Carl Milsted wrote: CM> There is a GIGANTIC gulf between the amount of meat in a "reasonable" LP platform and the list of procedural reforms in the Contract with America. <CM
The LRC site says the Platform should be limited to changes "that can plausibly be enacted in the next term in office". By criticizing the CWA as insufficiently ambitious while claiming your platform is plausibly enactable, you seem to be trying to have it both ways. Your list of proposals -- replacing SS and income taxes, range voting, etc. -- cannot plausibly be enacted in the 111th Congress. Indeed, it's not plausible that they'll even be introduced as bills in the 111th Congress. It seems just as utopian to hope that we'll be writing such legislation in the 111th Congress as to hope that the anarchotopian 2004 Platform would be enacted in our lifetime. CM> Rather more than the Contract With America, methinks... <CM The CWA included a balanced budget and tax limitation constitutional amendment, a line item veto, denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, two-years-and-out welfare rule with work requirements, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis for regulations, product liability reform, etc. CM> Outside the LP, the word "platform" means what you refer to as a program. Those who encounter the platform assume that the platform is what the party wants to accomplish once it gains power. <CM Platform means program only for the Democrats and Republicans, for the very reason I said: "The platforms of the major parties are custom-written by the presidential nominee's campaign staff to emphasize the achievements and failures of the major parties in the last four years, and the specific changes the nominee would push in the next four years. There is no prospect of a third party writing laws in the next four years, and a third party has no legislative record to stand on, so its platform needs to be more constant and comprehensive." The main reason that the Democrats and Republicans have relatively unambitious platforms is that both just want to tinker with the present nanny state, and so their goal state is not far from the status quo. Look at these minor-party platforms: * http://www.gp.org/platform/2004/ * http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/Platform.htm * http://constitutionparty.com/party_platform.php * http://reformparty.org/platform. * http://sp-usa.org/platform/ None of them, even the Reform Party's, tries to be a legislative program for the next Congress. Many Libertarian strategists look at what the major parties do, and think that if we just mimic everything but their policies, we will mimic their electoral success too. Some strategists say we need our state and federal candidates to first win local non-partisan office -- the dog-catcher-first strategy. Others say we need to run on a platform that is more conversational and less comprehensive -- Contract With America envy. Still others say we need to distribute yard signs and wear suits and shake hands and kiss babies. All of these strategists are in danger of making the cargo cult mistake. The natives of Melanesia in the late 1940s built airports and radios of coconuts and straw in the hope that these would call down from the skies the planes that had stopped bringing precious cargo after the war ended. Unfortunately, there are systemic reasons <http://marketliberal.org/FixLP.html#WhyWeLose> why copying the habits of the major parties won't make us a major party. I doubt that very many people who could find the LP's Platform couldn't also find its Program. If that indeed were a problem, we could just always distribute the Program and Platform together. So no, the problem with the LP Platform has not been that it is broader than a 10-point Program or that it looks beyond the next Congress. The problem with the LP Platform has been that it is too explicitly radical. The way to fix the Platform is to replace its laundry lists of extremist and utopian proposals with general principles that imply direction without specifying exactly how far to go in that direction. CM> I proposed a program to various LNC members and other prominent libertarians after the convention. My proposal fell on deaf ears -- including a prominent member of the LRC, who said he would not support a program that conflicted with the platform. <CM If the Platform -- like the Greatest-Hits draft -- consisted of direction-oriented principles instead of utopian laundry lists, it wouldn't conflict with your Program. For a Program to remain relevant, it might need substantial revision at every convention. Personally, I think the LP should just endorse as its legislative program the biannual Cato Handbook For Congress (now called the Handbook For Policy) at http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb109/index.html. I don't know of any explicit conflicts between the Greatest-Hits draft Platform and the Cato Handbook. BH> the Platform should be a comprehensive but terse reference document for looking up where the party stands on any issue that might be of concern to a sizable number of Americans. <BH CM> Where the PARTY stands. Is the party to be a handful of Austrian philosophers and Randroids? Or is the party to be a sizeable coalition of freedom-lovers? <CM I'm neither an Austrian nor a Randian, and I don't know of anything specifically Austrian or Randian in my Greatest-Hits draft platform. CM> Platforms matter -- because people do care about them. If the platform didn't matter, why do so many fight the efforts at platform reform? <CM Anarchotopians fight platform reform because they care more about exhibiting their ideological purity than about increasing liberty in America. However, it's unfair to imply I said that "the platform didn't matter". I in fact said that the platform mattered a great deal to opinion leaders -- journalists, academics, policy analysts, etc -- and it's a big reason why they neither take us seriously nor present us to voters as being serious. CM> The platform should be something a large party can either agree with, or simply stomach because the other parties are worse. This means being less radical than what the purists want, but more radically libertarian than what either major party offers. <CM You're preaching to the choir. :-) The fundamental question here is how to draft a Platform that in Denver can win a head-to-head vote against the 2004 Platform but still removes the obstacles to increasing liberty that were contained in the 2004 Platform. Any effort to redefine the Platform as a near-term legislative program will invoke a firestorm of accusations that we're walking away from our principles. The problem with the old Platform was not its principles, but rather its insistence on utopia-tomorrow as the only way to apply the principles. The solution is not to omit both principles and utopia and describe only a pragmatic tomorrow. Rather, the solution is to keep the principles and omit both a pragmatic and utopian tomorrow in favor of principled implications about policy direction. The key to big-tent libertarianism is to unite freedom-lovers around the direction of increasing liberty. Describing only the first step is not as divisive as describing only an idealized final step, but it doesn't invoke confidence that we know what path we want to take, and it needlessly alienates those who want to go farthest along the path.
