Liberty Maven

Penn Jillette appeared with Glenn Beck on Beck’s TV show earlier today to discuss the accusations of domestic terrorism / militia movement warned about in the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) report released recently. The report profiles those “types” of people likely to be involved in anti-government militia groups. It specifically states that supporters of Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and Chuck Baldwin are suspect.

Once again Glenn Beck shows support for the Founders’ version of America. He even dons a Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” flag T-shirt during the clip.

I’m starting to wonder if I’m on a super secret anti-government list for the things I’ve stated here on Liberty Maven over the past couple of years. I had a Ron Paul bumper sticker on my car. I had a Bob Barr bumper sticker on my car. I attended rallies and meetups. I’m an enemy of the state I guess. Oh well. Of course, I’m also a happily married tax-paying, upstanding citizen with two young children with a good job (for now).

If I’m on the list then I’m honored to be there. If I’m not, it must be due to government ineptitude. Lovers of liberty should look at such a list as a petition to sign rather than something to be avoided. Where do I sign?

Watch the free, patriotic, and entertaining goodness below.

This morning Glenn Beck ranted about the demise of the U.S. dollar making sure to claim he is no conspiracy theorist. Yet with each word of warning he sounds not all that different from Alex Jones.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. I think it is good in fact. It shows there is someone who (at least on the economy) is out there in the main stream press saying what needs to be said. Beck is not ready to latch on to the “elites taking over the world” argument, and neither am I. Though with each passing piece of evidence suggesting we are deliberately devaluing our currency it becomes more difficult not to grab on to that line of thinking. It seems Glenn Beck is fighting the urge latch on.

He goes from talking of the dollar’s demise right into the worry about globalism saying he doesn’t want to “live in a milk toast world”. Finally, he laments that our “Constitution is damn near gone”. On these points I could not agree with him more.

Now if he’d change his neo-con ways a bit on foreign policy we’d have another ally for liberty. However, when people change their ways they aren’t immediately welcomed with red pill induced hugs. One need look no further than Bob Barr for evidence of that.

Listen to his rant here:

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Dave Weigel at Reason magazine sat down with Bob Barr for a kind of exit interview for his failed bid to become the first Libertarian President of the United States. The Ron Paul phenomenon is discussed openly except for one particular answer about access to fund raising lists.

reason: What did matter? Campaign funds? At the convention, Russ Verney told me that he hoped to raise $30 million, and the campaign eventually raised about $1.2 million.

Barr: If certain things had happened that we expected to happen early on, like gaining access to certain lists very quickly, I think we could have gotten there. But those lists turned out to be not available, unfortunately, and that prevented us early to turn over and over again into significant fundraising. We didn’t get that seed money early on that we anticipated. We realistically anticipated it. We didn’t sit around say ‘it would be nice to have all that money.’”

reason: Was one of these Ron Paul’s fundraising list?

Barr: All I can say is that it appeared very realistic that we would have a list that let us raise a large amount of seed money that we could build on. And that didn’t happen.

Read the full interview

Reason magazine is reporting that Ron Paul still hasn’t ruled out a 2012 Presidential run yet, according to Jesse Benton.

Last week, Campaign for Liberty press guy and Ron Paul grandson-in-law Jesse Benton was driving to a constituent event with his boss and the subject of 2012 came up.

“He hasn’t closed out the idea of another run,” said Benton today. “We have some time to decide whether he runs again, or whether he gets behind somebody else. But we don’t have tons of time. By the middle of 2009, the decision needs to be made.”

Interesting. The article also shows Benton’s opinion on a potential Gary Johnson 2012 bid. His argument uses Bob Barr as an example.

I asked about the rumor that former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson might jump into the race (unclear in which party yet). “If he were to decide that he wanted to do that, he’d be a great guy to take the reins. But I don’t think that what Dr. Paul captured was 100 percent transferable to anyone else. I think the Bob Barr campaign assumed that and it didn’t pan out.”

So it looks like we may know within the next six months or so if Ron Paul will be running in 2012.

