Henry Haller wrote: HH> The Principle and Solution sections serve to keep us on principle, while the Transition section, if properly written, can satisfy those who want to see a short term agenda for the next election cycle. If we choose to ignore either of these two constituencies, we risk a major rift in the party that we can ill afford. <HH
Both of those constituencies are misguided. Given the available principled and <http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=324> self-consistent varieties of libertarianism, it's self-marginalizing for the Platform to pretend that absolutist zero-aggression anarcholibertarianism is the only thing that can "keep us on principle". It's equally unwise to try to keep the Bylaws-encumbered Platform up-to-date at each Convention as a legislative agenda for the next election cycle, especially when the Cato Institute already does such a good job with its biannual legislative <http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb109/index.html> handbook. HH> If anyone has a better solution to the question of how to keep both sides happy, please share it with us. <HH I'm not sure I'd even call it a "solution" to splice together 1) our most extreme anarchopurist vision with 2) our most pragmatic recurring short-term effort to propose legislation for the next Congress. What we need instead is a principled statement about the libertarian direction for each policy area -- a statement that is not so specific that it either 1) mandates a particular faction's goal state or 2) rules out commendable ways to make progress in the libertarian direction. Our Bylaws state that our purpose includes "moving public policy in a libertarian direction". Our Bylaws do not state that our purpose is to be an Underwriters Laboratory that tests public policy proposals for conformity with 1940's-style anarchopurist utopianism. The way to unify the LP around a Platform is not to just paste together contradictory wish lists from each LP faction. The way to unify the LP around a Platform is to write down what most liberty-lovers should be able to agree on, while not taking sides on the issues over which large numbers of liberty-lovers disagree. There is surely enough writing talent in the Platform-interested LP community to eloquently and elegantly describe what the Bylaws mean by "a libertarian direction" in public policy. If we can't do that, and instead insist on using the Platform as a battleground for disputes over tactics and issues and ultimate visions, then we as a party deserve the continuing failure that this will guarantee. We've heard prominent LRC members express approval of the approach underlying the draft Greatest Hits <http://marketliberal.org/LP/Platforms/2007.html> platform. I'm glad we have some self-described purists here, because we'll need to see if they agree that the draft describes a libertarian direction that can be interpreted as leading to where they want to go. I'm still waiting to hear the first substantive criticism that it doesn't do so. Dave Dellinger writes that principled vs. pragmatic is a false dichotomy, and I agree in both the sense he intends and in another sense. I agree not only that it's possible to define a pragmatic transitional path toward an ultimate goal of principled anarchopurist utopia. But I also think that there are self-consistent principled <http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=324> libertarian waypoints along the way, and that we should not dismiss as compromisers those who want to get off the Freedom Train when it reaches their ideal stop. For example, I'm a fire-breathing economics-oriented minarchist who's fully prepared to argue that his position is more libertarian -- i.e. more liberty-maximizing in the real world -- than aggression-abstaining ZAPsolutist anarcholibertarianism. But I reject the notion that this debate has to be settled before we can get the Freedom Train moving. And I of course utterly reject the notion that it's been settled that aggression-abstaining anarcholibertarianism is the "most libertarian" of the various flavors of libertarianism. It's indeed the most distant from the current American mainstream, but one blatantly begs the question if one assumes that degree of libertarian-ness is measured by degree of nonconformity with the status quo. Kevin Bjornson writes: KB> Self-described "anarcho-capitalists" don't literally advocate "anarchy" since they would still have agencies of retaliatory and defensive force. Many or most "anarchists" don't call such agencies "government". However, such are governments, because the dictionaries don't make that distinction. <KB Yes, I'm aware of the anarcholibertarian distinction between law and government. "Govern" has multiple senses in the dictionary, but the sense understood by most native speakers of English in the political context includes the notion of sovereign authority. Anarchists need to forswear bait-and-switch and have the courage to give us a name that describes all and only the institutions that they oppose. In mainstream political theory, that name is "government" -- by which I understand that institution, or hierarchy of institutions, that maintains a formal monopoly on the initiation of force in a given territory. An institution does not count as "government" in the political sense if, like a book club or condo association, it has no power to initiate force. The Zero Aggression Principle is inconsistent with having any such force-initiating institution(s) whatsoever. This is clearly the meaning of "government" that has been intended in every LP Platform since 1972. Thus it's fair in this context to define anarchism as the belief that institutions meeting this definition of "government" are unnecessary and undesirable.
