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Some plan for growth. Millions face futures they neither deserved nor were prepared for, so suddenly has disaster hit. Mortgage payers will be unexpectedly hammered. All homeowners face a sharp fall in house prices in which most of their wealth is held. Worse, those dependent on functioning public services and benefits confront privation and even destitution.

Compelled to find up to 40bn of spending cuts in November to pay for Liz Trusss unwanted tax cuts, the Treasury has to cripple the state to restore financial credibility. Capital investment, the science budget, new schools and hospitals, uprating benefits and public sector wages in line with inflation forget them all. Instead of a stimulus to growth, Britain faces intense economic and social dislocation and ongoing stagflation. Austerity is back, this time on an epic scale.

Whisper it this is where Brexit has inexorably led. There is no Brexit that can work congruent with deeply held British values, beliefs and economic interests. A democratic vote has transmuted into a rightwing coup, culminating in a destructive libertarian programme, an attempt to shrink a state the right considers bloated, to eliminate the last remnants of regulation, to try to drive taxes down, however vital to sustain public services. All in the name of liberating enterprise and forcing self-reliance on what the Brexit right consider a lazy, cushioned workforce. The line from Brexit to last weeks debacle is straight and obvious.

The EU never ranked in the top 10 of voter concerns: it was an obsession of the British right who saw it as emblematic of big state regulation; worse, it was from abroad. Yes, the EU, in trying to create common product, service and professional standards across member states, along with allied freedoms to secure the benefits of a continental economic area, perforce has to regulate. But to American libertarians, so influential on the British right, any regulation is necessarily coercive, limits freedom and is morally damnable. These libertarians live in a parallel universe in which the only moral responsibility is to oneself: even the pronoun we is coercive because it subsumes the individual I. If you think that, then any EU directive for any purpose must necessarily be opposed to the last.

Worse, the EU became a source of law that did not originate in the House of Commons, which exists in rightwing circles to confer prerogative power to the English upper class via the Tory party. The EU may be creating a continental market, high-quality standards and continent-wide competition, but it threatened an idiosyncratic conception of liberty, and a self-interested idea of sovereignty.

This was a minority preoccupation until immigration jumped in salience. Suddenly, the prospect emerged of an alliance between English libertarian toffs and an elderly, white working class. Add the malevolent genius of Nigel Farage, together with plausible Brexiters on the left, like the charismatic RMT boss Mick Lynch, and the rest is history.

EU membership was an unacknowledged boon: it had opened up 40 years of economic growth that allowed Britain to become a much more liberal society while avoiding the tough issues in addressing the deep dysfunctions of its capitalism. The better part of the City boomed, offered a continental hinterland, while multinational investors turned round swathes of the British economy from the car to the food industry able to export freely from low-cost Britain into the EU single market. Companies such as Vodafone could become multinationals, turning British standards into global standards via the EUs blessing. Our regions were propped up by generous EU funding. Longstanding weaknesses, from endemic financial short-termism to a chronically weak training system, were disguised. Where weakly regulated Britain did not act, from securing clean beaches to promoting security at work, the EU stepped in to hide British failings.

Brexit has wrecked all of that. Desperate attempts to revive the London stock market as an international financial magnet fail to recognise that, cut off from the EU, it is just a failing regional stock market: inward investment has stagnated; exports of goods and services are falling; no new companies can ever reproduce Vodafones path to scale. Britain has to invent another economic model reflecting its new, isolated place in the world.

Boris Johnson could talk about levelling up, becoming a science superpower and restoring the Citys greatness, but without EU membership it was all hot air. Britain once led EU science and finance. No more. It once had the tax base to fund levelling up and attract inward investment. No more. For Truss, Kwarteng and the rest of the doomsday cult there is only one way forward a libertarian revolution. Hence last weeks disaster.