The New York Times has published their first part of the Ron Paul “answers your questions” interview this morning. One of the questions was regarding running third party or independent after failing to get the GOP nomination. Finally, Dr. Paul explains what Jesse Benton sent us in an email a few days ago.

Q: Even before the primaries, you said you would not run in the general election. Why specifically did you not run?

A: I was running for the Republican nomination, and I would have run in the general if I had won. I had little interest in running third party due to the inherent biases against such efforts. I also signed legally binding agreements not run third party in 2008 if I failed to win the G.O.P. primary. That was the cost for ballot access in several states, 11 total I believe. So even I had wanted to, it would not have been possible to run in the general after I lost the primary.

In another interesting question (That I swear wasn’t submitted by me. Well, truthfully it was.) that Ron Paul sort of “punts” on is about his relationship with Bob Barr.

Q: Did Bob Barr’s failure to appear at your press conference endorsing the third-party vote cause a rift between you and him? Are you still friends with him?

A: That’s old news as far I’m concerned. I’m more interested in focusing on positive things Americans can accomplish moving forward.

He makes a fair point, but he didn’t answer the question. Then again, judging from his answer we can infer the truth. I’m reminded of the age-old axiom, if you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, say nothing at all. I doubt there will be any future joint efforts toward liberty between Paul and Barr. Is it getting cold in here or is it just me?

Judging from some of the comments to the interview we still have a long way to go before people get it through their thick skulls that the government is not a substitute for parenting, hand holding, and individual responsibility.

Read the full set of questions, answers, and several inane comments here.

Who gets your vote now that Ron Paul is no longer on the ballot in most states? Liberty Maven’s newest contributing author, Mark Keller charts the candidates on the Nolan Chart to help you decide.

Some people seem to always vote for the candidate from their chosen party.  Others vote for whomever they believe to be the “lesser of two evils”.  I, personally, am a great advocate of voting on principle ― voting for the person who most aligns with your views, no matter their party or chance of winning.  Determining who that candidate is takes a good deal of research.  Detailed analysis of a candidate’s positions on a wide variety of issues is highly important.  But when you’re slogging through so much information, it can be hard to compare the different people running for office.  How much are these two guys alike?  Exactly how authoritarian is this person’s viewpoint?

And that’s where fun stuff like graphs and quizzes come into play.  A great way of displaying how a certain political philosophy fits into the spectrum of thought is by means of the Nolan Chart.  This is a square (or diamond-shaped) diagram, with a coordinate system charting varying amounts of economic and personal freedom.  With the four corners mapped to the extremes of libertarian (absolute freedom), conservative (economic freedom, but government regulation of personal lives), statist or authoritarian (absolute government control), and liberal (personal freedom, economic regulation) viewpoints, any person or candidate’s beliefs can be pretty well reduced to a point on the graph.

An excellent way of figuring out where you (or the candidate you’re considering) fits on the spectrum, is by means of the World’s Smallest Political Quiz.  In it, you indicate whether you agree with ten statements about economic and personal freedom, and then are shown where your views fit on the Nolan Chart.  It’s quick, it’s simple, and it’s pretty accurate.

I got the idea, a few days ago, to try to figure out what answers the six major presidential candidates would give, if they took the quiz.  So, after a lot of research and discussion, I took the quiz for each one of them, and put all their scores together on a single graph, for easy comparison, as you can see in the image above.

The findings were kind of surprising.  I would have expected Chuck Baldwin to be closer to the conservative part of the chart, and I didn’t think Bob Barr would be quite so libertarian.  Nor did I realize how nearly identical McKinney and Nader were on everything!  But McCain and Obama both are, predictably, found in the statist quadrant.  Now this isn’t a completely comprehensive score (there are, after all, only ten questions), so there’s a little room for error.  And there’s no indication of their views on foreign policy, for example.  But you can check the data for each candidate, yourself, at the bottom of this post, where I’ve got an explanation on why I gave them the answer I did on each question.

