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David Becker/ZUMA Press/NewscomEverything went to hell over the weekend for the immigrants and refugees who had been legally approved to live and travel in the United States but were then caught up in President Donald Trump's terrible executive order banning them from returning back into the country.

I watched through social media the outraged reactions across the political spectrum from friends and analysts alike. The reasons for the opposition varied. Some (especially on the left) thought the order remarkably cruel. Others acknowledged the president's authority to generally regulate immigration rules but recognized this executive order as being poorly drafted and illegal. There was a reason that when I blogged about the stay on Trump's order I pointed to the argument by the American Civil Liberties Union that the order violated due process.

For much of Saturday it felt very much like a coming together of anybody who valued human liberty and the rule of law across the political spectrum. I found it so much more an important and positive development than the women's march because it was about something very concrete and fundamental to American values. I've gotten so used to the reflexive, condescending "This is not who we are" derision that President Barack Obama's administration used to try to shut down criticism. It was different to see people across the political spectrum in significant agreement (though, yes, there were some exceptions), even if not for the same reasons.

Then "#DeleteUber" happened, and I threw up my hands and yelled, "Goddammit!"

In New York City, taxi drivers organized a work stoppage to stop ferrying travelers to John F. Kennedy Airport for an hour in solidarity with those who were being detained there. I will admit that I was at first utterly mystified as to how refusing to transport people in New York for a while would help resolve any of this at all, but after reading their Facebook statement, I realized that it wasn't really a "strike" so much as taking an hour so that they could participate in the protests as well.

Uber continued ferrying travelers andinterestinglyannounced that it was ending its price surge. While Uber catches a lot of flak for having price surges at peak hours from people who don't understand basic supply-and-demand economics, they caught flak this time for continuing service. They were perceived as trying to "break" this strike.

In addition, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has agreed to join Trump's economic advisory team (along with the likes of Elon Musk and Disney CEO Bob Iger). Despite a Facebook post from Kalanick declaring that Uber was going to do what it could to assist drivers who would be negatively affected by Trump's executive order, this apparently wasn't enough for some. A social media movement sprang up to encourage people to delete the Uber app from their phones and go with a rival like Lyft instead.

Under normal circumstances and with other companies, this would merit a shrug from libertarians (it might still). Uber has a right to operate, but it doesn't have a right to customers. People have the right to choose with whom to do business and to use public pressure to influence company decisions. In this case, I don't think either side has behaved unethically or illegally.

So why the frustration? First of all, we can't look at this protest in a vacuum. Uber is a company that is frequently targeted by protectionist taxi cartels and unions (and leftist supporters), and they're willing to use their power and influence to use government force to stop Uber's operations as much as they can. There is a bit of an obvious political trap going on here, and Uber kind of fell into it.

Second, the response is symptomatic of a deeply entrenched desire to use a communal form of punishment against those who are perceived as straying from established ideological positions. It's practically a reflexive response at this point to find somebody to attack. Why do headlines like "Can Taylor Swift call herself a feminist after skipping Women's March?" even exist (and there are other versions of this kind of story)? These kind of responses do not reflect a desire or a willingness to "live and let live." Even in an environment where the left is struggling to maintain influence, they're calling out allies for not showing up for marches or for employing poor people, minorities, and immigrants in a way that doesn't match the progressive playbook.

This reflexive desire to punish leaves me with a deep concern that even in the face of Trump, there is no stomach on the left to engage in introspection over its own authoritarian tendencies. And I'm going to remember pushes like "#DeleteUber" every time I see a call for libertarians to partner with liberals or the left to fight back Trump's worst policies. It's not because I don't agreeit's because I don't see a commitment to advancing freedom in response to Trump. I see a commitment to regaining control and authority. Thus, I don't see any "partnership" forming so much as two deeply ideologically different groups pushing for similar outcomes for different reasons. I don't want more power, except over my own life. I want more freedom.

When I (and others at Reason) bring up Obama and the left's role in expanding the power of the executive branch, this isn't merely some sort of "whataboutism" excuse for whatever awful thing Trump is doing or will be doing in the future. It is absolutely, utterly necessary to understand where this power came from in order to change it, and it's therefore utterly necessary for liberals and leftists or progressives to rethink their relationship with government authority.

Unhappy with Kalanick's and Musk's relationship with Trump? They're just doing what they've been doing all along regardless of the political party of the person in charge. Musk, at least, would have his hands all over a Hillary Clinton administration as well. Her proposed tech policy was full of cronyist opportunities for the "right" folks in the right industries, an extension of what was offered by the Obama administration. The expansion of the power of the government and its regulatory system has put businesses in a situation where not only is it extremely profitable to get cozy with the government; it's sometimes necessary to survive.

