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Monica Tranel and John Lamb, Democrat and Libertarian running for Montanas new congressional seat, have agreed to debate each other in every county in the western district. But Ryan Zinke, their Republican opponent, has not accepted their invitation to participate. I urge him to do so.

Honest debate helps reveal what candidates really believe, whats important, what they will go to the matt for, and what kind of Montana leader they will be. Debate is not easy. I should know. In 1992 I ran for governor against Marc Racicot. Debate was a hallmark of our campaign. It was joked that if three people stopped at a corner to change a tire, Marc and Dorothy would stop and debate. But we believed in the voters right to know, and it is one of the things about that campaign of which I am most proud, although debating our former governor was nothing short of daunting.

Ryan Zinke should welcome the opportunity to present his side of all current issues. As important, he should offer his defense of reports released from the inspector general of the Department of the Interior, regarding his record of public service, that he lied in a deliberate attempt to deceive them. It is a serious charge, along with inquiries that were made regarding his conduct in office and use of public funds. And it is an opportunity for the voters to hear about his actions as Secretary to open public lands to polluters and deny wildlife vital protections. These issues are important to all of us. The candidates should lay them out in their own words.

Now, more than ever, we need open and honest debate. As we are aware, enormous amounts of secretive money have transformed campaigns from an exchange of political perspectives into an unhelpful deluge of TV ads and social media rants that become so annoying we turn everything off. What used to count in Montana politics knocking on doors, answering tough questions, showing up at town meetings is fast vanishing.

I urge Ryan Zinke to join Monica Tranel and John Lamb, to engage in debates that will help make us thoughtful and informed Montanan voters.

Dorothy Bradley is a former director of the University System Water Center at Montana State University and former Democratic Montana state representative. She lives in Clyde Park.

See the rest here:
We Need Open and Honest Debate - Flathead Beacon

California's state government is plowing ahead with its plan of sending free money to people to mitigate the pain of inflation.

On Tuesday, state Sen. Nancy Skinner (DBerkeley) tweeted a reminder that in October, California residents who filed a tax return in 2020 should start seeing checks appear in their mailboxes courtesy of the Better for Families tax refund program.

The rough sketches of the program were announced in late June as part of the budget deal reached between Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and state legislative leaders.

The $9.5 billion program will provide checks of up to $1,050 depending on one's income, filing status, and number of dependents. Single-filers earning more than $250,000 (or joint filers earning more than $500,000) aren't eligible for the checks.

Much like the Inflation Reduction Act passed by the U.S. Congress last month, these tax refunds will likely exacerbate the problem they're trying to mitigate.

The program puts cash in the hands of low- and middle-income consumers with a higher marginal propensity to consume. That's a fancy way of saying they're more likely to spend this money instead of saving or investing it. That's particularly true in an inflationary environment where prices are rising fast.

And boosting statewide demand will boost prices.

There's already evidence of federal checks-for-all have increased inflation. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021, which included $1,400 stimulus checks, is estimated by one Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco analysis to have raised inflation by three percentage points.

It's important to point out that the state is issuing these tax refunds because it sort of has to. A convoluted budget mechanism known as the Gann Limit requires the California state government to return budget surpluses to taxpayers or spend them on a few budget categories like infrastructure and education.

One libertarian argument would be that, given the Gann Limit, it's better to return that money to taxpayers than let state bureaucracies spend it on public works and public programs.

That's a fair enough perspective. It's complicated by the fact that the state is mostly flush with revenue because of higher-than-expected tax returns from high-income earners. Many of those high-income earners either won't qualify for the Better for Families program. The Better for Families program is therefore an income redistribution program. For many recipients, their payout might exceed their state tax burden.

Leaving money to state bureaucracies to spend, which has obvious libertarian drawbacks, would probably be better for inflation. Those bureaucracies would be slower to spend the money and thus less prone to boosting demand.

Better yet, California's politicians could return the state's budget surplus to the high-income earners who funded it. That would be fairer. It would also be less likely to increase inflation because higher income earners have a lower marginal propensity to consume.

That's not what state politicians did. The state's consumers will now reap the consequences.

Read more here:
California Providing Free Money In Attempt To Mitigate Inflation - Reason

Adelle Nazarian, CEO of the American Blockchain PAC, whose advisory board is chaired by blockchains co-inventor Dr. W. Scott Stornetta, and Alex Allaire, the co-founder and CEO of the American Blockchain Initiative, recently published a roadmap for Congressional blockchain regulation in the National Interest.

Our two organizations have curated ten legislative proposals among the best, most consequential, and politically most palatable. Soon there will be more.

