Category: reason

“Are human beings smart enough to overcome scarcities through
their intellectual powers?”

Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey says this is the
question that scientists and economists have been grappling with
for decades. In a talk in front of a live, in-studio audience at
Reason’s LA headquarters, Bailey answered that question with a
resounding, “Yes!”

Bailey previewed his upcoming book, The End of
Doom, in this thought-provoking talk of the same name. By
documenting numerous errors in prediction from the past, from Paul
Ehlrich’s famous
commodities bet with Julian Simon to unfounded concerns
about “peak oil,” Bailey takes on the doomsayers and argues that
it’s much more rational to expect a more prosperous, resource-rich,
and ecologically sound future than it is to fear armageddon.

Approximately 20 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by
Alex Manning, Paul Detrick, and Tracy Oppenheimer.

Click the link below for downloadable versions of this video,
and subscribe to Reason
TV’s Youtube channel for daily interviews, documentaries
and more.

View this article.

“Are human beings smart enough to overcome scarcities through
their intellectual powers?”

Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey says this is the
question that scientists and economists have been grappling with
for decades. In a talk in front of a live, in-studio audience at
Reason’s LA headquarters, Bailey answered that question with a
resounding, “Yes!”

Bailey previewed his upcoming book, The End of
Doom, in this thought-provoking talk of the same name. By
documenting numerous errors in prediction from the past, from Paul
Ehlrich’s famous
commodities bet with Julian Simon to unfounded concerns
about “peak oil,” Bailey takes on the doomsayers and argues that
it’s much more rational to expect a more prosperous, resource-rich,
and ecologically sound future than it is to fear armageddon.

Approximately 20 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by
Alex Manning, Paul Detrick, and Tracy Oppenheimer.

Click the link below for downloadable versions of this video,
and subscribe to Reason
TV’s Youtube channel for daily interviews, documentaries
and more.

View this article.

John F. Kennedy places near the top 10 in most
presidential ranking surveys of historians, and in a 2011 Gallup
poll, Americans ranked him ahead of George Washington in a list of
“America’s greatest presidents.” Kennedy’s murder was a national
tragedy, to be sure, but an honest assessment of his record shows
that our lawless and reckless 35th president was anything but a
national treasure. That may sound harsh, writes Gene Healy, but 50
years after his passing is not too soon to take a clear-eyed look
at JFK’s legacy.

View this article.

Amid reports that the alleged LAX gunman Paul Ciancia left a
note that referred to the “NWO” — widely believed to be a
reference to the New World Order — Lizzie Crocker of The Daily
Beast has written a short
piece about the history of the phrase. I make a few
appearances in her story:

It might be easy to mistake the
NWO as a concept born out of Tea Party politics, since the movement
occasionally throws the term around, especially when talking about
the Obama administration. But Jesse Walker, author of The
United States of Paranoia, says that the idea has been a
constant in modern American political life and its historical roots
run deep….

According to Walker, the [debate over the] League of Nations
introduced the term to the political and cultural lexicon after the
First World War to describe “evolving world institutions.” The New
World Order was also the titular subject of writer H.G. Wells’ 1940
treatise, published one year after the outbreak of World War II,
which advocated that nation states band together to prevent future
outbreaks of war (“I am not going to write peace propaganda here,”
Wells wrote.) The idea of a one-world government also appears, in a
thinly-veiled form, in Wells’ 1933 book The Open Conspiracy:
Blue Prints For a World Revolution (whose subtitle he later
changed to, “What Are We To Do With Our Lives?”), which encouraged
a “mental sanitation process” to erase nationalistic ideals from
people’s consciousness so they can accept their new roles as “world
citizen[s].”

From there the article goes on to describe the John Birch
Society’s discovery of the phrase, as figures such as Nelson
Rockfeller and Richard Nixon deployed the term in various contexts
in the 1960s. And then we jump to the ’90s and President George
H.W. Bush, who used the words “new world order” while sketching a
vision of the post–Cold War world. Bush’s fondness for the phrase
helped unleash a new wave of New World Order fears, not just on the
populist right but in the counterculture.

