Is 2018 the Year of the Libertarian Party? New at Reason

Libertarians had high hopes last presidential race. The candidates offered by the two major political parties were hated, so libertarians thought 2016 was their big chance.

It didn’t turn out that way.

Still, Nicholas Sarwark, Chairman of the Libertarian Party, says it was a great success. “We tripled all previous records. In the 45-year history of the Libertarian Party, we’ve never had that kind of support from the electorate.”

Stossel talks to Sarwark about what we can learn from the last election, and what the future holds for libertarians and the Libertarian Party.

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In Memoriam: Marcus Raskin, Radical and Decentralist

When Marcus Raskin died over the Christmas holidays, his obituaries may have made him sound like a fairly typical left-liberal figure. He had a job in the Kennedy administration. He co-founded the Institute for Policy Studies, described in his New York Times obit as “a progressive think tank.” He was active in the ’60s antiwar movement, and his son is a Democratic congressman. He clearly was more militant than your average liberal: That Times piece mentions that he played a part in the leak of the Pentagon Papers and that he went on trial for “conspiracy to counsel young men to violate the draft laws.” But there’s nothing there to suggest his condemnations of state power ever went further than that portion of the state that was waging an especially stupid war in Vietnam and drafting American kids to die there.

But in the ’60s and ’70s at least (I’m less familiar with his later work) he staked out a much more anti-authoritarian position than that. If you pick up Raskin’s 1974 book Notes on the Old System, you’ll find that it’s largely an attack on presidential power—not just in the hands of Richard Nixon, but in the hands of the progressives who built up the imperial presidency before Nixon entered the White House:

Since 1933, the United States has been in a declared state of national emergency and crisis. During this period Congress delegated, through 580 code sections, discretionary authority to the president “which taken all together, confer the power to rule this country without reference to normal constitutonal processes.”…Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may seize properties, mobilize production, seize commodities, institute martial law, seize control of all transportation and communications, regulate private capital, restrict travel, and—in a host of particular and peculiar ways—control the activities of all American citizens.

His days butting heads with hawks and technocrats in the Kennedy administration had radicalized him: Raskin became a part of the New Left revolt against liberalism. And unlike, say, the Weathermen, his wing of the movement mostly stuck to revolting against the right things: the imperial presidency, the national security state, the partnership between the government and the great corporations (“It has been a cardinal principle,” he wrote, “that big business helps big government and vice versa”), and a host of measures that concentrated power in Washington, D.C. “From the end of the Second World War,” he complained in Notes, “liberals provided the music for the corporations and asserted the need for a strong national leader who would operate benevolently through rhetoric and the bureaucracy for the common good of the System. His powers would verge on the dictatorial.” The book didn’t just reject that approach to power; he rejected a lot of its fruits too. “Lyndon Johnson was a master at managing bills through the Senate which were thought of as reforms, but whose fine print left the major institutional forces of the society untouched, or even greatly reinforced. Appropriations for Great Society programs seemed designed to help the wretched but turned out in practice to meet the needs of the ‘helpers,’ the bureaucracy and the middle class and the rich.”

Raskin was a man of the left: He wanted society to challenge corporate capitalism and to assure minimum levels of well-being. But not necessarily through the federal government. Notes instead calls for a decentralized participatory democracy; the book doesn’t get into details, but you can guess the general outline of what the author wanted from his habit quoting the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Couple that distrust of centralized power with Raskin’s sharp critique of his old colleagues in the national security establishment, and you can see why several libertarian figures of the 1960s and ’70s saw him as a potential partner. Karl Hess, Murray Rothbard, and Leonard Liggio gave lectures at the Institute for Policy Studies, and the institute helped sponsor Hess’s Community Technology project. Raskin in turn served on the board of the National Taxpayers Union and contributed a cover story to the Cato Institute’s Inquiry magazine. Many different flavors of radicalism had their advocates at the institute while Raskin was running it, but the ones whose ideas seemed to be closest to his heart hailed from that grand old forgotten left/right/libertarian coalition, the Neighborhood Power movement.

As the song goes, that was another place and another time. The institute eventually moved in another direction, and so did a great deal of the libertarian world. But Raskin’s old writing deserves an audience today. Living under another corrupt president who has alienated some-but-not-all of the Washington establishment, I can’t help thinking of one more passage in Notes on the Old System:

Even now, there are those in the media who will say that the System successfully worked its will in the Watergate/Nixon affair, and there are those in the bureaucracy and the banks, the corporations and the military, who will bathe themselves in self-congratulation because Nixon’s excesses were condemned. They will say the national security groups, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the policing agencies—the established power in the bureaucracy and among the elites—”blew the whistle” on Nixon just as they had done with Joe McCarthy.

We will be taught to forget the integral involvement of Nixon, the barons, and the Democratic party in developing the structure in which these excesses occur.

In the wake of Watergate, he added, the architects of a disastrous war “have been able to catch their breath and come forward as men of gravitas and decency. That they did not have to make any sort of public penance for the war is a political and moral travesty.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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Simple wisdom from one of the most famous people to go broke

In the late 1800s towards the end of his life, Mark Twain wrote one of his greatest observations of humanity:

“When you remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

Twain’s quote was primarily a commentary on himself.

A lot of people don’t know this, but Mark Twain had gone flat broke late in life.