It will fail, and not only because of social and political revulsion. The whole thesis is wrong. Capitalism cannot pauperise the societies in which it operates: it must earn a licence to operate. Public agency is an imperative to share otherwise crippling risk with business. There must be maximum access to continental scale markets: the obvious one is Europe. A libertarian US government, with the dollar as the worlds reserve currency, could borrow on a Trussian scale. Isolated Britain cannot.

The alternative is the model the Labour party is starting to fashion: a partnership between government and business, pursuing an industrial strategy designed to meet national challenges climate change, data, care, resilience and all the while attentive to building a stronger, fairer society. Success will demand redressing financial short-termism and a weak skills base, and promoting purpose-driven companies. But, crucially, EU markets must be opened up to our business, high tech, universities and finance. The UK must join the customs union; and it must align with EU rules and regulations in sector after sector. Only thus is there any prospect of the export growth and accompanying investment growth to lift our living standards.

The shadow cabinet may not want to talk about it, but this is the inexorable logic of its position. Yet reality does crowd in on politicians: Truss will attend the first meeting of the European Political Community in Prague this week, championed by President Macron, to discuss European defence and energy security; there is a collective European interest of which Britain is part. Last week witnessed peak libertarianism and peak Euroscepticism.

The long, slow march back to where Britain belongs now begins into the heart of Europe.

Will Hutton is an Observer columnist

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Whisper it, but it was the folly of Brexit that paved the way for Trusss crazy libertarian zeal - The Guardian

Getting to know Sane Hazel, Libertarian candidate for governor

Early voting is just 10 days away, and Georgians may be surprised to see a third name on the ballot in the race for governor. Libertarian Shane Hazel is running against incumbent Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams.

ATLANTA - With just about a month to go until Election Day, most voters have heard a lot about the rematch between incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams. But Georgians will see a third name on their ballots this fall--Libertarian Shane Hazel.

"I think Georgia needs another choice. We've got a Republican and a Democrat and what we've seen over the years is more and more government invasion into our lives," said Hazel.

Hazel first ran for office as a Republican in 2018 when he tried to unseat incumbent U.S. Rep. Robb Woodall in the 7th Congressional District. Woodall won the primary with about 72% of the votes.

His first campaign as a Libertarian was in 2020 when he ran for Senate against Republican David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff. While Perdue garnered the most votes, Hazel won 115,039 votes (2.32%) in that race, forcing the contest to a January runoff, which Ossoff won.

In Georgia, a candidate must get 50% plus one vote in order to win a race without a runoff.

Hazel could be a factor again this fall. The most recent InsiderAdvantage/FOX 5 poll put Kemp at 50%, Abrams at 45% and Hazel at 2%, with 3% of voters undecided.

Kemp won the 2018 race with 50.22% of the November vote--8,744 votes over the 50% threshold.Libertarian Ted Metz received 37,235 (0.95%) votes, only about a third of what Hazel got in the 2020 Senate race.

Hazel's platform centers around personal liberty. The Cherokee County podcaster wants to eliminate income and property taxes, nullify federal and state education mandates and get rid of health care mandates like vaccinations.

FIREARMS

Hazel strongly supports the Second Amendment and called the state's new permit-less carry law "a step in the right direction."

"The Second Amendment was just a codification of your right to protect your life, liberty and property," Hazel explained. "Take it a step further, as governor, as a Libertarian, say let's get rid of the ATF. Let's nullify the ATF. Let's move them out of Georgia and allow people to provide for their own self-defense the way they think they should."

MARIJUANA

"It's a plant. By nature, it's your right," said Hazel, who advocates for legalizing cannabis.

Thursday President Joe Biden announced he will pardon all federal marijuana possession offenses and called on governors to do the same at the state level.

"Sometimes the Democrats get it right. Sometimes the Republicans get it right, but when we err on the side of freedom for peaceful people, you're never going to get it wrong," Hazel said.

ABORTION

Hazel, a father of three, said he is pro-life, but expressed concerns about the state government's role in either sanctioning or banning abortion.