One point I stressed in the interview is that it’s possible for
critics of the New World Order to use the term to describe broad
political trends or to use it to describe a
conspiracy allegedly driving those trends. It is not an innately
conspiracist concept, though it is frequently bound up with
conspiracy stories.

If you’re interested in reading Wells’ book The New World
Order, it’s online here. The
Open Conspiracy is here.
And it’s been a while since I last did a roundup of United
States of Paranoia links, so:

• Arthur Goldwag, who has written a
couple of
books about conspiracy theories himself,
reviews the book on his blog.

• Seth Blake reviews
it in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

From the “folks, this is just wrong” department of our War on
Drugs, reported
by KOB-TV 4 in New Mexico. They are reporting on a lawsuit that
arose from an:

incident [that] began January 2, 2013 after David Eckert
finished shopping at the Wal-Mart in Deming.  According to a
federal lawsuit, Eckert didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign
coming out of the parking lot and was immediately stopped by law
enforcement.      

Eckert’s attorney, Shannon Kennedy, said in an interview with
KOB that after law enforcement asked him to step out of the
vehicle, he appeared to be clenching his buttocks.  Law
enforcement thought that was probable cause to suspect that Eckert
was hiding narcotics in his anal cavity.  While officers
detained Eckert, they secured a search warrant from a judge that
allowed for an anal cavity search.  

The lawsuit claims that Deming Police tried taking Eckert to an
emergency room in Deming, but a doctor there refused to perform the
anal cavity search citing it was “unethical.”

But physicians at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver
City agreed to perform the procedure and a few hours later, Eckert
was admitted.

While there…

1. Eckert’s abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.
 

2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert’s anus with their
fingers; no narcotics were found.

3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert’s anus with their
fingers; no narcotics were found.  

4. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema. 
Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police
officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. 
No narcotics were found.

5. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a second
time.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and
police officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his
stool.  No narcotics were found.

6. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a third
time.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and
police officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his
stool.  No narcotics were found.

7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.
 

8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then
performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted
into Eckert’s anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines.  No
narcotics were found.  

Throughout this ordeal, Eckert protested and never gave doctors
at the Gila Regional Medical Center consent to perform any of these
medical procedures….

There are major concerns about the way the search warrant was
carried out.  Kennedy argues that the search warrant was
overly broad and lacked probable cause.  But beyond that, the
warrant was only valid in Luna County, where Deming is
located.  The Gila Regional Medical Center is in Grant
County.  That means all of the medical procedures were
performed illegally and the doctors who performed the procedures
did so with no legal basis and no consent from the patient.
 ….

The warrant also had expired in time when the “medical
procedures” were carried out. Eckert is suing the city of Deming
and Deming Police Officers Bobby Orosco, Robert Chavez
and Officer Hernandez, as well as three Hidalgo County Deputies and
two doctors from the Gila Regional Medical Center.

The petty legalities of time and place of the carrying out of
these hidieous tortures will, I hope, be sufficient for Eckert to
win his suit; but of course the entire thing is an abomination from
beginning to end. If only he could just sue for “police being petty
officious asshole morons, and doctors violating their professional
standards and all human decency by going along.”

I blogged yesterday on military doctors
also violating their oaths and decency in the name of
orders.

From the “folks, this is just wrong” department of our War on
Drugs, reported
by KOB-TV 4 in New Mexico. They are reporting on a lawsuit that
arose from an:

incident [that] began January 2, 2013 after David Eckert
finished shopping at the Wal-Mart in Deming.  According to a
federal lawsuit, Eckert didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign
coming out of the parking lot and was immediately stopped by law
enforcement.      

Eckert’s attorney, Shannon Kennedy, said in an interview with
KOB that after law enforcement asked him to step out of the
vehicle, he appeared to be clenching his buttocks.  Law
enforcement thought that was probable cause to suspect that Eckert
was hiding narcotics in his anal cavity.  While officers
detained Eckert, they secured a search warrant from a judge that
allowed for an anal cavity search.  

The lawsuit claims that Deming Police tried taking Eckert to an
emergency room in Deming, but a doctor there refused to perform the
anal cavity search citing it was “unethical.”

But physicians at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver
City agreed to perform the procedure and a few hours later, Eckert
was admitted.