Many smart people on the Hill and in the executive branch are formulating legislation worthy of President Joe Bidens landmark Executive Order #14067: Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets. That executive order is the most consequential presidential statement of technology policy since President John F. Kennedy sent the United States to the moon with his 1962 Rice University speech on September 12, 1962.

Bidens executive order created a national framework fully respecting, for the first time, the responsible development of digital assets such as the blockchain.

The first policy recommendation on our initial list:

Congress should provide funding for blockchain research and development on the scale of the National Quantum Initiative. In October 2019, Chinese president Xi Jinping, the leader of Americas premier rival, threw down the gauntlet. It is necessary to strengthen basic research, enhance the original innovation ability, and strive to let China take the leading position in the emerging field of blockchain, occupy the commanding heights of innovation, and gain new industrial advantages, Xi declared. America must rise to this challenge!

Federal research and development (R&D) will never pass the libertarian purity test. Yet as one of us noted in a column for Newsmax:

Per [the eminent Norman] Augustine, numerous studies including those that won Robert Solow and Paul Romer Nobel Prizes in Economics, demonstrate that as much as 85% of the long-term growth in America's economy is attributable to advancements in science and technology.

The payoffs from the successes of federal R&D dwarf the cost of the failures. This inconvenient truth is supported by abundant evidence, however horrifying to libertarians.

To loop back to Romer, the proto-supply-sider and coiner of the maxim a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, a 1997 article in Wired titled The Long Boom noted that research by a few economists, like Stanford University's Paul Romer, suggests that fundamentally new technologies generally don't become productive until a generation after their introduction, the time it takes for people to really learn how to use them in new ways.

This latency demands primarily government, rather than corporate, initiative. And here it comes!

Last month, in a massively bipartisan fashion, the president signed the Chips and Science Act of 2022. This committed America, according to CNN, to invest more than $200 billion over the next five years to help the US regain a leading position in semiconductor chip manufacturing.

$200 billion? Our prior call for spending on blockchain on the scale of the National Quantum Initiative$1.2 billion over the next five yearsseems positively, well, libertarian. In retrospect, our proposal called for an unduly modest response to a challenge from Americas number one technological and economic rival, the Peoples Republic of China.

Yet take heart. The New York Times observed that the act would also add $200 billion for scientific research, especially into artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing and a variety of other technologies. (Emphasis added.)

If we dedicate even a few percent of the $200 billion to blockchain, Beijing will be eating Americas dust. America retains a powerful advantage in innovation. Again, per the New York Times: The road to the global peaks of technology, as Mr. Xi has described Chinas aspirations, is decidedly uphill.

Americas advantage becomes especially vivid with possible breakthroughs for blockchain-as-a-platform via concurrency computing using rholang, an advanced mathematics invented by Gregory Meredith, one of our colleagues.

Lets take Romers dictum, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, to heart. Let our federal governments scientific thought leaders allocate 3 or 4 percent of the funds from the Chips and Science Act to put the United States at the commanding heights of blockchain technology.

Todd White is the founder of American Blockchain PAC where Ralph Benko is senior counselor.

Image: Reuters.

Continued here:
The CHIPS Act Can Fuel an American Blockchain Revolution - The National Interest Online

If the main purpose of a political party is to run candidates for office, former Libertarian Party of Virginia Chairwoman Holly Ward says it felt like a violation to keep taking peoples money.

Its clear that we cant function, Ward said in an interview as she explained why the party is dissolving as a corporation and giving back the nearly $30,000 it had in the bank.

Ward provided documents showing the party had dissolved its corporate entity registered in Virginia, but other Libertarians have been questioning the legitimacy of the move and insisting the party will live on.

In an emailed statement, Angela McArdle, the chair of the National Libertarian Committee, said that, as of Tuesday evening, the national body does not acknowledge that a disaffiliation has taken place and we are waiting on the members of the Libertarian Party of Virginia to issue a statement on the matter.

As far as I can tell, the alleged disaffiliation and resolution of the Libertarian Party of Virginia are the actions of a small group of rogue individuals who exploited their positions of power and moved to disaffiliate with no regard for the other members of the party or the bylaws of their organization, McArdle said.

Ward, a 36-year-old Northern Virginia resident who works in tech, said the disarray over the Libertarians status in Virginia is part of a bigger battle over the national partys tone and focus. The resolution to dissolve the state party, which Ward says was approved Sunday in a 7-6-1 vote by the partys central committee, said the national party has become functionally indistinct from other alt-right parties and movements.

