Kevin Bjornson wrote: KB> The constitution offers no method for a state to secede. <KB
Yes, and that constitutional defect was associated with what was by far America's bloodiest and most tragic war. M Carling wrote: M> I'm not saying we *need* a naked angels dancing on pinheads plank. I'm just saying that we need one *more* than we need a secession plank. <M There is no constitutional defect related to naked angels on pinheads, and no war was ever fought over naked angels either. Our platforms from 2004 back to as far as 1990 advocated an unconditional "right to political secession by political entities, private groups, or individuals". This sentence was perhaps the most embarrassing one in those platforms, as it in effect made the LP 1) endorse anarchism and 2) take the unpopular and arguably wrong side in the Civil War. That's why the Greatest Hits draft replaced it with the moderate 1972 secession language, which avoided both embarrassments by imposing these conditions on secession: only by regions, only by majority vote, only with protection of minority rights, and only if the region becomes as free as its parent. I don't see anything kooky or "repugnant" about this 1972 language, and I doubt secession was ever used against our candidates before this language was replaced with the kooky version (presumably during the 1975 Rothbard/Evers rewrite). Nevertheless, the only immediate work that the 1972 language is doing in the Greatest Hits draft is to deflect possible accusations by radicals that the draft has a conceptual hole compared to the 2004 Platform. If people as smart as Carling and Shuey and Capozzi can't distinguish the reasonable 1972 language from the later doubly-kooky language, then it's not worth keeping. Bob Capozzi wrote: BC> actually, susan, if an adult has sexual contact with a child, i'd call that molestation. like i said, i could look up which platform allowed for this. if i recall, that one was fixed prior to portland. <BC All platforms from at least 1990 through 2004 called for "repeal of all laws that restrict anyone, including children, from engaging in voluntary exchanges of goods, services, or information regarding human sexuality, reproduction, birth control, or related medical or biological technologies". Platforms from at least 1990 included a controversial Children's Rights plank, which was removed for the 1996 platform. That lengthy plank opposes "all legally created or sanctioned discrimination against (or in favor of) children, just as we oppose government discrimination directed at any other artificially defined sub-category of human beings". This presumably includes laws that try to protect minors from e.g. psychotropics or incest. The web's most complete archive of past LP Platforms is at http://marketliberal.org/LP/Platforms/. KB> the feds should not be allowed to levy direct taxes (except user fees) and would get funding through the state govs (this would be an additional check on fed power). KB One of the most interesting libertarian think pieces I've read in the last couple years is a paper about "cellular democracy <http://www.foldvary.net/works/auspc.pdf> " by the LP's own Professor Fred Foldvary of Santa Clara University here in Silicon Valley. It advocates "a governance structure of cellular, bottom-up, multi-level voting, with public revenue flowing up from the lower to the upper levels". A similarly interesting paper <http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.22942/pub_detail.asp> was by Michael Greve of the American Enterprise Institute on the importance of the Constitution creating competition among branches and levels of government..Both of these papers have forever changed my views on how government should be organized -- a question that is orthogonal to, and in some ways more important than, what governments should do. Unfortunately, the LP's anarchist ancestry has given it a huge blind spot for the fascinating and important academic literature related to design of government institutions. M Carling writes: M> Insider trading is a serious but subtle form of fraud. <M If it currently can be considered fraud, that's only because of some expectations and contractual arrangements that are not the only possible practice. If I "commit" an insider trade, I can only be defrauding either my transactor or my fellow shareholders. We can just tell would-be transactors that -- if they care -- from now on they need to demand explicit contractual assurances that the other party did not possess inside information. Defining and enforcing such assurances would of course be a nightmare, which is why insider trading laws are so problematic right now. We can also tell shareholders who care about insider trading that they need to investigate whether the corporation defines and enforces rules against insider trading, and to not buy the stock if the corporation doesn't. Thus with the right configuration of expectations, insider trading reduces to mere contract enforcement. This is reminiscent of Coase's Nobel-Prize-winning insight that if transaction costs are low enough, then markets will take care of externalities no matter how you assign initial property rights -- as long as you explicitly assign them. (The difference, of course, is that you don't need efficient micro-torts to run stock markets.)
