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The remaking of a nation is typically a process that unfolds at a glacial pace over time. A few bellwether events however stand out, both as catalysts of change as well as signs for posterity on how the nation was remade. Siraj-ud-Daulahs defeat at Plassey, the reconstruction amendments after the American Civil War abolishing slavery, Nelson Mandelas release from Robben Island are some events to which historians have attributed special significance in shaping the future course of history of their respective nations.

Whenever India has a government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, there is a narrative that the nation, founded on values of the freedom movement helmed by the Indian National Congress, is being slowly remade. Central to such a narrative is the cultural project of the BJP asserting the rightful place of Hindus in the nation. That project is well-documented and such a national remaking is core to theraison dtreof the BJP. But with the passage of the three farm laws in Parliament, the prime minister has demonstrated a definitive intent to remake the nation economically. Sure, there have always been murmurs that BJP governments have traditionally been best friends of big business. But that is something that can be truthfully said of all major political parties in post-liberalization India. Yet, the farm laws are the boldest and most candid declaration by the BJP that New India will not be founded on amai-baap sarkarbut rather with the hard work of the individual farmer supplemented by the enterprise of the private sector. This is as bold as it is surprising.

At its core is a seriously contested economic argument for farmers prosperity. That Indian agriculture is not as productive as it can be is an acknowledged fact. Small land-holdings, the lack of credit available to farmers, outdated farming methods, scores of middlemen and a skew towards paddy and wheat owing to selective government price support all contribute to this state of affairs. The new laws choose to address one dimension of the problem the dominant role of the State in Indian agriculture.

To this end, one of the new laws ends the monopoly of the governments agricultural produce market committee that runs the localmandi. It gives farmers and traders the freedom to trade in any trade area, including on an electronic platform. The second law, in tandem, empowers farmers to enter into contracts directly with buyers bypassing middlemen who are an endemic feature of Indian agriculture. The third law, an amendment to the Essential Commodities Act, is most revealing it limits governmental intervention in the agricultural market only in extreme cases of war, famine and so on. This, as the government has been at pains to point out, has nothing to do with the minimum support price for paddy and wheat, which is not provided under the Essential Commodities Act. Nonetheless, it is a clear sign of the determination of the government to be a facilitator rather than an active price-setter and regulator of Indian agriculture.

This is a distinct vision of how Indian agriculture can grow from the State-supported model in vogue at present. Central to this vision is the growth of new agri-businesses, which are expected to compete with State procurement processes. Whether such businesses will lead to greater benefits for farmers or worsen their lot is a hypothetical question that can only have hypothetical answers at present. But the bottom line is this the new laws provide options to farmers to either sell to the State in themandior to private producers outside it. Simultaneously, it opens up the sector to a range of private actors whose enterprise is expected to make the system more productive. This combination of individual choice and invitation to enterprise is not primarily an economic argument for reform it is an ideological one.

Economic libertarianism of the kind that underlies the farm laws remove the State from the equation and let the market show the path to prosperity has largely been tangential to traditional Indian right-wing thought. This conflation between the cultural right and the economic right in recent times is a fundamentally American idea born out of a distrust of the State and the championing of limitless individual freedom. The Indian right has never shared this distrust of the State or advocacy of individual liberty. In fact, with the exception of the Swatantra Party, the major intellectual strand of right-wing politics in India, the Jana Sangh and now the BJP moored by the philosophy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has been that of cultural conservatism together with aswadeshiState that plays a dominant role in the economy. In some senses, that is classic conservative politics as Eric Kaufmann has recently written, Most voters lean left on economics and conservative on culture but no one represents them. This is whom the BJP has traditionally represented, more so with the diminishing political smartness of the Left in India.