While there…

1. Eckert’s abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.
 

2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert’s anus with their
fingers; no narcotics were found.

3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert’s anus with their
fingers; no narcotics were found.  

4. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema. 
Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police
officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. 
No narcotics were found.

5. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a second
time.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and
police officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his
stool.  No narcotics were found.

6. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a third
time.  Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and
police officers.  Eckert watched as doctors searched his
stool.  No narcotics were found.

7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.
 

8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then
performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted
into Eckert’s anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines.  No
narcotics were found.  

Throughout this ordeal, Eckert protested and never gave doctors
at the Gila Regional Medical Center consent to perform any of these
medical procedures….

There are major concerns about the way the search warrant was
carried out.  Kennedy argues that the search warrant was
overly broad and lacked probable cause.  But beyond that, the
warrant was only valid in Luna County, where Deming is
located.  The Gila Regional Medical Center is in Grant
County.  That means all of the medical procedures were
performed illegally and the doctors who performed the procedures
did so with no legal basis and no consent from the patient.
 ….

The warrant also had expired in time when the “medical
procedures” were carried out. Eckert is suing the city of Deming
and Deming Police Officers Bobby Orosco, Robert Chavez
and Officer Hernandez, as well as three Hidalgo County Deputies and
two doctors from the Gila Regional Medical Center.

The petty legalities of time and place of the carrying out of
these hidieous tortures will, I hope, be sufficient for Eckert to
win his suit; but of course the entire thing is an abomination from
beginning to end. If only he could just sue for “police being petty
officious asshole morons, and doctors violating their professional
standards and all human decency by going along.”

I blogged yesterday on military doctors
also violating their oaths and decency in the name of
orders.

There are two scandals regarding a national
politician’s veracity this week. One is about a president
lying about his signature, transformative legislative
achievement, while his administration
lies and
prevaricates some more in the face of being caught selling the
American public a bill of goods. The second
initially centered around a senator
lifting movie-description passages from Wikipedia in his
speeches. You could almost see the thought bubble around Rand
Paul’s head–how could they possibly be nitpicking me in
this of all weeks? But that is exactly the wrong response, both
externally and internally, as new revelations make even more
clear.

First came
word Sunday that a whole
1,318-word section of Paul’s book
Government Bullies was lifted from a Heritage Foundation
study (the think tank just shrugged). The
latest is that a September Washington Times
op-ed the senator wrote on mandatory minimums, and also

testimony he gave on the subject to the Senate Judiciary
Committee, was lifted from a recent piece by Dan
Stewart in The Week.

Taken together, these sloppy, undergraduate-level infractions
suggest strongly that Sen. Paul is running a loose ship, one not
currently ready for the prime time of winning a national
election.

“There are technicalities to
this, but nothing I said was not given attribution to where it came
from,” Paul
said prematurely last week, in response to the first wave of
Wikipedia discoveries. “[People are] making a mountain out of a
molehill….It’s a disagreement about how you footnote things.” By
“people” he especially meant MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who (along
with Buzzfeed) has been stoking this controversy: “She’s
been spreading hate on me for about three years now,” he
complained. On ABC’s
This Week on Sunday, Paul even wished out loud he could
challenge his critics to a duel.

There are two fundamental problems to this kind of defensive
response. The first is managerial–what kind of message do you send
staff by waving off such juvenile, 100% avoidable unforced errors
as “technicalities”? That’s like putting up a sign in the office
saying “substandard work welcome here.” In a world of free plagiarism-detection
services, the time to begin
scrubbing old speeches for possible problems was last
week, when the senator was busy lashing out at his critics.

The second problem, which cuts straight to the heart of the
difference between Rand Paul and his dad, is that he’s actually
trying to win the presidency. If your goal is to genuinely
compete in a general election with your once-marginalized ideas,
instead of building a revolutionary movement at the margins, then
you don’t need to be as clean as the competition–you need to be
cleaner. Why? Call it The Weird Man’s Burden.

