected to fare over the next few years, if you follow trends.

Lets turn back the clock to 2000. Bush is in, and the conservatives are celebrating their national championship. Liberals are cringing at the prospect of reigning in the expansion of government entitlements and the influx of a new idea of tolerance. The glut of big money investment is about to roll out into corporate take-overs and incessant greed of the, soon to be feared, one percent.

We all know how the Bush administration went; ugh, debt, debt and some more debt. That deficit rose quicker than the technology of those futuristic new smart phones that were coming out. We wanted change we needed change. But, all we did was change the side of the celebration.

We pumped more and more into government expansion and entitlements for those street-destroying celebrators of change. The held-out hand seemed not to drop a thing, as the ones that were used to holding on to their investments and portfolios found new interests in storm shelters and 30-round magazines. Those same people probably thought at the time, that the Arkansas dress destroyer was a saint compared to what was coming out of Kenya.

The eight year reign of the liberal agenda helped the hopeless aspire to receive far more than they contributed: citing free phones, healthcare and questionable bathroom preferences. Our national debt continues to climb, right along with a manifested racial divide and sprinkled in terrorist attacks , as well as those killer cops.

Still, the winners of 08 claimed that progress was the right track for the equality of all. You were deemed a racist, intolerant, or a bigot if you thought otherwise.

2016: The year of what just happened? Well, it happened again. The swing back to conservative-ism or, as the newly found losers called it, not my America.

Here we are, primed for the run. As I alluded to previously, the so-far surprise market is a base moniker of how we are doing, right? First quarter projections are now rolling in and American manufacturing as a whole is taking a woodshed beating. We are seeing it in non-technical manufacturing very hard, reminding those who have been around long enough to boast those comments, remember 01, or 09? We took a beating those years. Head scratcher, huh?

If you were to make a prediction of the outlook for 2017, it looks like a safe bet for the status quo. The only thing different is that the winners gloated a little more, and the losers well, are they done yet? It is merely a continuation of the same things we have dealt with our entire adult lives. So, it might be a good idea to keep conserving your money, play wisely with retirements, and for heavens sake get on that highway of progress; that fabled economic growth that every politician ever has spouted about.

We are all meant to be winners in this game of big ol gubmint, or so they say. The nation may veer to the left or to the right and back again, but we continue in the same basic direction, paying our forced tithes to the downward spiral. To be happy about it you simply need to jump onto a different bandwagon every four or eight years. My hope is for the bandwagon of Enough Already. But dont look to jump on it anytime soon.

* Wes Fischer self supporting libertarian focused on shrinking our government one action at a time.

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I'm with the Band(wagon) - Being Libertarian