But with the farm laws, the BJP has taken a distinct libertarian turn on economics. As a party avowedly resolute about reform, it could have chosen to reform Indian agriculture in a number of ways conclusive land titles for agricultural landowners would have been a game-changer that would increase the creditworthiness of farmers in one stroke. That it chose to whittle down the role of the State, something that it hasnt done despite indications that it would do so to the MGNREGA or to the National Education Policy, is an unraveling of the traditional understanding of the Indian right. From a culturally conservative party, it is also becoming the Indian variant of the Republican Party of the United States of America imbued by the doctrinaire belief that small government is the way to prosperity.

This is why the protests against the three farm laws enacted by the National Democratic Alliance government are the sternest test yet of the resolve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of remaking the nation. The protests against the CAA-NRC, almost a year to the day, despite their largescale support and longevity, made no headway in their objectives. This was unsurprising given the focus of the protests was support for minority groups that are politically unimportant for the BJP. But the farmer protests are an entirely different kettle of fish. After all, thekisanin traditional political terms is theannadata, to be given free electricity and exempted from payment of taxes. Electorally, given that agriculture is the primary source of livelihood of 58 per cent of the Indian population, the vote of the farmer is the holy grail. When faced with such largescale farmer protests, the prime minister was quick to offer compromises with folded hands and bowed heads clause-by-clause readings, amendments and assurances that the MSP would not be touched. Only time will tell whether this is smart politics to fulfil his new economic vision or an unraveling of the vision itself.

Each of the prime ministers offers demonstrates the knife-edge the nation is on at present. In their resolution lies the ultimate answer on whether the farm laws will be a bellwether event in the remaking of the Indian nation or simply yet another footnote in the glacial changes always afoot around us. The Singhu and Tikri borders are no longer mere outposts they are the sites where history is being written.

The author is Research Director, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.Views are personal

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History at the gates - Telegraph India

A new analysis from Sludge Magazine shows that Washington nepotism is just as unsurprisingly nepotistic and grossly disappointing as ever:

18 congressional Republicans and one Libertarian have received $21.7 million for 38 businesses with which they are associated. Nine Democrats received $6.1 million for 11 of their own businesses. An additional roughly $54 million went to nonprofits, think tanks and policy institutes, congressional caucuses, and higher education institutions tied to members of both parties.

[]

Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), net worth $77 million, received a $135,800 loan for his Geniecast, LLC.

Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), net worth $73.9 million and the fourth-richest member of Congress, received $2.8 million in loans for four of his 27 companies.

Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), net worth $60.9 million, received a loan of $1,070,000 for his KTAK Corporation. Hern, who owns 97 percent of the company, estimated its value at between $5 and $25 million last year.

Norman, net worth $43.4 million, received $306,520 for four of his 20 companies.

Mitch McConnell and wife Elaine Chao, with a combined net worth of $34.4 million, are tied to a loan for the Chao-family owned Foremost Maritime Inc. of $417,700.

Roger Williams (R-Texas), net worth $27.7, received $1,430,000 for his JRW Corporation. Last year, he valued the company at more than $50 million.

Greg Pence, net worth $12.6 million, received a loan of $79,441 for his Pence Group, LLC, which he valued on his financial disclosure as worth between $5 and $25 million.

T.J. Cox (D-Calif.), net worth $11.8 million, received $609,825 for two of his 26 businesses.

Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), net worth $10.9 million, is tied to a loan of $1,100,000.00 that went to her husband's law firm, Lowey Dannenberg P.C.

Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), net worth $10.4 million, received $974,100 for four of his car dealerships.

Ralph Abraham (R-La.), net worth $4.8 million, received loans of $38,300 for two of his four companies.

Earl Blumenaeur (D-Ore.), net worth $4.5 million, received $432,734 for his two companies.

Vicki Hartzler (R-Mo.), net worth $3.8 million, is tied to $451,200 for her husband's Heartland Tractor Company, which she valued at between $1 and $5 million and from which he claimed as much as $1 million in income last year.

Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), net worth $3.7 million, received $988,700 for his two family plumbing businesses.

