Posted on 11/24/2001 8:28:42 AM PST by real saxophonist
Will Libertarians bolt The Stupid Party?
By Bob Ewegen
Saturday, November 24, 2001 - ast week's column detailing the Libertarian Party's new majority on the Leadville City Council caromed around the Internet and brought a cascade of intelligent, and often delightful, responses from readers.
A Libertarian Leadville is a significant historical event, as well as a triumph for alliteration. There are currently 270 Libertarians in public office in the United States.
But except for a brief tenure in Big Water, Utah, a hamlet of 230 people, Leadville marks the first time Libertarians have won outright control of a governmental body in the U.S.
That's a significant landmark for Libertarians, who have quietly become America's best organized and most significant third party. They have a strong enough presence nationally to qualify for taxpayer funding of their presidential tickets. They also have enough integrity to turn down those "federal" dollars rather than joining the rush to the political hog trough. That's because they believe strongly that there is no such thing as "federal" money, only your money taken without your consent. Libertarian candidates will happily accept your voluntary contributions but scorn the notion of sharing in the exactions taken from you by force.
Unlike flash-in-the-pan parties organized around cults of personality like Ross Perot's and Ralph Nader's, Libertarians have organized at the grass roots for the long haul. In the last election, Libertarians fielded 75 candidates for the 84 seats up in the Colorado Legislature - often providing the only alternative to the Demol-ican or Repubocrat parties in the 21 districts where one or the other of the major parties didn't field a candidate. One Libertarian, Steven Lee, even captured the endorsement of the supposedly liberal Denver Post in Senate District 26.
Libertarians are a long way from replicating their Leadville success on a national scale. But they are fast approaching the point where they may force the major parties to reckon with Libertarian ideas - as Democrats did in the 1930s by coopting such Socialist planks as Social Security. Their Leadville success shows Libertarians may have already reached that point in Colorado, where the national party was born in 1971.
In the 1998 election, Republican Bill Owens won the governorship over Democrat Gail Schoettler by just 7,928 votes. The main reason for that photo finish in a state where registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by about 150,000 voters was the superbly managed campaign Mary Alice Mandarich mounted on Schoettler's behalf. But it's worth noting that Libertarian candidate Sandra Johnson received 22,159 votes - nearly triple Owens' victory margin. A few more defections from the GOP to the Libertarians would have elected Schoettler.
The growing Libertarian presence may spell problems for the Republican Party if it can't wean itself away from the religious right's insistence on sticking its nose into our private lives the way Democrats intrude in our economic affairs.
One Republican friend with Libertarian leanings moans: "There are two parties - The Evil Party and The Stupid Party. We belong to The Stupid Party."
To Libertarians, the Democratic Party's fealty to the Marxist principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" truly is evil.
But Libertarians are equally appalled by Republican efforts to dictate what goes on in your bedroom, your choice of intoxicants or even the manner of your death.
San Miguel County Coroner Robert Dempsey recently switched to the Libertarian Party to protest U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's assault on the Oregon "Death with Dignity" law - a measure twice approved by that state's voters.
I called Dempsey to discuss his switch.
"Ashcroft's action was the final straw. I've been a Republican all my my life, believing in less government and more freedom. I was on the San Miguel County Republican Party Central Committee for 15 years. But the religious right has taken over the Republican Party, putting in more laws to take away your freedom," Dempsey said.
"Here are the Republicans pushing for state's rights - and trying to take them away in Oregon. I want less government spending, more freedom. I could never join the Democrats, they are controlled by socialist ideas. But I've had it with the Republicans and their hypocrisy."
Those are strong words and constitute a strong warning to The Stupid Party. If the GOP doesn't wise up and back off its assault on personal freedom, its influential small "l" libertarian wing may desert to its uppercased namesake.
Bob Ewegen is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post. He has written on state and local government since 1963. E-mail him at: bewegen@Denverpost.com
I wonder sometimes if our fate resides with, or is in the hands of the 'little guy' anymore when I see what's coming out of Washington DC. Perhaps this is what I find attractive about the libertarian party. As impossible as it may be to imagine the L's in charge at the national level, so to, is imaginning either of the major parties putting the brakes on government growth or reversing the erosion of our rights.