Rand Paul, like his father, has
a lot of “weird” ideas, at least in the cramped context of how
“responsible” two-party politics and governance has played out over
the past several decades. He thinks the drug war is a failure and
has introduced ways to peel it back. He wants to balance the budget
in five years, and slash several federal departments. He believes
in the Fourth Amendment. He is anti-interventionist to the point
that when I asked him repeatedly earlier this summer to name
American military conflicts during his lifetime he would have
retroactively supported, the only he came up with was deposing the
Taliban after 9/11. You and I may think those positions are within
the bands of normality, but libertarians are still
less than one-quarter of the population. 

The Weird Man (and Woman, bien sur), very crudely
speaking, has two broad avenues available for changing the system:
from within, and from without. Since us weirdos are often, well,
weird, there’s a natural attraction toward hopeless,
beautiful, philosophically pure fires on the sidelines. (This isn’t
libertarian-specific—it’s true of any group whose
issue or issues have been consistently disregarded over time.)
Henry David Thoreau wasn’t trying to fix slavery and imperialistic
war from within Washington, he simply refused to pay his taxes and
headed off into the woods to write. It is emotionally satisfying to
give the finger to The Man, and out there on the margins it is an
affirmation, not an occasion for self-reflection, when the
mainstream and its apologists attack you, whatever the
reason. 

The other avenue for Weird Man change-making goes
not into the woods, but into the streets, television screens, and
halls of power. It is an inherently compromising approach–even
Martin Luther King was dismissed in his lifetime as a sellout. As
King and many of the most effective Inside-Gamers have learned,
however, it can be an incredibly effective tactic to present your
claims with more dignity, decorum, and “self-purification” than
the mainstream you aim to change. Think about it–gay rights at
first was the stuff of revolutionaries and outrage-generating
paraders, but the gay marriage debate really took off with
a bullet when those two sweet old ladies got married in San
Francisco. The movement to legalize marijuana by necessity began
with the gray-ponytail crowd, and will end with square-jawed
businessmen in suits. This is not to state a preference for one
of the two main avenues of change–Rand wouldn’t be a national
politician without Ron’s rEVOLution–but rather to identify the
characteristics of the path that Rand has very obviously
chosen. 

So what does that mean in this instance? If he wants to run for
president, he needs to be better, not worse, and not
merely as good, as the competition when it comes to the most
seemingly trivial matters of comportment. Journalists, particularly
(though not only) from
those outlets sensitive to the allure that libertarian ideas
have on some progressive voters, will be gunning for every
possible gaffe, glitch, error of judgment, and stated deviance. He
should consider it an honor to be challenged, instead of a
challenge to get huffy about.

People who choose the Inside Game know, or at
least should know, that the deck is stacked against them,
and that they will be judged more harshly. Those were always the
rules. On the upside, being the first real truth-teller inside an
empire of lies carries with it enormous galvanizing potential.
Whining about being picked on in this context is like complaining
about getting fouled when you drive to the hoop against Bill
Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn. The answer is to dunk the damned
basketball, not bitch to the refs. And for god’s sake, make sure
your shoes are tied.

It’s actually helpful for Rand Paul’s presidential ambitions to
be having these mini-kerfuffles in November 2013. It’s doubtful
that they will have any impact on the 2016 race, and he could
clearly use the practice. 

There are two scandals regarding a national
politician’s veracity this week. One is about a president
lying about his signature, transformative legislative
achievement, while his administration
lies and
prevaricates some more in the face of being caught selling the
American public a bill of goods. The second
initially centered around a senator
lifting movie-description passages from Wikipedia in his
speeches. You could almost see the thought bubble around Rand
Paul’s head–how could they possibly be nitpicking me in
this of all weeks? But that is exactly the wrong response, both
externally and internally, as new revelations make even more
clear.

First came
word Sunday that a whole
1,318-word section of Paul’s book
Government Bullies was lifted from a Heritage Foundation
study (the think tank just shrugged). The
latest is that a September Washington Times
op-ed the senator wrote on mandatory minimums, and also

testimony he gave on the subject to the Senate Judiciary
Committee, was lifted from a recent piece by Dan
Stewart in The Week.

Taken together, these sloppy, undergraduate-level infractions
suggest strongly that Sen. Paul is running a loose ship, one not
currently ready for the prime time of winning a national
election.

“There are technicalities to
this, but nothing I said was not given attribution to where it came
from,” Paul
said prematurely last week, in response to the first wave of
Wikipedia discoveries. “[People are] making a mountain out of a
molehill….It’s a disagreement about how you footnote things.” By
“people” he especially meant MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who (along
with Buzzfeed) has been stoking this controversy: “She’s
been spreading hate on me for about three years now,” he
complained. On ABC’s
This Week on Sunday, Paul even wished out loud he could
challenge his critics to a duel.

There are two fundamental problems to this kind of defensive
response. The first is managerial–what kind of message do you send
staff by waving off such juvenile, 100% avoidable unforced errors
as “technicalities”? That’s like putting up a sign in the office
saying “substandard work welcome here.” In a world of free plagiarism-detection
services, the time to begin
scrubbing old speeches for possible problems was last
week, when the senator was busy lashing out at his critics.

The second problem, which cuts straight to the heart of the
difference between Rand Paul and his dad, is that he’s actually
trying to win the presidency. If your goal is to genuinely
compete in a general election with your once-marginalized ideas,
instead of building a revolutionary movement at the margins, then
you don’t need to be as clean as the competition–you need to be
cleaner. Why? Call it The Weird Man’s Burden.

Rand Paul, like his father, has
a lot of “weird” ideas, at least in the cramped context of how
“responsible” two-party politics and governance has played out over
the past several decades. He thinks the drug war is a failure and
has introduced ways to peel it back. He wants to balance the budget
in five years, and slash several federal departments. He believes
in the Fourth Amendment. He is anti-interventionist to the point
that when I asked him repeatedly earlier this summer to name
American military conflicts during his lifetime he would have
retroactively supported, the only he came up with was deposing the
Taliban after 9/11. You and I may think those positions are within
the bands of normality, but libertarians are still
less than one-quarter of the population. 

The Weird Man (and Woman, bien sur), very crudely
speaking, has two broad avenues available for changing the system:
from within, and from without. Since us weirdos are often, well,
weird, there’s a natural attraction toward hopeless,
beautiful, philosophically pure fires on the sidelines. (This isn’t
libertarian-specific—it’s true of any group whose
issue or issues have been consistently disregarded over time.)
Henry David Thoreau wasn’t trying to fix slavery and imperialistic
war from within Washington, he simply refused to pay his taxes and
headed off into the woods to write. It is emotionally satisfying to
give the finger to The Man, and out there on the margins it is an
affirmation, not an occasion for self-reflection, when the
mainstream and its apologists attack you, whatever the
reason. 

The other avenue for Weird Man change-making goes
not into the woods, but into the streets, television screens, and
halls of power. It is an inherently compromising approach–even
Martin Luther King was dismissed in his lifetime as a sellout. As
King and many of the most effective Inside-Gamers have learned,
however, it can be an incredibly effective tactic to present your
claims with more dignity, decorum, and “self-purification” than
the mainstream you aim to change. Think about it–gay rights at
first was the stuff of revolutionaries and outrage-generating
paraders, but the gay marriage debate really took off with
a bullet when those two sweet old ladies got married in San
Francisco. The movement to legalize marijuana by necessity began
with the gray-ponytail crowd, and will end with square-jawed
businessmen in suits. This is not to state a preference for one
of the two main avenues of change–Rand wouldn’t be a national
politician without Ron’s rEVOLution–but rather to identify the
characteristics of the path that Rand has very obviously
chosen. 

So what does that mean in this instance? If he wants to run for
president, he needs to be better, not worse, and not
merely as good, as the competition when it comes to the most
seemingly trivial matters of comportment. Journalists, particularly
(though not only) from
those outlets sensitive to the allure that libertarian ideas
have on some progressive voters, will be gunning for every
possible gaffe, glitch, error of judgment, and stated deviance. He
should consider it an honor to be challenged, instead of a
challenge to get huffy about.

People who choose the Inside Game know, or at
least should know, that the deck is stacked against them,
and that they will be judged more harshly. Those were always the
rules. On the upside, being the first real truth-teller inside an
empire of lies carries with it enormous galvanizing potential.
Whining about being picked on in this context is like complaining
about getting fouled when you drive to the hoop against Bill
Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn. The answer is to dunk the damned
basketball, not bitch to the refs. And for god’s sake, make sure
your shoes are tied.