Currently, Georgia's "heartbeat" abortion law outlaws the procedure in most cases once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is at around six weeks of pregnancy.

"The best idea that we have as Libertarians I think is to decentralize this down to the city and the county level where those populations maybe of different cultures and different backgrounds decide differently for their areas and we respect those people's cultures and their decisions on what they want to do. Personally, I'm very pro-life, but I don't know in terms of taking money through force and coercion to fund things that are against people's conscience whether they're pro-life or pro-choice that we can do such a thing in an effective manner and live in a peaceful society."

Hazel will debate Abrams and Gov. Kemp on October 17. Election Day is Nov. 8.

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Shane Hazel hopes to give voters another option in Georgia governor's race - FOX 5 Atlanta

A district judge has ruled that Arkansas 56 Libertarian Party candidates qualified for this years ballot, but the state could still appeal for future elections, and if it does, the incoming Senate president pro tempore expects it to win.

In an 83-page decision, U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker ruled Sept. 30 that an Arkansas law passed in 2019 violated the Libertarian Party of Arkansas 1st and 14th Amendment rights. The case was Libertarian Party of Arkansas v. John Thurston, who is secretary of state.

Act 164 of 2019 increased the required number of valid signatures new parties must collect from 10,000 to 3% of the total number of votes in the previous governors race. For this election cycle, the Libertarians would have had to submit 26,746 valid signatures, which is more than they did.

A new party is any party that did not win 3% of the vote in the preceding governors race or presidents race, whichever is most recent. The Libertarian candidate for president in 2020, Jo Jorgensen, received 1% of the vote in 2020. The law also limited third parties signature-collecting process to 90 days and moved the dates for submitting signatures and certifying candidates to earlier in the year before the election.

Baker wrote that the laws provisions collectively impose a severe burden on plaintiffs rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments and that the State of Arkansas is unable to demonstrate that the statutes are narrowly drawn to serve a compelling state interest.

Thurston spokesman Chris Powell said his office was still conferring with the attorney generals office about whether to appeal. Gov. Asa Hutchinson told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he was reviewing the case and would assess whether to appeal.

Dr. Michael Pakko, the Libertarian Party of Arkansas chairman, said in an interview that the Legislature needs to address the gap that now exists in Arkansas election law. Asked if the Legislature would alter the law when it next meets in 2023, Sen. Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, the incoming Senate president pro tempore, wrote in a text, Judge Baker will get overruled as is a matter of routine practice for her rulings.

Baker had issued a preliminary injunction in the case in 2019, a decision that later was affirmed by the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Pakko said the combination of new requirements included in the law made it especially burdensome for Libertarians to collect the required number of signatures. The 10,000-signature requirement was put into law in 2007. After that, Libertarians qualified for elections starting in 2012. The Green Party qualified for the ballot from 2008 to 2014.

Under Act 164, new parties are required to be recognized 60 days before the filing period. For this election cycle, that was Dec. 24, 2021, which is 319 days before the general election and five months before Republicans and Democrats held their primary elections. In the next election cycle, the signature deadline would be even earlier Sept. 7, 2023. The Libertarians argued that the early deadlines came long before elections when voters are less interested.

Libertarians favor greatly reducing the scope and role of government. They would drastically reduce government spending on social programs, and they also support gun rights, gay rights, and legalizing marijuana.

Pakko said theres a perception that Libertarians take more votes from Republicans than Democrats. He said he hasnt seen evidence that is the case. He said he believes the party gets votes from people who otherwise would not vote, and then the rest come from people who would have voted for both Republicans and Democrats.

The party has yet to elect a candidate to a significant office in Arkansas, but he said its presence raises issues that might otherwise be ignored. He hopes the party can be more competitive as its credibility and name identification grows.

I think our democracy would be a lot more healthy if we had more than two competing parties bashing heads all the time, he said.