Good post, CJ! Good points all around. It was the first thing that made me smile this whole holiday.
Mark W.
The truth is that Kev drinks and has blackouts. He usually finds himself back at the house wearing a silk bathrobe and a little "sore".( Wink wink, nudge nudge) But on the plus side the waiters all like him and he goes to the theater for free.
Say that to my face and you are going to get a mouth full of teeth, you understand?
< Listen up all you dope, porn, and sodomy defending libertarians. The applause and cheers you hear are the liberal Democrats pulling for you. You might be small in numbers, but you are a key factor in their strategy to achieve a complete Hillary-type nanny government victory. >
If you think liberal Democrats and libertarians are allies, you are living in a complete fantasy world. Right wing Christians are so obsessed with things like drugs, porn and abortion that they simply assume everyone who doesn't agree with them on these issues must be working together. The fact is, the majority of libertarians care more about economic issues than drug legalization.
Or this one:
< go for it kevin!!! the sad truth is libertarians THINK they are conservative. >
No, libertarians don't think they are conservative. If they did, they wouldn't need a separate word to define themselves.
BTTT for the moral-liberal humanist ideologues.
Getting drunk is not a very reponsible act, but under what grounds can you make it illegal? Getting drunk harms only the individual.
To head off the next step, if a person gets drunk and then commits a crime, punish that crime, even if getting drunk was a contributing factor.
But other than your subjective dislike, how can you justify making getting drunk illegal? And what objective measure would you use? BAC? And how could you enforce it? Few things worse than enacting unenforcable laws.
That is a non-answer. There are such things as "fighting words" you know? These are words said for no other reason than to elicit a response. Coming from someone named "jihad" these words should be taken with a grain of salt.
However, you've gotten a rise out of me. I suggest in the future have the intestional fortitude to say such a thing in person. It's cowardly to hide behind a pseudonym and toss such stink-balls.
I've never seen you say a brave thing in the half-year I've been here. I've made a number of attempts to try to bury the hatchet with you, and all of them were rebuffed. Sure, you have a problem with libertarians, but I reserve the right to answer any of your crap I see in this forum.
What a pitiful existance you must have knowing that your bright spot is CJ's inflammatory rhetoric.
How sad that your definnig features are what you are against, not what you are for.
I am with you all the way on this one. The ant-free choice platform of the Republican party is dragging it into oblivion.
There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to him:
haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
a false witness who pours out lies
and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers
Ah, yes. Another ideologue chimes in to claim that laws against evil behaviors somehow rob people of their free will. Laws against bank robbery are supposedly much worse than bank-robbery itself, according to the ideologues. The laws against bank-robbery somehow rob bank-robbers of their free will choice on whether to rob banks or not. It's only noteworthy because ideologues here claim that no one so claims what you have so claimed.
So the conspiracy to build and deploy weapons of mass destruction is a-okay to ideologues, but pointing out that fact is not. One is a 1st Amendment "right" and the other deserves the force of scorn and visible displeasure. Odd principle.
Let me tell you how much I fear you.
I have voted Republican for 35 years. If I thought that the anti-free choice faction of the Republican party would prevail due a Republican in office, I would change my vote. I would be willing to subject myself to the many evils of a liberal government if that was the only way I could keep free choice. I would grit my teeth and accept more gun control, higher taxes, bigger government and all the rest of the stink of a liberal government to avoid anti-free choice prevailing.
I am not the only conservative that feels this. I know numerous long time republicans who voted for Gore in this last election due to this one issue. I tried to persuade them them that Bush was too smart to allow anti-free choice to prevail. I tried, but I was not successful. I hope I was right.
This one issue could well drag the Republican party into insignificance. After eight years of Klinton and considering that he was running against numb nuts Gore, Bush should have won with a landslide. Bush almost lost. He almost lost because loyal Republicans like me fear the anti-free choice movement.
It is not just this issue of Free Choice that frightens us. It is everything that it stands for. The anti-free choice fundamentalists have a long agenda for which anti-free choice is the vanguard. Open the gates to anti-free choice and you open the gates to many unthinkable restrictions of individual freedom.
It is so very sad to see this issue dragging down so many other fine principles with it.
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