Author: ben45

			Nominal Dollars not Inflation Adjusted	Nominal
Election	Candidate	Popular Votes	Individual Donations	Dollars/Vote
1996	Harry Browne	485,759	$1,248,198	$2.57
2000	Harry Browne	384,431	$1,217,198	$3.17
2004	Michael Badnarik	397,265	$1,093,013	$2.75
2008	Bob Barr	523,713	$1,372,110	$2.62
2012	Gary Johnson	1,275,821	$1,984,244	$1.56
2016	Gary Johnson	4,167,740	$12,794,165 includes Super PACs	$3.07

2016 Reference
 

At the FEE site, Professor Van Colt presents the essay “‘Creating Jobs’ Will Hurt the Economy”

full text

Excerpts:
“Gaining jobs” to achieve a given objective is synonymous with worsening your situation, not improving it.

The value of work is easy to grasp at the most domestic level: your own home.

Being a homeowner isn’t easy. Among other things, you always seem to have more chores to do than time to do them. The chores are not ends in themselves. Rather, they are means to an end — in this case, making a home and yard more livable or aesthetically pleasing.

Opting to do a chore yourself — “insourcing” in current parlance — isn’t costless. You lose the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of your other labors. For example, you could tackle different chores, spend more time with your family, or work extra hours in the marketplace, increasing your income. Hiring someone else to do the chore — that is, “outsourcing” — isn’t costless, either. It means you can’t buy other things. Costs represent sacrificed alternatives.

The minority of crazies chase off people only because the sane expect everyone to be perfect. The sane give up when they find someone they think is unreasonable.

Ignore the crazies.

Don’t waste your time trying to convince them, just work to have a majority and out vote them.

When you find someone unreasonable, just tell yourself, I need to find another sane person.

If the sane out vote the crazies enough, it will be the crazies who leave.

When crazies stops getting attention, they generally leave to find another audience to annoy.

(orginally published May 26, 2016)

At my request, my friend, Brian Wright, found an old favorite speech/article from Michael Cloud.  You can find Brian’s blog  at http://brianrwright.com/CoffeeCoasterBlog/

The Late, Great Libertarian Macho Flash

by Michael Cloud

It was a large and expensive home. The architecture radiated impeccable taste. Seated around the dining table were five people: three moderates, a conservative and a libertarian. The conservative was a multimillionaire — and a generous political contributor. After dinner she turned to the libertarian and said, “Our hosts tell me you’re a libertarian. Maybe I’m a little naive, but I don’t know what that word means. Could you tell me about your beliefs?”
Continue reading Michael Cloud’s Blast from the Past

Chelsea German writes at FEE

Poverty Dropping

Jeffery Tucker writes to Ross Ulbricht on the occasion of his 32nd birthday.
full text at Fee

Excerpt:
Isn’t it ironic? It is increasingly difficult to distinguish the intentions of cyber criminals from that of the government itself. They are both on the same side in lining up against the interests of the human right to liberty and property.

Advice from Matt Zwolinski
full article at Fee

Excerpts:
There are at two main reasons why reasonable disagreement is so common.

1) The moral values that underlie our political debates are plural and conflicting.
….
2) Many of our moral disagreement are ultimately rooted in complicated empirical questions.
…
So be humble — don’t be so confident that the beliefs you’ve formed are the single correct way of thinking about political morality. And be tolerant. Recognize that people who disagree with you might have good reasons for doing so.

Of course, I think that being tolerant of reasonable disagreement means that we should be reluctant to impose our moral views on others by force, or to ask the state to do so on our behalf.

But then again, I’m a libertarian, so I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Jeffrey Tucker discusses recently departed philosopher Tiber Mahan.
article at FEE

The possibility of nominees for President that majorities do not seem to want is due to the plurality winner takes all elections and the existence of super-delegates in the Democratic Party.

If Trump wins the nomination, Republicans have another tool to block both his election and the Democratic nominee – the Electoral College.

Most states use plurality voting for electing members of the Electoral College. The Electoral College requires the person they designate as President to get a majority of electoral votes. If no one gets a majority, the House of Representatives gets to pick the President.

If the Libertarian Party nominee wins enough states to insure that no one gets a majority of the electoral votes, then if the Republicans can continue to hold the House of Representatives, the Establishment could end up selecting the President.

Could the Republican Establishment (whoever they are) give Gary Johnson or whoever wins the Libertarian nomination, enough votes to win a plurality in a sufficient number of states to deadlock the Electoral College?

While he might be better than all the other major presidential candidates still active, John Kasich is wrong for America.

From his website:
https://www.johnkasich.com/nationalsecurity/

“RENEW OUR MILITARY: As America’s commitment to security leadership has withered, our military has been neglected. John Kasich has called for $102 billion in increased defense spending over the next eight years to improve our conventional capabilities and create new cyber defense resources to better safeguard our security.”

There is no data that shows that the military has been neglected.
https://mises.org/library/no-military-has-not-withered-away-under-obama

It is the foreign adventurism started years ago, and continuing to this day that is out of control.
“…during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency (2001 through 2008), the federal government spent $4.7 trillion on defense. During the seven years of the Obama years, from 2009 through 2015, the federal government spent $5.3 trillion. Obama still has another year to go.”

The appalling suicide rate of those who have been sent on deployment after deployment by the Bush and Obama Administrations shows there is something terribly wrong. The reports on the suffering of so many veterans, never question the fundamentals of an interventionist foreign policy that has led us to this situation. Better treatments for PTSD is not the solution. Stopping the madness of our foreign policy is.

As the last good Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul (not Rand) says: the best way to rebuild the military is to change our foreign policy. We must stop using the military of the United States as the world policeman. Stop treating soldiers, sailors, and airmen as pawns in the neocon and “humanitarian interventionist” game of militarized American exceptionalism. Stop using the US military to protect wealthy countries across the globe. Putting troops on Russia’s border and sending warships to the South China Sea are not protecting the United States. Our bipartisan aggressive foreign policy continues to place us in danger.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2016/march/06/do-we-need-to-rebuild-the-military/

At least in his public pronouncements John Kasich shows no willingness to change the direction of our foreign policy, but rather wants to double down on the failed policies that have continued to make the world so dangerous.