Pakko testified in court that the party has spent $30,000 to collect signatures, in addition to the volunteer effort.

The party could avoid the signature requirement if its candidate for governor, Ricky Dale Harrington, wins 3% of the vote in November. Harrington received 33.5% of the vote as Sen. Tom Cottons only opponent in the 2020 U.S. Senate race. The partys best finish in a governors race came in 2018 when Mark West won 2.9%, falling 861 votes short of the 3% mark.

Among the arguments made by the state was that the law would keep the ballot from becoming too cluttered. But Pakko said there is no evidence that the ballot is cluttered now. Many legislative races are uncontested or feature only a Libertarian running against a major party candidate.

The party has candidates for governor, U.S. Senate, three congressional races, lieutenant governor and state auditor. It also has nine candidates for state Senate and 31 for the state House.

Pakko said the laws provisions were really intended to keep other parties off the ballot and to limit competition in the electoral process. In 2019, the law passed the Senate before he had the chance to testify. Pakko noted that because this is a civil rights case, the Libertarian Partys legal fees would be paid by the state, in addition to the costs the state has incurred in its own defense.

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State third party election law declared unconstitutional, appeal being mulled - talkbusiness.net

Republican state Sen. Bruce Thompson, Democratic state. Rep. William Boddie and Libertarian Emily Anderson, a digital print operator at a publishing company, are running to replace Butler.

With the start of early voting approaching, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spoke to Thompson and Anderson. A spokeswoman for Boddie said he was unavailable to talk with the AJC.

In a previous interview, Boddie said he wanted to restore trust in the agency, improve its technology and expand its historical role by providing more support for working parents and gig workers, who are typically not covered by the states unemployment insurance fund.

Thompson, who frequently cites his military and business experience, said he differs with his rivals on how to manage the department, but not on the need for change.

I think whether you are a Democrat or Republican that you agree that during the pandemic, the (Labor Department) failed the citizens of Georgia, he said. We can agree there needs to be a significant improvement.

That improvement will be partly about processes and potentially about the 1,134-person staff, said Thompson, who said he started, ran and eventually sold a number of companies, including Coverstar Automatic Covers, which sells covers for swimming pools, The Thompson Group Insurance and Bruce Thompson State Farm insurance company.

Despite contentious races at the top of the ballot for governor and the U.S. Senate and his own robust conservatism, Thompson said he doesnt think the office needs to be partisan. And despite his harsh criticism of the agencys past performance, he said he believes he can work with staffers.

Well do an assessment, he said. We plan to challenge them, but I want to be a cultivation agency, highlighting people and helping them.

Anderson, the Libertarian candidate, said she thinks the agency is understaffed.

I went to a career center years ago and I only went because I couldnt get anyone on the phone, she said. It was just compounded by the pandemic.

She said if elected, she would ask department staffers for ideas because they know the system best.

Where can we cut red tape? Where can it be streamlined to get you your benefits quicker? she said.

Many of the changes needed at the Labor Department require legislative support or federal help, such as funds for better technology and a longer period for payment of benefits, but the commissioner can lobby for assistance and promote fair treatment for those who need assistance, said Ray Khalfani, an analyst with the left-of-center Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

The North Star for governance should start with the mission to expand duration, access and benefit levels, he said.

Because the Legislature has shifted workforce development to the Technical College System of Georgia, the Labor Department has seen its budget cut from $114.4 million during the past fiscal year to $51.6 million, officials said. Accounting for much of that cut was the narrowing of the agencys responsibilities, making its main mission the vetting of applications for jobless benefits and making sure that valid claims get paid.

In the years after the 2008-09 recession, that task wasnt so demanding. But then came the pandemic.

Much of the economy was at least temporarily shut down, and hundreds of thousands of Georgians were tossed out of work. The number of claims in an average week went from less than 5,700 to more than 215,000 for the next three months. It stayed in six figures until July 2020. While the federal government passed a series of emergency measures, it was left to the states to execute the new programs.

