Henry Haller wrote: HH> As I have said before, I like the Greatest Hits platform, and think it is very principled. My main complaint about it was that it is not in the format that we have agreed to use. More to the point, I think having a Transition section is very important to make clear that we are not advocating a revolutionary change to these principles, but rather an evolutionary process to get there. <HH
A subtle thing to note about the Greatest Hits draft is that the words "immediate" and "repeal" are absent from it, whereas they occurred 14 and 47 times (respectively) in the 2004 Platform. It twice speaks explicitly of "transitioning" and "interim", and generally either states an atemporal abstract right or uses a verb/gerund that is consistent with gradualism -- like "favor", "separation", "divest", "restoring", "development", and "amending". Once we scrub away our accreted laundry lists of "immediate repeals", our underlying timeless principles do not inherently demand instantaneous utopian revolution. The LP can advocate transitions without engraving them into the Platform, where they might attract reincarnations of the old Rothbardian commandment against advocating any "order of destatization". I invite you and all our fellow gradualists to read the GH draft with fresh eyes and try to help expunge any remains of the old Platform language that so often served as a cudgel with which to attack Libertarians advocating any plan for increasing freedom if it had more than one phase. HH> The one plank I don't like is the Government Finance plank. I don't like supporting a "Balanced Budget" amendment; I would rather say we support a "Spending Limitation" amendment that prohibits the government from spending any more than it takes in during the previous year. <HH Good point. Since it already says the latter, I'll just take out the name of the amendment. This is an excellent example of how adding extraneous implementation details to our underlying principles tends to cause division rather than unity. HH> I would also suggest that some borrowing be allowed when a super majority of both houses of Congress declares a national emergency, (pragmatist that I am!). <HH Hold on now, if you're going to be THAT reasonable, then you may no longer be a representative sample of the purist camp. :-)