Those destructive ideas, the resolution said, include endorsing thinly-veiled antisemitism, explicitly welcoming bigotry into the party, reversing the LPs 50-year legacy of support for LGBTQ+ rights, and openly denouncing womens suffrage, the civil rights act, and democracy itself.

Ward attributed those trends to a Libertarian faction called the Mises Caucus, which she said is taking over the party apparatus and discouraging Libertarian candidates from running in swing states where they could hurt Republican votes and tilt the outcome toward Democrats.

Ward pointed to several social media posts as examples of the types of messages she opposed, including posts from the national party saying Social justice is a Marxist lie created to bully and divide the American people, defining democracy as mob rule that endangers individual rights and replying to the AP Stylebook suggesting the pronoun she could no longer be used since we dont know what a woman is anymore. She also pointed to a deleted Martin Luther King Jr. Day Twitter post by the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, an account the national party amplifies, that said America isnt in debt to black people, if anything its the other way around. Another post from the New Hampshire account said 6 million dollar minimum wage or youre antisemitic, which many interpreted as a reference to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Obviously I dont support any of these messages, Ward said. Its bigoted. Its absolutely repugnant.

Asked about the criticisms of the national party, McArdle said those sentiments came from the same group of rogue actors and may not reflect the views of all Virginia Libertarians.

Libertarians dont have a major presence in Virginias elected offices, but they used to have at least some heft in state politics.

In 2013, Libertarian Robert Sarvis earned more than 145,000 votes while running to be Virginias governor, more than the difference between the winner, former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, and the loser, former Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Around that time, the party was involved in a handful of lawsuits challenging Virginias strict ballot access laws, which many Libertarians feel are designed to make it difficult for any alternative movement to break through and compete with the two dominant parties.

The party has faded in relevance since, running no candidates in recent statewide elections and having little discernible impact on state policy debates. A similar entity could re-emerge in some other form, but the new troubles raise serious questions about the viability of what was once Virginias highest-profile third party.

The Libertarians didnt have a candidate in last years gubernatorial race, but the party defended its right to use L on state ballots to avoid confusion with the Liberation Party, a third-party effort spearheaded by anti-police brutality activist Princess Blanding.

Online records from Virginias State Corporation Commission show the state Libertarian Partys nonstock corporation is in the process of dissolving, and the partys website has already been taken down. But there appears to be a power struggle underway over whether the party is or isnt calling it quits.

Daniel John, the state partys treasurer, emailed the Virginia Department of Elections Sunday night saying a few members of the organization acted inappropriately by attempting to dissolve the party against the wishes of the body and its bylaws.

Due to their choices, they have constructively resigned, John wrote. The rest of our board members and I will continue on with business as normal.

John didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

A new Twitter account ostensibly representing Virginia Libertarians appeared Sunday and also cast doubt on the validity of the dissolution vote. And local Libertarian chapters around the state have been chiming in to say the partys staying put.

The Libertarian Party of Virginia attempted to dissolve through a childish coup that violated multiple procedures, wrote the Libertarian Party of Northern Virginia.

A spokesman for the Department of Elections said that, as of Monday, the Libertarian Party of Virginias PAC was still considered active and there had been no formal communication apart from Johns email. According to its most recent campaign finance report, the PAC took in a little more than $6,100 between January and March and had $26,984 on hand as of March 31.

Ward, the partys former chair, said she didnt think any notification to state election officials was necessary, because Virginia only treats Democrats and Republicans as officially recognized political parties. A party must have received at least 10% of the vote in one of the last two statewide elections to be recognized to qualify as a political party.

If a different group wants to try to reincorporate a new Libertarian Party of Virginia, Ward said, theyre welcome to do so. But she questioned what the point would be since the party doesnt have candidates to support.

We couldnt run anybody, Ward said. No ones even willing to put their names behind this.

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Libertarian Party of Virginia dissolving after national party's 'bigoted' turn, ex-chair says - Virginia Mercury

I have always felt a libertarian streak in my view of society, but Im not sure that the term hasnt taken a turn for the worse (Free Staters test limits of N.H. libertarianism, Page A1, Sept. 4). As I recall how William Weld had to promise the Libertarian party that he would remain a Libertarian for the rest of his life in order to be nominated as the vice presidential candidate of that party in 2016, and as I read about Free Staters in Brian MacQuarries article, I wonder where the liberty is.

If democracy is soft communism, then Free Staters seem to be soft fascists, dictating to others what they may think and forcing them to leave their lifelong homes if they dont fall in line. They dont want to be told what to do but are ready to tell others, and with a totalitarian attitude.

The rest is here:
In N.H., its live Free State or leave thats libertarianism? - The Boston Globe