The Georgia Labor Department, with about half the employees it had during the previous recession, was overwhelmed.

Legislators, journalists and social media feeds were flooded with complaints from frustrated and scared workers waiting for benefit payments even as officials struggled to screen out thousands of fraudulent claims.

Another wave of layoffs may be on the horizon. While the weekly claims for jobless benefits are nearly as low as pre-pandemic, the economic outlook has grown murky with the Federal Reserve raising interest rates in an effort to stifle inflation by slowing the economy.

The candidates are slated to appear in an Atlanta Press Club debate on Oct. 18.

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Labor commissioner's race: Down-ballot and up in the air - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Happiness is the death of morality, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant famously declared. Kants insight is a valuable one: if we decide to act morally only when it makes us happy (what Kant called a hypothetical imperative), then authentic moral actionaction that is not merely self-interest in disguisewill be as rare as an icicle in summer. Thats why Kant calls us to locate morality exclusively within the realm of duty (what he calls the categorical imperative): do what is right without exception independently of your happiness.

Thats one solution to the problem of the relationship between being good and being happy. But what a dragespecially to the secular minds increasingly uncloseted hedonism: Do something that doesnt make me happy? Deny my right to self-care? Are you kidding me? Yet if duty cant justify and motivate moral action, whats the alternative? Perhaps you could choose to be an honest cynic like the character Thrasymachus in Platos Republic: appear to be good when other people are looking, but otherwise do whatever you want if you think you can get away with it. However, even if this option accurately describes many individuals default practice of morality, openly embracing cynicism is indistinguishable from endorsing a Hobbesian war of all against all: with morality divorced from an objective duty to be good, each individual and group has carte blanche to exploit weakness, which ultimately leads to those with the most power, and the least reservations about using that power, dominating othersuntil an even more ruthless alternative arrives. (Look to the cartels in northern Mexico, or the drug gangs dominating inner cities in the United States, to observe what this theory looks like in practice.)

There thus appears to be a dilemma at the heart of morality: On the one hand, a morality of dutydoing good independently of what you desiremay provide individual and social stability, but it comes at the cost of not being able to do what you really want to do, that is, what makes you happy. On the other hand, having license to do whatever you desire, may, like Pinocchios Pleasure Island, make you feel happy, perhaps even intensely so; but that comes at the price of individual degradation and, ultimately, societal collapse. It seems, then, that we, individually and collectively, are forced to make an impossible decision: Should I do my duty? Or should I be happy? Should we live according to a moral law? Or should we let people do what they want?

What if it was your duty to be happy? What if it was in your self-interest to be selfless?

Classical liberal and libertarian political philosophy thinks it has found a way to thread the needle on this predicament. Based on a conception of autonomy, the solution takes the following form: I get to do whatever I want to do provided I respect your right to do the same. The we in this model is reduced to the procedural: the only thing that binds us is a system of laws that prevent people from violating each others autonomy. Meanwhile, everyones free to do what they want, when they want, and with whom they want to do it, provided there is consent.

This splitting of the difference between being good and being happy by saying all that being good means is not interfering with others pursuit of happiness is a tempting compromise. But it begs rather than answers a fundamental question: What should I do to make myself happy? The liberal/libertarian answer, is, Do whatever you desire to do (provided you permit others to do the same). But then comes the next question: But what should I desire? To which liberalism/libertarianism self-assuredly responds, You should desire whatever you desire to desire! And it is here where the liberal/libertarian dream begins mutating into a nightmare, where the illusion that happiness means the endless feeding of insatiable idiosyncratic cravings fades into the realization that the most obvious thing in life might actually be the most mysterious: What makes mewhat makes ustruly happy?

The liberal/libertarian point of view grants each of us the power to create our own answer to this question, but with two catches: First, you must accept that, whatever definition of happiness you choose, it is entirely subjective, which is another way of saying it is devoid of objective truth. Your definition of happiness is thus yours; but it is also a fancy, a whim, the grasping of a moral phantom in the darkness of equally absurd possible preferences. Second, and consequently, you cant tell anyone, not even your own children past the age of reason, that your definition of happiness is good because that would mean that you think that they should define happiness the same way you doshould here meaning obligated to believe because its truewhich is tantamount to violating their autonomy. This liberal/libertarian compromise on the relationship between morality and happiness thus dictates that a free choice to live on the streets injecting fentanyl into your veins is just as good as a free choice to work as a lifesaving, Narcan-administering EMT; the choice to turn whole urban districts into open-air drug markets is just as good as the choice to build parks and install new playground equipment. Its all just preference. And in the land where preference is king, theres no complaining about what others, individually or collectively, choose to do with their autonomy so long as no one physically assaults you or violates a contract youve signed. This is the price of the live and let live compromise: when the definition of happiness is radically individualized (and thus utterly relativized) and morality is reduced to consent, you gain the right to define the meaning of life and live it out how you chose; however, you lose the right to believe your choice, or anyone elses choice, is anything other than arbitrary and, therefore, objectively meaningless.

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There is, however, a fourth option for how to relate being good with being happy. What if it was your duty to be happy? What if it was in your self-interest to be selfless? What if you could align your deepest desires with the goal of becoming an objectively good person, meaning that what you want most in lifeby definition, what makes you happiestis one and the same as what morally you should do?

This, in a nutshell, is the Catholic vision of morality, and one of its greatest recent promulgators is the late Fr. Servais Pinckaers, OP (1925-2008). Fr. Pinckaersafter whom Bishop Barron named the Servais Pinckaers Fellowship in Catholic Ethicsis well known within Catholic circles for his brilliant, Vatican IIinspired work synthesizing the different strands of moral theologynatural law, Scripture, the Church Fathers, Thomism, the manualist tradition, the Magisterium, and spiritualityinto a vibrant, cohesive whole. However, Fr. Pinckaerss insights into the nature of morality and moral freedom hold great wisdom for non-Catholics as well. He writes in his book Morality: The Catholic View, From our birth, we have received moral freedom as a talent to be developed, as a seed containing the knowledge of truth and the inclination towards goodness and happiness, an inclination diversified according to what the Ancients called the semina virtutum, the seeds of virtue. This moral freedom, Fr. Pinckaers explains, is not a freedom of indifference, meaning a freedom whose only purpose is to show obedience to external commands and to fulfill subjective desires. Rather, this freedom is what he calls a freedom for excellence, which is the freedom to grow in virtue and thereby conform your lifeyour whole being: body, mind, soul, desires, emotionsto what is objectively good and, therefore, the only source of authentic happiness. As he explains,

Freedom for excellence engenders a moral science that directly takes up the question of happiness and the absolute good. It is a science that regards the question of happiness as decisive for the integral ordering of ones life and the formation of ones character. This science is organized according to the principal virtues that strengthen freedom and refine human action . . . [and] is brought to completion in the study of laws in its educational role, a role that firmly brings together wisdom and love, and even constraint, which is sometimes necessary in the struggle against evil.

To be sure, there is much to unpack here, a lifetimes worth. As a central part of my work for the Word on Fire Institute, I intend to explain and advocate for Fr. Pinckaers view of morality, which is synonymous with the comprehensive Catholic view. In other words, to be continued.

Yet it is enough to say now that the choice between being happy and being good is ultimately a false one. As Fr. Pinckaers shows, we need not choose between the two. The trick is to see that, if duty means doing good no matter what, and what is truly good is living according to Gods will, and Gods will is that each of us freely become wholly and permanently happy, then it is our duty to freely become wholly and permanently happyno matter what. Much more than a set of rules, in other words, Catholic morality is a recipe for joy.

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Be Good or Be Happy: Evergreen Insight from Fr. Servais Pinckaers, OP - Word on Fire