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Election 2016: Will You Take a NAP With Me?

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With the next US national election only a little more than ten months away, you’ll soon be hearing from, and about, candidates of all parties. America’s third largest party, the Libertarian Party, will likely run more than a thousand candidates for local, state and federal office. Some of them, mostly at the local level, will win. As a voter, you owe it to yourself to know what the candidates asking for your vote are all about. So here, in a nutshell, is what the Libertarians are all about.

New members of the Libertarian Party, at the national level and in most state party organizations, must sign a pledge as part of their enrollment: “I certify that I oppose the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals.”

That pledge is reiterated and expanded upon in the Libertarian Party’s Statement of Principles. In shorthand, we refer to it as the Non-Aggression Principle or the NAP.

It means exactly what it sounds like it means. It means exactly what you were probably — hopefully! — taught as a child by your elders and instructors: Don’t assault others. Don’t threaten others with violence to get your way. Don’t steal other people’s property. The only moral use of force is in defense against those who START a fight.

These are the most basic rules of any sane society, and most of us carefully follow those rules in our daily lives. At some point, however, the institution we call “government” successfully carved out an exception for itself.

If you or I demand money at gunpoint from another, it’s called “armed robbery” and treated as a crime. If government agents demand money from us, and abduct and cage us if we refuse to cough up, it’s called “taxation” and somehow magically becomes “legitimate.”

If you or I break into a neighbor’s house and rifle through his medicine cabinet, it’s called “burglary” and treated as a crime. If government agents burst into that neighbor’s house, find medicines they don’t approve of and haul the neighbor off, it’s called “drug enforcement” and somehow magically becomes “legitimate.”

And so on and so forth.

But aggression is never “legitimate,” even if the aggressors carry shiny badges and receive government paychecks.

Next year, the “major party” candidates will offer up all kinds of excuses and justifications for aggression. They’ll try to convince you that they’re running your life and taking your money — at gunpoint and on pain of imprisonment for resistance — for your own good.

Only the Libertarian Party’s candidates will assure you: “We certify that we oppose the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals.” And that’s why only Libertarian candidates deserve your vote.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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McAfee 2016: Libertarian For Real?

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In September, after computer security pioneer John McAfee announced his presidential candidacy under the “Cyber Party” label, I publicly suggested that he should consider seeking the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination instead.  On Christmas Eve , McAfee announced he’s doing exactly that.

No, I don’t think my suggestion changed his mind. I have no reason to believe he reads my column (or that he even has any idea who I am). But heck, maybe I’m wrong. So here’s another suggestion:

Get very libertarian, very quickly and very convincingly.

McAfee really doesn’t have that far to go. He clearly has libertarian instincts on issues like free speech, privacy, Internet censorship, immigration and foreign policy.

But in other areas, his positions are either too vague to really pin down, or else default to a naive technocratic progressivism that puts far more faith in government than Libertarians are comfortable with.

My working theory is that McAfee allowed the non-specificity and naivete to creep in on issues where he doesn’t have strong opinions, and that if he pays them more attention he’ll get more libertarian on them. At least I hope that’s the case, and that he’ll make the effort.

Why should he re-think? Does he really need to? Maybe not.

The Libertarian Party HAS nominated non-libertarians before. In 2008, big-government “conservative” Bob Barr fooled us into thinking he’d changed his stripes, then went back to his big-government “conservatism” as soon as he had what he wanted from us.

And based on my past experience with the Libertarian Party’s internal politics, a little bit of fame, fortune, glitz and glamour goes a long way.

Maybe McAfee can just waltz into our national convention in Orlando, Florida next May and walk out with our nomination because he’s famous and because he has more personal charisma in his left little finger than  previous (even though unannounced) front-runner and 2012 nominee Gary Johnson — who clings to some un-libertarian positions of his own — has in his whole body.

Then again, maybe not.

McAfee tells USA Today that none of the other Libertarian contenders have “personality.” I don’t know about that, but some of them do have a sincere and visible dedication to the principles the Libertarian Party stands for. That kind of dedication doesn’t always beat out personal fame and charisma, but sometimes it does … and the best outcome would be to get all of those things rolled up in one candidate.

If McAfee is willing and able to be that kind of candidate, the Libertarian Party, and America, could be in for an interesting election cycle. And let’s face it — on his worst day he’s a better pick than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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Spoiled Rotten: Who Owns Your Vote?

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There’s a word that sets my teeth on edge, bubbling up among the commentariat every other year as election campaigns heat up. In this cycle I’m starting to hear it earlier than usual, mainly because prominent candidates — first Donald Trump, now Jim Webb — are rumored to be considering independent bids for the presidency.

Since the word is out there early, signifying a bad idea, I’m coming out early to combat that bad idea.

The word I’m referring to is “spoiler.”

You’ve heard the arguments, I’m sure: If everyone in Florida who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 had voted for Al Gore instead, we wouldn’t have ended up with George W. Bush (as a side note, if everyone who had voted for Harry Browne in 2000 in New Mexico had voted for Dubya instead, Florida wouldn’t have mattered).

“A vote for the Libertarian is a vote for the Democrat.” “A vote for the Green is a vote for the Republican.” “A vote for anyone but the candidate I support is a vote for the candidate I fear.”

Horseapples.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: Your vote is yours and yours alone. It doesn’t belong to a candidate until you cast it for that candidate, and you don’t owe it to any candidate until he or she has — in your opinion and your opinion only — EARNED it. You have no obligation whatsoever to vote for someone else’s hypothetical “lesser evil” instead of for your own carefully considered greater good.

Secondly, the “spoiler” phenomenon is largely a myth. As a partisan Libertarian, I often hear the claim that people who vote Libertarian would instead vote Republican if they didn’t have a Libertarian option. That’s sometimes true, but decades of exit polling says that Libertarians “take votes from” Democrats in about the same ratio as “from” Republicans on average, and sometimes more so (for example, in the 2013 election for governor of Virginia, Libertarian Robert Sarvis’s voters said, by a two to one margin, that their second choice was Democrat Terry McAuliffe, not Republican Ken Cuccinelli).

Finally, even if “spoiling” is a real phenomenon, so what? If the candidate who wanted your vote didn’t get it, maybe that candidate should have worked harder to deserve it. If there’s any chance to bring one or both of the major parties around to the views of third party voters, that chance is represented by the “spoiler” factor: “What do we have to do to get back that 3%  we lost by last time?”

As you watch the 2016 campaigns unfold, keep these three things in mind. Vote your own priorities and let the chips fall where they may.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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