If liberals are not willing to consider that government authority itself is the problem and are insistent that the problem is Trump's particular brand of ego and narcissism, what does this partnership with libertarians even look like? If the only goal is regime change, what exactly is the role libertarians are meant to play in this push other than supplying additional numbers?

Allow me to pivot to something that seems completely unrelated, but I assure is not: The occasionally dismissive response to the critique of "political correctness culture" at colleges. In the wake of Trump's election, I've seen frustrated responses targeting libertarian outlets (including Reason) for continuing to hit at this subject even while Trump promises a horror show of civil liberties violations.

Besides this argument presenting a false choice (Reason certainly hasn't abandoned reporting on a whole host of other topics in favor of complaining about college kids today), it ignores the very real long-term potential authoritarian consequences of this college campus speech- and sex-policing. Reason has hit back frequently on the actual impact on people's livespotentially costing students' their educations and threatening their livelihoodswhen college administrators fail to respect the First and Fifth Amendment rights of their students.

But that's just a look at the consequences of what's happening right now. Less discussed is how these selfsame studentswho are being taught to ignore concepts of free speech and due process if it results in outcomes they don't likewill eventually inherit the systems of government in a decade or so. What happens when a college student who internalizes that due process shouldn't apply to people accused of rape becomes a juroror a judge? What happens when a student who doesn't believe "hate speech" counts as free speech becomes a member of Congress?

This is precisely why I mentioned up above that Trump's executive order against refugees and immigrants violated due process. Trump isn't just a "consequence" of political correctness activismhe is the cracked mirror reflection of it. Trump has no respect for free speech or due process or really any civil liberties at all.

So what I would recommend to anybody calling for an alliance between libertarians and the left (regardless of whichever side is making the call) is not look at Trump as some particularly remarkably bad outlier and anomaly (though he is certainly giving every sign he's going to be remarkably bad), but as an expression of the constantly present dangers of authority that cares only about the "right" outcomes and nothing about legal foundations and limits to power based on defenses of human liberty and civil rights.

There will obviously be places of intersection between libertarians and the leftplaces where we've been on the same team even before Trump, like criminal justice reform, immigration, and the scaling back of the drug war. But unless the left is willing to reconsider its relationship with authority and its desire to want to use power to punish its opponents (which occasionally includes libertarians, lest we forget), what are libertarians supposed to see as the endgame of all this? Long ago, I asked conservatives what happened to the power they were giving President George W. Bush after he left office. Later I asked the same to liberals about Obama. Now here we are, and now we know. How much government authority are you willing to eliminate to stop Trump? Think about it and get back to me.

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Looking for a Left/Libertarian Alliance Against Trump? Maybe Rethink Reflexive '#DeleteUber' Reactions - Reason (blog)

Donald Trump's executive order on immigration and refugees is anathema to Reason's core libertarian beliefsas is his proposed tariff, border wall, and a slew of other anti-globalist policiesbut he's also talking about deregulating industry, and has nominated (or is considering nominating) several pro-freedom cabinet members. So where do libertarians fall in Trump's America?

"The future of politics is going to be more oriented around a purely issue-by-issue consideration of things," says Reason's Editor at Large Matt Welch. "You're going to have a lot of temporary coalitions." On the other hand, "we also seem to be seeing the rise of a permanent anti-Trump coalition," notes Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward, "and at some point the true Trump oppositionists will consider any kind of coalition building with Trump to be evidence of non-trustworthiness."

In our latest podcast, Nick Gillespie chats with Mangu-Ward and Welch about refugees, "rage exhaustion," tribalism, and how Trump is making us more like Western Europe.

Click below to listen to that conversationor subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.

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Where Do Libertarians Fall in Trump's America? (New Reason Podcast) - Reason (blog)

There is no RSVP or cost required to attend the event. A $25 membership is available if you wish to join your local party.

From 9-10:30 a.m., the party chairman, Robert Burke, will present materials gathered from a January 2017 symposium he attended on breakthrough treatments for addiction and mental illness currently banned by the U.S. government's war on drugs.

The event is meant to be an outreach and educational event to share alternative options to the current system of addiction and mental illness treatment.

No treatment recommendations or solicitations will be made.

The public is welcome to attend just this segment, if desired.

A break will be taken after the presentation and the party will reconvene at 11 a.m. to conduct the annual business meeting.

During the business meeting, the party will be electing officers and discussion the upcoming Libertarian Party of Wisconsin State Convention scheduled April 21-23 in Tomahawk and planning 2017-18 activities.

