During election years, attention tends to turn to “swing state” races that might affect which “major” party ends up with majorities in the US House or US Senate.

Earlier this year, Arizona was widely considered one of those “swing states,” with incumbent US Senator Mark Kelly (D) looking vulnerable for re-election in a state that US president Joe Biden carried by barely 10,000 votes (less than 1/3 of 1 percent) two years ago.

The “swing state” perception dissipated as Republicans descended into civil war over their choice of a nominee to oppose Kelly, then settled on Blake Masters, a Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” flack and protege of right-wing venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

At the moment, Kelly looks safe for re-election, polling 46 percent to Masters’s 33% among likely voters in  an OH Predictive Insights Poll.

The real news from the poll is that the remaining 21% of voters who responded to the poll aren’t “undecided” — nearly three quarters of them, 15%, plan to pull the lever for Libertarian candidate Marc Victor and his traditional libertarian platform of “live and let live.” Victor’s chunk of the vote more than covers the difference between Kelly and Masters.

And therein lies a story of a political party gone astray.

I’ve mostly avoided writing about the Libertarian Party for the last few months. Although I’ve been an ideological libertarian for 30 years and involved with the Libertarian Party since 1996, I changed my Florida voter registration to “No Party Affiliation” earlier this year and ceased  my (admittedly not hefty) financial support for the party’s national committee in May.

Why? Because at the party’s national convention, something called the “Libertarian Party Mises Caucus” (to all appearances actually a Republican “infiltrate and neuter” PAC) took over the party’s national apparatus.

The Mises PAC’s demonstrated raisson d’etre is to ensure that Libertarian  candidates for public office are so toxic that “liberty-leaning Republican” voters recoil in horror from the Libertarian brand and decide that even Trumpism is preferable to voting third party.

Among their successes in that mission are a gubernatorial candidate in New Hampshire who claims that Jews chose to die in the Holocaust and Hitler went to heaven, and a (withdrawn for ineligibility) gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania (also running for Congress as a Republican) whose claims to fame are his sex offense conviction and his appearance at a Rudy Giuliani press conference to say that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election.

Non-toxic LP veteran Victor is one of the Mises PAC’s failures. He got around the corrupted party apparatus and onto the ballot by petitioning for signatures, prompting comedian/podcaster Dave Smith (a Mises PAC supporter and prospective 2024 Libertarian Party presidential candidate) to publicly whine about the unfairness of it all and proclaim his support for, you guessed it, Blake Masters.

While I strongly encourage those who vote to never, ever vote Republican or Democrat, this year I also urge you to take a close and careful look at Libertarian candidates before voting for them. Support the genuine article, but accept no Mises PAC substitutes.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On October 13, the US Department of Labor published a “draft rule” which, if adopted, will escalate California’s disastrous war on workers and the “gig economy” to the national level.

Like California’s Assembly Bill 5, the Department of Labor’s rule would force companies who use services offered by “independent contractors” (think Uber, Lyft, Instacart, et al.) to pretend that many of those contractors are, legally speaking, “employees.”

The theory of the anti-worker forces behind this movement is that they’re really helping workers.

Employees get guaranteed rates of pay (including higher wages for “overtime”) and other government-mandated benefits. Independent contractors get whatever they agree to accept for whatever they agree to do.

Who makes more money? That varies from job to job and person to person. An employee who shows up 40 hours a week probably knocks down more money than an Uber driver who works 15 hours a week between college classes.

That latter part explains the benefits of independent gig work:

Employees work when they’re ordered to, where they’re ordered to, and how they’re ordered to.

Independent contractors own, as Karl Marx would approvingly note, the means of production. They set their own schedules and determine their own work loads. They decide what they’re willing to do, and when, where, how they’re willing to do it. They’re their own bosses.  That flexibility is a benefit for students, single parents, and others for whom 9-5, Monday-Friday creates problems.

One fake benefit of employee status is that employees can form labor unions. That’s not a benefit. It’s the result of government acting — on behalf of business owners who didn’t like wildcat strikes and existing union bosses who didn’t want competition for dues revenues — to tame and cage organized labor with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Absent the NLRA, independent contractors would be just as free (more free, actually) to form unions and drive hard bargains as employees are now. Having broken workers’ legs, it’s unseemly to expect gratitude for providing a second-hand crutch.

Why so much hate for gig work — which fits the classic definition of “socialism” — from alleged “progressives?”

If you have to ask why, the answer is usually money.

One of the National Employment Law Project’s complaints about the gig economy is that it may be “costing states billions of dollars in tax revenue. “

It may also cost Big Labor’s government-dependent unions  opportunities to “organize” gig workers, whether they like it or not, and siphon dues from their paychecks.

The war on the gig economy is just one of many examples of how conservative today’s “progressives” really are. They’re more interested in saving an old and busted system, in the name of “the workers,” than they are in  the actual interests of real workers.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

After decades as one of America’s most vicious and uncompromising drug warriors — and three years of promising to become less vicious and more compromising — US president Joe Biden finally took action.

On October 6, he announced pardons for thousands of Americans convicted in federal court of “simple marijuana possession,” urged governors to do likewise at the state level, and ordered a review of the federal “Schedule I” status that, contrary to reality, treats marijuana as a narcotic with “no currently accepted medical use.”

Why now? Well, it’s October of an election year, and Biden’s the kind of politician who keeps simple, easy, popular deliverables in his pocket until he believes they’ll produce positive impacts at the polls for him or his party.

It’s no coincidence that the Democratic Party’s candidates in all five close (even “toss-up”) elections for US Senate (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) support legalizing cannabis. Biden’s move could could conceivably seal the deal with thousands of voters in elections that may come down to recounts.

“October surprises” come in all flavors. The surprise on my part is mild rather than extra hot, but it’s still a welcome move in the right direction, and consistent with Biden’s recent conversion to the position that “no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana.”

No one should be in jail for growing or selling marijuana either.

Perhaps this move will get a bandwagon rolling toward the day when cannabis is treated like any other common plant — pick a few seedlings up at Walmart, try to remember to water them, and maybe put one on your desk at work.

The devil, unfortunately, is in the details. If the “review” of marijuana’s “scheduling” results in it being removed from that system altogether, good deal. If it locks marijuana up in the Food and Drug Administration’s approval and doctor prescription/permission systems, on the other hand, it could actually be a step backward, wrecking existing freer state regimes on both the medical and recreational fronts.

Nothing short of complete federal legalization — including a “hands off” mandate on the FDA — makes any moral or practical sense.

If you vote, let candidates who support moving in that direction know why you’re supporting them, and candidates who want to keep the war on drugs rolling along why they’re not getting your vote. We can’t count on little “October surprises” to get this job done.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY