----- Original Message ----- From: "matthew_reider" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hey - great responses to my original post. I wonder if I can take the question in another direction. It seems that there is some acknowledgement that the GOP is a second home to many libertarians. In my experience it seems to be a libertarian's primary party affiliation due to the lack of candidates on local ballots. I have many friends who claim to be "on the libertarian side of the republican spectrum." They are registered republicans who believe in a free market and do not believe ***** SRL: I am one of the former democrats. I left the democrats in disgust back in 1980 over Jimmy "Malaise Forever" Carter's rampant militarism (yeah sounds wierd today, doesn't it?). By the end of his term he had built up the hated Shah Reza Pahlovi into a monster that was torturing his own people and was on his way to aquiring nuclear weaponry, was still building up the hated Somoza regime in Nicauraugua, and was training Salvadoran death squads at the School of the Americas at Ft Benning, Georgia and had enacted the Carter Doctrine which made the Persian Gulf a US territory. In 1980, I was a candidate for delegate to the democrat convention pledged to Jerry "Governor Moonbeam" Brown. ***** Yet the GOP is a questionable alternative to libertarian ideals. This is a paradox. The Republican rhetoric appears to be supportive of the free market - yet it favors one side of the equation (business rights) over the other side of the equation (worker rights). In seems to me that a true libertarian would favor both sides of the equation equally. Business should not be regulated by government. But a worker's right to organize should also be unregulated. The Taft-Hartley Act prohibited labor practices such as jurisdictional strikes, secondary boycotts, picketing, closed shops etc. It allowed states to pass "right-to-work" laws - which were adopted by Republican states to limit union power within the workplace. But it flies in the face of free association - an ideal that is solidly libertarian on its face. I wonder, then, how republicans who claim to be libertarians reconcile favoring business owners over labor and worker's rights. As a libertarian, you need not agree that unions are beneficial or positive within a market economy, but isn't it my right to organize and fight for higher wages or worker safety? Here lies the contradiction of the "Libertarian Republican." It is a slight of hand used by the GOP to claim that they favor working Americans - when, in actuality, they are fighting take care of owners rights. I have yet to see any republican platform built upon both sides the labor / capital equation. ***** I agree that voting republican is a questionable alternative. But the democats are simply no better. FWIW, Taft-Hartley was simply an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act signed by Roosevelt. Taft-Hartley basically gave some civil rights to business owners. Taft-Hartley was wrong headed, as was the NLRA. The Libertarian position is be there should be no government interference in voluntary contractual obligations. The only winners have been lawyers to interpret NLRA and Taft-Hartley. PEACE Steven R. Linnabary, Treasurer Franklin County Libertarian Party (614) 891-8841 P.O.Box#115; Blacklick, OH 43004-0115 "When you make peaceful revolution impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable" John F. Kennedy ForumWebSiteAt http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