While this kind of nepotistic corruption is always bipartisan, it is frustrating to note that Republicans were twice as likely to partake in such behavior. And of course, many of these same people also voted against giving more than $600 to citizens in the most recent round of COVID relief efforts, even after voting to provide immense relief to big businesses instead of smaller mom-and-pop shops.

Anecdotally, I've noticed that a lot of the conservative and Libertarian pundits opine about COVID relief being the single largest transfer of wealth to the already-wealthy and powerful. I agree with this assessment, and I agree that it's a problem. But I can't fathom how continuing to oppose any form of government relief and forcing businesses to resume as normal would help that either. It seems to me the problem rests with the same politicians who get voted into power on a platform of "The government is evil and corrupt!" who spend their entire lives trying to prove that prophecy true (and then somehow still get re-elected).

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Tens of million in CARES Act loans went to the families of just 28 Congresspeople - Boing Boing

It's tempting to wonder if history is made by stupid people as much as by clever people. The reputation of former adviser to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, was enhanced by a television drama which presented him as a deep thinker and a deft communicator, two gifts that don't always go together.

ot that there weren't other voices ready to explain how bumping yourself out of the single market was effectively imposing sanctions on yourself, the sort of treatment we usually reserve for rogue states.

One of the qualities of a truly great leader must surely be the ability to hold fast against all derision when you are sure you are right. It is also the mark of a fanatic.

We only get to find out which term applies when the story is over and history has passed its judgment.

Fortunately, there are tests we can apply to political figures while they are still alive. Arlene Foster agitated for Brexit without foreseeing the danger of a weakening of the Union. It's hard to see how posterity will vindicate that.

Maybe foreign capital will now pour into Northern Ireland and we'll all be so rich in 10 years' time that we'll be called the Orange Tiger.

We got a nice insight into the workings of the mind of one of our conviction politicians on Any Questions on Radio 4 last week. Sammy Wilson came out as seriously sceptical of the efforts to curtail the Covid-19 virus.

He said the Government and advisers had succumbed to "Project Fear". This is a phrase that was coined to dismiss the warnings about how bad Brexit could be. Sammy applied it to the reaction to the virus. Now it's the handy phrase for mocking any doubts about any policy.

Sammy scoffed at the "deplorable way" in which old people have been left "cowering in their homes", because of measures to control a pandemic which has affected very few of us.

He didn't exactly say, "Give me liberty or give me death", but he did say that we are being kept in a state of perpetual fear to prepare us to accept curtailments on our liberty, as if he thinks the curtailment of liberty is the core objective.

His solution would have been to "protect the vulnerable and let others get on with their lives". He didn't say how that could be done without curtailing the liberties of older people. (It can't.)

Sammy is 67 years old. He is one of the vulnerable himself. I'm a bit worried about how red his cheeks are. He is a portly man.

The implications of what he says are that he himself should be removed from society, out of reach of a virus that could kill him, and that people who are less likely to die should be free to blithely infect themselves and each other.

So, on the one hand, he is saying that old people are cowering in their homes and, on the other, that that's where they would be anyway if he was in charge.

He is demanding freedom from curtailments and then endorsing curtailments.

Sammy rants a lot and yet one of his repeat themes is that we are all getting over-exercised about something or other. Like the chances of a united Ireland.

That question was a prompt for further self-contradiction. He said that the Government handling of the virus has demonstrated the merits of being part of the United Kingdom, a bigger and richer country.

I should have been on that programme. Somebody should have been there to point out that the Irish Republic's infection levels are proportionately about a quarter of those in Northern Ireland.

And how come these measures, which he dismissed minutes earlier as "deplorable", are now evidence of the merits of the Union?

Sammy builds up arguments on different issues and doesn't check whether they contradict each other. Then he did it again.

There was a question about whether electric cars will ever be affordable. Sammy said the Government's Green plan was "Stalinist".

This from the man who wanted the vulnerable to be sectioned off from the rest of society. He said he drives a diesel van and that people should have the option of driving whatever car they think they need.