It’s actually helpful for Rand Paul’s presidential ambitions to
be having these mini-kerfuffles in November 2013. It’s doubtful
that they will have any impact on the 2016 race, and he could
clearly use the practice. 

If you’re a fan of comic books
or other types of serial fiction, you’re probably familiar with the
concept of the “retcon”—a made-up word that stands for “retroactive
continuity.”

For the not-so-geeky, the basic idea is that the authors of some
long-running storyline change previously established facts within
the narrative. Often the idea is to facilitate new storylines,
or, less generously, to help struggling serial writers work
themselves out of some difficult plot corner they’ve written
themselves into.

Fans sometimes complain about the way the practice can upend
complex stories that have been developing for years. But in
general, they’re expected to just go along and accept that the old
story is gone, and the new story is what really happened.
 

I wonder if President Obama is a comic book fan. Because with
the updated version of his oft-repeated promise that individuals
who like their health plans can keep them, he’s essentially
retconned himself.

Here’s how Obama
described his promise yesterday: “Now, if you had one of these
plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really
liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t
changed since the law passed.”

This isn’t just an update. It’s a backwards revision. Obama is
not just changing his claim going forward—he’s attempting to alter
what he said in the past as well. 

Let’s look through some back issues for a moment. Here’s what
Obama used to say about the circumstances under which you can keep
your health plan, via New York Magazine. 

Got that? If you’re happy with your plan, nobody’s changing it.
If you like your plan, you can keep it. You will keep it. Nobody’s
changing it. 

There are no exceptions here, no qualifications or caveats. It’s
a promise, as Obama has said, period.
No matter what. 

This is what Obama actually said. But now he’s saying it’s not.
He’s covering for his old lie with a new one—an insistence that he
never misled in the first place. And he’s hoping that everyone just
goes along. The most ardent fanboys might buy it. But most people,
I suspect, will see it for the artless and desperate revisionism
that it is. 

Libertarian gubernatorial
candidate Robert Sarvis’ campaign slogan: “Open Minded and Open for
Business” has to be one of the most copacetic I’ve ever
encountered. If Sarvis can clear the 10 percent electoral benchmark
that would give the Libertarian Party a line on the ballots of the
Old Dominion through 2021, offering Virginians a way to get beyond
the intellectually bankrupt so-called major parties. The
Danville Register and Bee
summed up the situation well in its editorial endorsement of
Sarvis:

Both the Democrats and Republicans failed to come up with good
gubernatorial candidates this year. If we were to endorse either
McAuliffe or Cuccinelli, we would be playing their game. “If you
always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve
always got,” the saying goes.

Robert Sarvis offers a real alternative this year, a break from
the two-party paradigm that has not served us well.

As a Libertarian, Sarvis favors restraints on the size and scope
of government. We’re comfortable with that.

“I realized that the Republican Party, at least in Virginia, in
the current era, is not a good vehicle for liberty candidates,”
Sarvis told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in August. “Republicans are
very strident on personal issues. When they talk about liberty,
they don’t mean any personal issues, there is very little respect
for personal autonomy.

“And on economic issues, it’s almost like they don’t believe in
what they talk about. They talk about limited government, but they
are just as bad as the other party at cronyism, raising taxes and
growing government.”

If there is one knock on Sarvis’ record, it is this: He has
never held elected office. If he wins on Tuesday, he would have to
navigate a swamp of partisan politics in Richmond.

But as a conservative, he would be a political kindred spirit
with many of the Republicans in the General Assembly. We believe he
could be more than just a novelty candidate in 2013, but the kind
of governor who inspires confidence from Virginians and respect
from other members of the General Assembly.

What we won’t get from Sarvis is a big-government agenda. In a
year when so many other things have gone wrong, a young man with a
new way of looking at our old problems is just what the Old
Dominion needs. We’re not interested in what Robert Sarvis can do
for the Libertarian Party; we’re interested in what this young,
intelligent and highly-motivated family man can do to change the
two-party trap we’ve gotten ourselves into.

I’m off to the polls in a bit to cast my ballot for a candidate
who offers more than the usual lesser-of-two-evils electoral
choice.