I doubt anyone will be changing their mind on who to vote for, this late in the season (today, is, after all, election day), but this info should, at least, give you something to think about.  And if, in fact, you haven’t voted yet and are still undecided, taking the quiz and comparing your score to the candidates might be helpful.

I’ll leave you with this quote from John Quincy Adams:

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone; and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.

And now, get out and hit the polls!

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Dave Wiegel of Reason magazine is spending some of the final hours of Bob Barr’s campaign at their headquarters in Atlanta. He reports that staffers are working the phones trying to find last minute votes for Barr in Georgia.

One interesting point is made by Shane Cory (Barr Communications Director). He has some parting words of blame for Ron Paul.

As the campaign wound to a close, it was clear that Barr wouldn’t get close to the $30 million fundraising goal campaign manager Russ Verney set in May, a disappointment that staffers blame in part on former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). “Paul set the liberty movement back a decade by encouraging people to stay in the GOP,” Cory says. “Not that the Republicans planned it, but if they did they couldn’t have planned it any better.”

While I’ve been quite critical of the Barr campaign I’ve also said that there were many things that went wrong that were not under their control. I have no praise for Shane Cory other than to say that in this case I tend to agree with him.

I firmly believe that if Ron Paul chose to run as a Libertarian after losing the GOP nomination as Bob Barr and the Libertarian National Committee wanted back in December of 2007 we’d be looking at a very different electoral map on CNN and other news outlets today. Ron Paul was a great unique unifying figure. His supporters are a wire mesh of far left, far right, and in between. The decisions he made after losing the GOP nomination caused that wire mesh to rip apart.

However, the unity he once fostered is not gone for good. It is just gone for now. I have hope that a new unifying candidate emerges within the next few years to carry the torch of liberty toward the future and all of this divisiveness will be merely history.

Here is Bob Barr on CNN talking about his efforts for providing voters for a real choice in the election today. Barr is a choice for limited government and maximum liberty. He also is one of the few who actually mention the Constitution. Bob Barr has my vote today. He should have yours as well.

David Weigel of Reason Magazine sat down to discuss Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Harry Browne, poker, politics, and libertarianism with Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller fame. Penn, as usual doesn’t disappoint.

reason: But you’d enjoyed the Paul movement (or moment)?

Jillette: I was just thrilled! I love it when people are seeing a point of view that they’ve never seen before. I had people coming to me and explaining RP’s positions in a way that I couldn’t explain them. I loved that! I love listening to somebody talk about liberty so much better than I ever had. I am such a believer in marketplace of ideas. What troubles me most about politics is this feeling that you shouldn’t waste time with anyone but the frontrunners. The fact that we had this little glitch in the system, that people might listen to somebody else who wasn’t at the top of the polls, it just fills me with such incredible joy to think about it. There were people who considered me a nut for not going with one of the two major party candidates who were, all of a sudden, supporting Ron Paul.

The thing is, I don’t think any of libertarian ideas are very far out of actual spirit of our culture. The reason I use the word “nut” positively is that I think a lot of people really do believe in libertarianism, and small government, and they just need to be told that it’s OK. Paul found ways to say talk about it. I don’t think winning or even running a good race was that important. I don’t even think the million-dollar fundraising days were important. What was important was people being able to say in their own words stuff I agree with about individual rights. I think we need somebody that has charisma and clarity to make people think that’s ok. I have always, like the singers and songwriters of country western music, identified with the losers. A lot of people are not like that. A lot of people watch the Olympics to see people pick up medals.

If you’ve never seen Penn and Teller’s Showtime series called “Bullshit!” I can’t recommend it enough. Below is a fine example of their work on flag burning and the Bill of Rights.

Video has been released for the hour long debate between Bob Barr, Chuck Baldwin, and Ralph Nader that was held last Thursday afternoon at the City Club of Cleveland in Ohio. For those that have rejected the two major party candidates this is your chance to compare the next tier of candidates. Although for some of us, we consider these 3 candidates our first tier.

The debate explores issues that you haven’t heard much about from the two major party candidates. That is quite refreshing in and of itself. Grab your beverage of choice, sit back and watch the debate below.