So, one minute he is the social engineer who will lock up the vulnerable and the next he is a free market libertarian who would let anyone drive whatever they liked, regardless of the impact on the environment. He's a libertarian when it suits him.

If the threat is a virus, then the response should be targeted and thorough.

And if it is climate change, then everyone should do as they please.

We should have more of our local politicians on Any Questions in the hope that they will unpack their thinking, or lack of it, as candidly as Sammy did.

In the style of the programme, there is often a light question at the end. This was the week in which Barbara Windsor died. One of the clips played over and over again in the news reports showed her as the landlady in EastEnders, ordering someone out of her pub.

So, who would Sammy order out of his pub? The Chief Medical Officer. Sammy didn't remember his name. That's how much attention he has been paying to him.

The case against Professor Chris Whitty (write it on your cuff, Sammy) is that he ordered the pubs closed without having gathered sufficient evidence of the extent to which Covid-19 might be spread in them.

Some things have to be taken on faith and it seems to me that one of the easier ones to accept is that drunk people mingling in a bar and bumping against each other and shouting and blathering and squaring up to each other are more likely to spread infection than people sitting down to a meal, well spaced from each other.

You get the feeling that Sammy, when we were hit with a pandemic, would have spent a year gathering data on how it spread before taking measures against it.

I hope Sammy has a happy and restful retirement and that it starts soon. In fact, I hope the same for a lot of our politicians.

But one thing we have learnt in this strange year is that daft as some of our politicians are, they are not exceptional. There are others as daft everywhere.

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Malachi O'Doherty: Sammy Wilson is a libertarian... but only when it suits him - Belfast Telegraph

Every ideology produces its own brand of fanatics, but theres something special about libertarianism.

I dont mean that as an insult, either. I love libertarians! For the most part, theyre fun and interesting people. But they also tend to be cocksure about core principles in a way most people arent. If youve ever encountered a freshly minted Ayn Rand enthusiast, you know what I mean.

And yet one of the things that makes political philosophy so amusing is that its mostly abstract. You cant really prove anything its just a never-ending argument about values. Every now and again, though, reality intervenes in a way that illustrates the absurdity of particular ideas.

Something like this happened in the mid-2000s in a small New Hampshire town called Grafton. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author of a new book titled A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, says its the boldest social experiment in modern American history. I dont know if its the boldest, but its definitely one of the strangest.

The experiment was called the Free Town Project (it later became the Free State Project), and the goal was simple: take over Graftons local government and turn it into a libertarian utopia. The movement was cooked up by a small group of ragtag libertarian activists who saw in Grafton a unique opportunity to realize their dreams of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community. Needless to say, utopia never arrived, but the bears did! (I promise Ill explain below.)

I reached out to Hongoltz-Hetling to talk about his book. I wanted to know what happened in New Hampshire, why the experiment failed, and what the whole saga can teach us not just about libertarianism but about the dangers of loving theory more than reality.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

How would you describe the Free Town Project to someone who doesnt know anything about it?

Id put it like this: Theres a national community of libertarians that has developed over the last 40 or 50 years, and theyve never really had a place to call their own. Theyve never been in charge of a nation, or a state, or even a city. And theyve always really wanted to create a community that would showcase what would happen if they implemented their principles on a broad scale.

So in 2004, a group of them decided that they wanted to take some action on this deficiency, and they decided to launch what they called the Free Town Project. They sent out a call to a bunch of loosely affiliated national libertarians and told everyone to move to this one spot and found this utopian community that would then serve as a shining jewel for the world to see that libertarian philosophies worked not only in theory but in practice. And they chose a town in rural New Hampshire called Grafton that already had fewer than 1,000 people in it. And they just showed up and started working to take over the town government and get rid of every rule and regulation and tax expense that they could.

Of all the towns in all the world, why Grafton?