For more information, call Robert Burke at 715-441-0287, or email Robert.Burke@Baldwin-telecom.net.

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County Libertarian Party to hold caucus Feb. 4 - River Towns

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Weld defended Hillary Clinton on her private email scandal and playedattack dog on Donald Trump.

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Johnson seemed sleepy, but he answered a question at length about THC amounts in marijuana and another from a young man asking about legalized prostitution. Johnson onlylightly and perfunctorily criticized Clinton, instead focusing most of his low-energy attacks on Trump. He also revealed a personal gluten allergy and said that he himself would not patronize the services of prostitutes.

These two marginal politicians are clearly enjoying the spotlight that the pro-Clinton media arefinally giving them in their effort to stop Trump. (Something tells me the folks at CNN have not secretly been reading Reason magazine all these years.)

The Johnson-Weld team seems to think that libertarianism is mostly about admitting as many immigrants to the United States as possible. This is a far cry from Ron Pauls pro-borders libertarian movement of a few years ago. The libertarian movement has shifted to the progressive globalist Left.

Bill Weld has called Clinton by and large a good secretary of state, and Johnson has called her a wonderful public servant.

When Johnson criticizes Clinton, he often goes after her for big government spending in a bald-faced attempt to sound conservative and to peel off Trumps support with the #NeverTrump crowd.

A top Clinton-supporting official at the libertarian Niskanen Center think tank (which advocates for more Syrian refugee settlement in America) spelled out the strategy in no uncertain terms: the Libertarians need to adopt a Right-sounding platform so they can take some of Trumps support and prop up Clinton.

Did you notice that the mainstream networks began touting a Clinton lead in a new 3-Way Poll.

But what about Jill Stein? Will CNN give Green Party candidate Jill Stein the same primetime platform?

Libertarian insiders, by their own admission, went into their convention in Orlando with one modest goal: to nominate Gary Johnson against various insurgent challengers, including Gonzo software recluse John McAfee, and then to get fivepercent of the popular vote in November to get the party on future state ballots. This could be the year, the insiders said. The fivepercent year!

Everyone who gets paid by the Kochs says so, longtime Libertarian insider Tim Cavanaugh quipped when the Johnson-Weld ticket was taking shape.

See, Gary Johnson does not just have a weed habit. He also has a Koch problem. As Breitbart News first reported, the Kochs secret Beltway bank pulled out of the race as soon as it became clear Trump was going to be the nominee, but they left the door open to supporting Clinton.

Indeed, a source within the Johnson campaign wanted people to think that Johnsonhad a Koch connection, leaking to the Daily Caller that tens of millions were heading Johnsonsway. They were not hiding it. The Libertarian party chairman begged like a dog for Koch money in a press conference in Orlando.

The Libertarians are finally showing their hand: theyre globalist Clintonites.

This is what happens when Koch-funded activists straight out of liberal arts college join Koch-funded Washington advocacy groups that throw happy hours aimed at Conservatariansbecause Libertarian Koch-funded people are totally friendly to the tea party!

The Kochs run the tea party, dont they? Thats certainly how the Kochs made it seem in the mainstream media after they started funding, funding, funding things attached to what was once a leaderless tea party revolution in this country that aimed to disrupt the power of the elites.

And then when the chips are down and Hillary Clinton goes for the White House, the Kochs roll over. And William Weld defends Clintonon the emails.

Congratulations, Libertarian movement. You guys finally went Left enough on immigration to make it onto CNN in primetime!

Maybe Don Lemon will come to the next happy hour. Just tell him not to bring gluten.

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Libertarian Candidates Expose Themselves as Anti-Trump ...

Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder in DeSmet, S.D.

By M. J. Andersen Globe Correspondent January 29, 2017

One winter maybe a dozen years ago, my aunt brought back some pineapples from Hawaii. One was intended for my parents, who lived in a small town an hour from her home in Brookings, S.D. But how to deliver it?

A few phone calls established that a couple from my parents town planned to attend a basketball game in Brookings and were willing transport the pineapple back home. My aunt delivered it to them in the stands, and later that night, my parents were awakened by a thud, then the sound of their front door closing. The next morning, a pineapple stood on their kitchen counter.

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Brookings is a short drive from DeSmet, S.D., which proudly advertises itself as the onetime home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the popular Little House on the Prairie series. Born 150 years ago on Feb. 7, Wilder would have recognized the neighborly impulse that carried a pineapple 60 miles across frozen fields.

Based on her familys late-19th-century homesteading experiences, Wilders eight childrens books are stocked with examples of neighbor helping neighbor. A woman nurses the fictionalized Ingalls family through a severe illness; Pa Ingalls helps some passing cattle drivers move their herd; a bachelor acquaintance offers nails to aid construction of the familys cabin.

