John Shuey wrote to Howard Pearce: HP> Counter productive for what ? Winning control of state power ? Yes, I have no doubt of that. But then control of state power is what libertarians should be abhoring .,... not embracing so they can become "grownup" political parties like the dems and reps <HP
JS> Alas, the same bullshit that has kept the LP a non-factor for more than 30 years while liberty has continued to drain away. <JS John, surely you can see the irony of railing at anarchists to complain that they merely rail at the state. We instead need to practice the pragmatism that we preach, and constructively find common ground with all our fellow less-archists. We shouldn't use the zero-aggression anarchopurists on this forum as whipping boys for our complaints about present and past LP platforms and strategy. Instead, we should use them to anticipate what objections we reformers will encounter in Denver, and how we can find a positive-sum constructive solutions that deal with those objections appropriately. So please judge each of your emails the way you would judge a platform plank: does it make progress toward our goal, or is it mostly posturing? So again, I'd ask our purists like Howard (and Henry Haller and Dave Dellinger any others) to avoid facile generalities about "abhoring state power", and get specific about how "principled" the Platform needs to be. In particular, can an LP Platform really not be "principled" without calling for any of the following? * legalized child prostitution ["repeal of all laws that restrict anyone, including children, from engaging in voluntary exchanges of goods, services, or information regarding human sexuality"]; * immediate repeal of all drug laws, without regard to kind of drug; * opposition to "all attempts to ban weapons", without regard to kind of weapon; * immediate non-enforcement of all tax laws; * "repeal of all taxation"; * replacement of all environmental protections with "trespass and nuisance" torts; * "elimination of all government fiat money"; * privatization of public roads. What specifically is insufficiently principled about the Greatest Hits draft platform at http://marketliberal.org/LP/Platforms/2007.html ? I'm going to keep asking these questions until I can find a zero-aggression purist who can come up with an answer. [Does anybody know why postings have lately been getting duplicated or worse? The site shows six copies of Shuey's "bullshit" message. If it continues I can ask the Yahoo Groups engineers, who work across the street from my building.]