They didnt choose it in a vacuum. They actually conducted a very careful and thorough search. They zeroed in on the state of New Hampshire fairly quickly because thats the Live Free or Die state. They knew that it would align well with their philosophy of individualism and personal responsibility. But once they decided on New Hampshire, they actually visited dozens of small towns, looking for that perfect mix of factors that would enable them to take over.

What they needed was a town that was small enough that they could come up and elbow the existing citizenry, someplace where land was cheap, where they could come in and buy up a bunch of land and kind of host their incoming colonists. And they wanted a place that had no zoning, because they wanted to be able to live in nontraditional housing situations and not have to go through the rigamarole of building or buying expensive homes or preexisting homes.

Wait, what do you mean by nontraditional housing?

As the people of Grafton soon found out, a nontraditional housing situation meant a camp in the woods or a bunch of shipping containers or whatever. They brought in yurts and mobile homes and formed little clusters of cabins and tents. There was one location called Tent City, where a bunch of people just lived in tents from day to day. They all united under this broad umbrella principle of personal freedom, but as youd expect, there was a lot of variation in how they exercised it.

What did the demographics of the group look like? Are we talking mostly about white guys or Ayn Rand bros who found each other on the internet?

Well, were talking about hundreds of people, though the numbers arent all that clear. They definitely skewed male. They definitely skewed white. Some of them had a lot of money, which gave them the freedom to be able to pick up roots and move to a small town in New Hampshire. A lot of them had very little money and nothing keeping them in their places. So they were able to pick up and come in. But most of them just didnt have those family situations or those 9-to-5 jobs, and that was really what characterized them more than anything else.

And how did they take over the local government? Did they meet much resistance?

When they first showed up, they hadnt told anyone that they were doing this, with the exception of a couple of sympathetic libertarians within the community. And so all of a sudden the people in Grafton woke up to the fact that their town was in the process of being invaded by a bunch of idealistic libertarians. And they were pissed. They had a big town meeting. It was a very shouty, very angry town meeting, during which they told the Free Towners who dared to come that they didnt want them there and they didnt appreciate being treated as if their community was an experimental playpen for libertarians to come in and try to prove something.

But the libertarians, even though they never outnumbered the existing Grafton residents, what they found was that they could come in, and they could find like-minded people, traditional conservatives or just very liberty-oriented individuals, who agreed with them on enough issues that, despite that angry opposition, they were able to start to work their will on the levers of government.

They couldnt pass some of the initiatives they wanted. They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district and to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, or to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone, some of the outlandish things like that. But they did find that a lot of existing Grafton residents would be happy to cut town services to the bone. And so they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, things like road services and fire services and even the public library. All of these things were cut to the bone.

Then what happened over the next few years or so?

By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a towns success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The towns legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.

So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldnt put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didnt have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.

Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.

When did the bears show up?

It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then youre essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.

One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didnt want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat.

As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.

It was an absolute mess.

Were talking about black bears specifically. For the non-bear experts out there, black bears are not known to be aggressive toward humans. But the bears in Grafton were ... different.

Bears are very smart problem-solving animals. They can really think their way through problems. And that was what made them aggressive in Grafton. In this case, a reasonable bear would understand that there was food to be had, that it was going to be rewarded for being bolder. So they started aggressively raiding food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up.

There are lots of great examples in the book of bears acting in bold, unusually aggressive manners, but it culminated in 2012, when there was a black bear attack in the town of Grafton. That might not seem that unusual, but, in fact, New Hampshire had not had a black bear attack for at least 100 years leading up to that. So the whole state had never seen a single bear attack, and now here in Grafton, a woman was attacked in her home by a black bear.

And then, a few years after that, a second woman was attacked, not in Grafton but in a neighboring town. And since the book was written and published, theres actually been a third bear attack, also in the same little cluster and the same little region of New Hampshire. And I think its very clear that, unless something changes, more bear attacks will come.