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Facing down blizzards, fires, wolves, and Indian war parties, the Ingallses came to symbolize American self-reliance. But if the lend-a-hand tradition remains alive in the rural Midwest, the ideal of self-sufficiency has taken a beating.

Thats partly because the subsistence farming of Wilders era has been replaced by large mechanized operations. In addition, an extensive subsidy system has developed to protect farmers from unpredictable weather and gyrating prices.

Still independent in spirit, the farmers I know frequently say they would prefer to take their chances on the free market. Some wryly describe their occupation as farming the government. In South Dakota, resentment of government handouts has always run deep.

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If this heartland backlash sounds familiar, it should. The resourceful pioneer family of Wilders books has become the ur-myth among libertarians everywhere. They claim that ever since the New Deal, politics have corrupted this virtuous American fable.

New scholarship on Wilder tracks how her books may have been deliberately engineered to fuel the limited-government movement. In a just published work, Libertarianism on the Prairie, Christine Woodside fleshes out earlier arguments that Wilders only child, Rose Wilder Lane, edited the Little House series to reflect her own political leanings.

Lane was an established writer who served as editor and agent on the books, though for years she kept her role largely hidden. She had grown up humiliated by the poverty on her parents farm, and left home at an early age. Making her way to San Francisco, she found work as a journalist, married, and divorced. She traveled abroad and sampled life in New York before rejoining her parents in 1928, on what turned into a years-long stay.

Despite their fruitful collaboration on the books, the mother-daughter relationship was often tense. Lanes private writings complain of a lack of maternal love.

As the Depression unfolded, her politics turned sharply rightward. Along with Ayn Rand and Isabel Patterson, she is considered one of the founding mothers of libertarianism. In letters, Rand and Lane quarreled over the desirability of neighbor helping neighbor. Rand thought mutual aid was for weaklings. Lane regarded community support as positive.

Lanes views fully flowered in her 1943 tract, The Discovery of Freedom: Mans Struggle Against Authority, which became a staple of the libertarian movement. She used royalties from the Little House books to support a Freedom School, established in the 1950s near Colorado Springs. Among those attending were Charles and David Koch. At her death, in 1968, Lane directed future royalties to her protege, Roger Lea MacBride the Libertarian Party candidate for president in 1976.

Lanes libertarian proclamations may help explain why the Little House books have been enlisted repeatedly in the conservative cause. Meghan Clyne argued in the conservative publication National Affairs that Wilder is a role model whose books illustrate the worth of self-reliance. She called for building a historical-appreciation movement around them, to counter what she sees as a growing dependence on government.

But while the Little House vision of the past may appeal to libertarians, the reality of pioneer life muddies the picture. Like so many settlers, the Ingalls family obtained free land under the 1862 Homestead Act. Their failed attempts at farming kept them moving from place to place.

Moreover, Wilders seeming indifference to the expulsion of Native Americans from the land can inspire a distinct chill. The cabin memorialized in Little House on the Prairie was erected illegally on land set aside for the Osage tribe. The Ingallses were eventually forced to abandon it.

While some have tried to claim the books as conservative propaganda, others have seen a subtler process at work. A 2008 book by Anita Clair Fellman, Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilders Impact on American Culture, suggests that the books subconsciously influence Americans to be more receptive to conservative principles, such as resisting federal regulation.

As a loving family that overcame tremendous odds to survive in the wilderness, the Ingallses are not just quintessential American heroes. They are the epitome of American longing possibly the perfect poster family for todays values voters. No surprise, then, that Ronald Reagan reportedly called the 1970s TV series based on the Little House books his favorite show.

A century and a half after Laura Ingallss birth, South Dakota children are still schooled in the genuinely grim hardships of early settlement days. But, unlike in my childhood, they also learn about the cruel losses dealt to native tribes.

Although Wilders books continue to enchant, most readers realize that theres no going back to the frontier. Many also realize that self-reliance, however desirable, may be a stretch. Global economic forces can defeat the most determined self-made individual, as the 2008 financial crisis painfully illustrated.

Rose Wilder Lane clung to her libertarian views to the end, taking her self-sufficient stance on a few acres in Danbury, Conn., and scheming to avoid taxation. Her feelings of deprivation growing up may have driven her politics. But they may also have been the vital sauce that brought a cherished set of childrens classics to life. Somehow, they merged with her mothers stories, leaving a small house that continues to loom large in the American imagination.

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Is 'Little House on the Prairie' a children's classic or a libertarian ... - The Boston Globe