His enormous fame as an author had brought him substantial wealth. But Twain squandered it all on countless business and investment blunders.

Twain’s publishing company, for example, racked up record sales of its 11 volume “Library of American Literature”.

The problem, however, was that the books cost him $25 to produce… but he only collected $3 up front from customers.

The more volumes he sold, the more money his company lost.

Twain started borrowing heavily to keep his business afloat, eventually mortgaging his home and taking substantial personal loans from wealthy friends.

But Twain was unable to indebt himself back into prosperity, and the company was run into the ground.

Simultaneously Twain made some hilariously bonehead investments.

He passed on the opportunity to invest in Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone (even though he boasted one of the country’s first telephones in his own home).

Meanwhile Twain dumped more than $40,000 (nearly $1.5 million today) in a failed technology that went bust.

Twain invested in another technology that was supposed to revolutionize steam engines. Per the terms of the deal, Twain paid the inventor a stipend of $35 per week.

Twain wrote in his journal, “He visited me every few days to report progress and I early noticed by his breath and gain that he was spending 36 dollars a week on whisky, and I could never figure out where he got the other dollar.”

Twain lost money in the stock market too, famously buying shares of Oregon Transcontinental Railroad at $78 per share, ignoring the stock bubble when it his $98, and ultimately selling at $12.

Obviously there’s nothing wrong with buying stocks or even making high-risk speculations.

But Twain had an extraordinary knack for massively overextending himself… betting way too much on deals with excessive risk.

Even on the rare occasion that one of Twain’s businesses or investments turned a bit of success, it got wiped out in the Panic of 1893.

Every major newspaper in America picked up on his troubles, publishing stories like “Mark Twain Fails” (Washington Times) and “Mark Twain’s Company in Touble” (New York Times).

Twain was nearly 60, yet he was totally insolvent and had been publicly humiliated. Even worse, the stress of his financial situation was starting to have a serious effect on his health.

Reflecting on his life, he was probably mystified at where he ended up. But “when you remember we are all mad. . .”

Now, Twain’s story ultimately has a happy ending.

He eventually found the grit and wherewithal to embark on a multi-year speaking tour, giving lectures around the world in places as far away as Australia, Bangladesh, and South Africa.

Today we’d think of these ‘lectures’ as stand-up comedy events.

Between the tour and the stories he wrote about his travels, Twain managed to claw his way out of debt.

There’s a <u>really</u> fantastic book called Chasing the Last Laugh which chronicles Twain’s misfortunes and speaking tour– I highly recommend it.

I spent much of my holiday break over the past few weeks re-reading parts of the book, and it really drove home a very simple ethos: avoid major mistakes.

Twain made plenty of enormous mistakes, and he suffered dearly for them. His life would have been totally different had he avoided them.

Looking around today I see a multitude of opportunities to make major mistakes.

Nearly every major asset class– property, bonds, stocks, venture capital, etc. is simultaneously at all-time highs with valuations not seen since historic crashes… yet investors keep piling in.

Even emerging asset classes have created spectacular bubbles that have literally never been seen before in history, replete with novice speculators who truly believe that they are hot shot investors despite having zero financial literacy.

Almost every major western government is so deeply in debt that they are officially insolvent, i.e. their debts and liabilities dramatically exceed their assets.

Trillions of dollars worth of debt has been issued by governments (most of whom are bankrupt) at NEGATIVE interest rates. It’s insane.

National pension funds, which tens of millions of people depend on, are rapidly running out of money.

These conditions are so irrational, it’s hard to imagine how we even got here. But “when you remember we are all mad. . .” it starts to make sense.

In our upcoming conversations I’d like to dive into these risks in greater detail, and talk about how to avoid major mistakes.

Avoiding major mistakes doesn’t mean hiding in the basement and cowering with fear. It means acknowledging some basic realities, being brutally honest with yourself, and staying rational.

We usually make serious mistakes when we’re emotional… especially when those emotions are excessive fear, greed, or ego.

(I’ve committed more than my fair share of those mistakes over the years… though fortunately fewer and fewer of them as time goes on. I’ll tell you some of those stories this week.)

It’s incredible what a profound impact it can have on your life when you stop making major business, investment, or financial decisions in the midst of those emotions.

Another other major component of avoiding major mistakes is having a realistic view of risks.

And this is far from rocket science:

If your government is bankrupt, it probably makes sense to diversify a bit. If assets are trading at record high valuations, it might make sense to consider taking some money off the table. Simple.

We’ll discuss all of this in more detail in the coming days. For now, I wish you a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year. More to follow.

Source

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A.M. Links: Recreation Marijuana Sales Begin in California, Trump’s Pakistan Tweet Causes Uproar, Hoda Kotb Replaces Matt Lauer on Today Show

  • Recreational marijuana sales have started in California.
  • “Pakistan summoned the U.S. ambassador in protest against U.S. President Donald Trump’s angry tweet about Pakistan’s ‘lies and deceit’, while Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif dismissed the outburst as a political stunt.”
  • Anti-government protests in Iran have left as least 21 people dead.
  • Hoda Kotb will officially replace Matt Lauer on the Today show.
  • New York City ballet leader Peter Martins is resigning in the wake of multiple sexual harassment and abuse allegations leveled against him.
  • South Korea wants to hold border talks with North Korea.

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