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The libertarian movement predates the Libertarian Party and will survive after it is gone. There was a time when radical libertarians like Samuel Edward Konkin III denounced formation of a “libertarian” politicial party as incompatible with libertarianism properly understood. With evisceration of the LP platform in recent years by “small government” statists longing to join the ruling class, the Ron Paul GOP presidential campaign has served not to shout out the irrelevancy of the Libertarian Party so much as serve as the heavy duty exclamation point punctuating that death cry that the LP already delivered to itself.

A shutdown of the Libertarian Party would get radicals and moderates out of each others hair. Radicals could pursue the long neglected non-electoral strategies for long-term radical change and moderates could apply their energies to seeking small reforms inside the major parties, as Ron Paul does. Sufficient social space for needed overlap between wings and their ideological cross-fertilization would exist organizationally in groups like ISIL and the Advocates for Self-Government, as well as out on the internet in political discussion forums of all sorts generally.

The first step in a campaign to shut down the LP would be to develop content for a web site comprehensively laying out both radical and moderate libertarian cases for shutting down the Libertarian Party as counter-productive to the cause of libertarianism.

DEATH WITH DIGNITY?

Is the market ready for this? Does the support exist for such a project? Can libertarians take responsibility for cleaning up their own mess?

Or should the Libertarian Party instead be left to wither on the vine and further become even more of a sad parody of the ideals of the thousands of activists, including myself, who put huge amounts of their lives and treasure into building it?

If the membership of the Libertarian Party wants to shut down the LP, they can do so at an LP national convention by amending Article 2 of the LP bylaws — the part that lists the duration of the party as “perpeptual”. It will take a 7/8 majority.

If the membership are to be persuaded to adopt such a course of action, the case(s) for doing so will have to be properly presented to them.

The domain www.shutdownthelp.info has been registered.

I am seeking $2500 in funding to develop comprehensive content for that site in support of a potential LP shut down effort. It is my opinion that if $2500 can not be raised to fully spell out the case for shutting down the LP, then there wouldn’t be enough potential support for an actual attempt to shut down the LP to be worth trying.

Will you pledge a donation toward Death with Dignity for the LP so that the libertarian movement can develop a consensus to move on to other strategies? Or should the Libertarian Party just be ignored until it goes away?

Pledge using Fundable. You will not be billed if the $2500 pledge goal is not reached.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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So, anyway, the topic of Hume’s is-ought problem came up on this blog several months ago.

In short, the is-ought problem is a challenge to any attempted transition from any set of descriptive claims to any prescriptive claim. Most criticism of the is-ought problem concentrates on attempting to show that an “ought” can (in fact) be derived from an “is”, the premise of the is-ought problem being that ought can not be derived from “is”.

What’s been bugging me about the matter, though, is that I’ve not been able to discover why my initial neophyte’s take on it is flawed — namely, that the is-ought problem could be regarded as what I’ll call a “null statement” because it’s recursive. As I put it then:

“…it seems rather silly/self-contradictory to assert that since it supposedly IS impossible to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’, that we OUGHT not make reference to ‘ought’.”

In other words, the is-ought problem is itself an example of the is-ought problem. One doesn’t have to falsify the is-ought problem in order to disregard it because the recursiveness of the is-ought problem means that proponents of the is-ought problem have themselves provided all of the rationale necessary to disregard the is-ought problem — both as an objection to Rothbard’s natural law theory and generally.

I have, no doubt, just embarassed myself. Show me why I’m wrong.

UPDATE: Charles H. writes…

I wanted to weigh in on your (mis)interpretation of the is/ought problem. (There’s some dispute as to
whether the problem as it is most commonly phrased today can actually be traced to Hume.)

You seem to think that the is/ought problem is a sort of moral proclamation: that its point is to tell us what we *ought* to do vis-a-vis making moral proclamations. As I understand the problem, however, it’s a straightforward logical problem: there’s no way to get a conclusion of the form “one ought to do X” unless there is a premise that also contains an “ought.” In other words, there is no way logically to move from factual statements about the world alone to moral proclamations. It’s not that one *ought not* make moral proclamations, it’s that if one does, they don’t follow logically from non-moral premises.

Thanks, Charles. As far as I can tell, that’s a great answer. It’s not clear to me, however, in what way it can be merely a logical problem without ALSO qualifying as a moral proclamation that says “one ought to be logical”.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Today is Day 6 of the Antiwar.com fundraising drive for this quarter. As noted there:

On the first five days of our drive, 539 of you gave a total of $26,310. We need to pick up the pace to reach our goal of $70,000 to keep Antiwar.com running for the next quarter.

Please make your donation today.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Sheldon Richman: The Whining Empire

Excerpt:

“What’s more obnoxious than a person who constantly whines about the real and imagined injustices committed against him while ignoring his own injustices against others? A country that does the same thing.”

digg story

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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Joe Carr posted a summary of efforts by Kansas Mutual Aid and friends to counter the message of organized xenophobia put forth by the Minutemen at the recent MCDC conference here in Kansas City.

Kansas City Unites Against the Minutemen

The Minutemen Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) is a racist vigilante group that
carries out armed border patrols and harasses Latino/a workers and their
employers. They have ties to known hate groups such as the KKK and Arian
Nation. Controversy over the group erupted here when Kansas City Mayor
Funkhouser appointed Frances Semler, an active member of the MCDC to the
city Parks and Recreation Board. In response, Latino rights group La Raza
pulled their national convention from Kansas City, so the MCDC staged
their first national leadership conference here instead.

Upon learning they were coming, the Kansas Mutual Aid collective called
for an organized response. Quickly joined by others, we helped put
together a coalition of over 30 Civil Rights, Migrants Rights, religious
and progressive organizations and called ourselves the Common Table
Coalition. It was the largest and most diverse coalition seen by this city
in a long time.

Read more…

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Wendy McElroy speaks for me on this issue, right here as a matter of fact:

I have given up on the hope that the true authors of the Ron Paul Newsletter, which prompted so much discussion of racism within the movement, will come forward even to exonerate Paul. I now hope that, in light of backlash from the wider movement, those racist views are no longer presented as “libertarian.” They are simply personal views (and ones I find abhorrent) that some libertarians happen to hold along with their belief in individual rights. How such people reconcile their methodological individualism with ‘group think’ is beyond me. Happily, it is their problem and not mine.

Tags: Politics by Brad Spangler
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On the topics of both firearms and education comes a news report saying W.Va. May Offer Gun Training in Schools. Excerpt:

A significant drop in the number of hunters in West Virginia has left a hole in the state’s budget, and one lawmaker thinks he has a solution: Allow children to receive hunter training in school.

Three points immediately come to mind.

1. Opposed to public education — The term “public education” is a misnomer, in that what is commonly called “public” is actually “government”. As an anarchist, I am against the very existence of the state. I am, therefore, against state provision of services, including education, without necessarily being opposed to those services in and of themselves.
2. Firearms curriculum — Strictly within the realm of education, I think age-appropriate firearms safety education and self-defense training are obviously wise curriculum additions. Thus, firearms in the curriculum should not even be controversial in my opinion.
3. Hunting curriculum — I do question and condemn the focus of the initiative on hunting for sake of bumping up tax revenue. If firearms belong in an educational curriculum, it ought to be so for sake of firearms safety education and self-defense training in my opinion. Your opinion may vary. The way I see it, though, this sort of hunting focused firearms education for sake of tax revenue is sort of like a drivers-ed course that focuses on drag-racing for sake of bumping up fuel tax receipts. It’s evil to use influence gained via a violently-maintained monopoly over the educational system to alter behavior in order to maximize the potential milking of future taxpayers.

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