Luckily, no ones been killed, but people have been pretty badly injured.

Youre fair, even sympathetic, to the libertarians you profile in this book, but I do wonder if you came to see them increasingly as fanatics.

You know, libertarian is such a weird umbrella term for a very diverse group of people. Some libertarians are built around the idea of white supremacy and racism. That was not the case with these libertarians. Most of the libertarians that I met were kind, decent people who would be generous with a neighbor in any given moment. But in the abstract, when theyre at a town meeting, they will vote to hurt that neighbor by cutting off, say, support for road plowing.

So I guess what I noticed is a strange disconnect between their personalities or their day-to-day interactions and the broader implications of their philosophies and their political movement. Not sure Id use the word fanatic, but definitely a weird disconnect.

Theres a lesson in this for anyone interested in seeing it, which is that if you try to make the world fit neatly into an ideological box, youll have to distort or ignore reality to do it usually with terrible consequences.

Yeah, I think thats true for libertarianism and really all philosophies of life. Its very easy to fall into this trap of believing that if only everybody followed this or that principle, then society would become this perfect system.

Did any of the characters in this story come to doubt their libertarianism as a result of what happened in Grafton? Or was it mostly a belief that libertarianism cant fail, it can only be failed?

One of the central characters in the book is a firefighter named John Babiarz. And John had the distinction of running for the governor of New Hampshire on the libertarian platform, and did better than any other gubernatorial libertarian candidate has ever done in America. And he invited the libertarians to come in and begin the Free Town Project. He was their local connection.

But by the end of the project [sometime in 2016], he had really drawn some distinctions between himself and many of the extremist libertarians who came to town. He still considers himself to be a libertarian, and a very devout one at that, but by the end of the project he was at odds with most of the other libertarians. And it shows that until you actually have a libertarian-run community, its very hard to say what it is or what it will look like.

In the end, do you think these people bumped up against the limits of libertarianism, or is this more about the particular follies of a particular group of people in a particular place?

I think they bumped up against the follies of libertarianism. I really do think that there is a hard wall of reality that exists thats going to foil any effort to implement libertarianism on a broad scale. And I think if you gave a libertarian the magic wand and allowed them to transform society the way that they wanted to, it wouldnt work the way they imagined, and I think it would break down just as Grafton did.

Maybe thats the lesson.

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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: Author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling on the Free State Project - Vox.com

Nothing clarifies the mind more than a faceless bureaucrat shutting down your business and snuffing out your dreams because of science.

We are entering a libertarian moment in the annals of American history.

The government overreach to battle a virus that kills far less than 1 percent of the people it infects will slowly and then all at once spark a counter-reaction.

We saw it with a pub owner in Staten Island who resisted when the mayor of New York shut him down and drew thousands of angry protesters to his cause. We saw it with a restaurant owner whose angry video went viral as she bitterly complained about the capricious decision of the mayor of Los Angeles to close her down while allowing a movie production to proceed right next door.

We see it with Facebook groups of angry moms and dads who want their local schools to open because their children are failing at virtual education but wont be successful because of the unions.

Right now, this anger is spontaneous, uncoordinated, lacking real leadership, because, well its libertarian and thats how libertarians roll.

But a clever politician can and should turn this angry moment into a movement.

The Republican Party has traditionally been described as having three legs in a stool: social conservatives, neo-conservatives and libertarians.

Thanks to President TrumpDonald TrumpTrump calls on Georgia AG not to have other Republicans oppose election lawsuit: report Pennsylvania GOP leader on breaking with Trump on election: 'I'd get my house bombed tonight' Lawmakers call for lowering health care costs to address disparities in pandemic MOREs populism, neo-conservatives self-deported from the GOP.

You would think that would leave social conservatives and libertarians to battle it out for the soul of the party, but I actually think there can be a meeting of the minds between the two philosophies.

The social conservative movement used to embrace the idea of having the government compel traditional values and strengthen families. But these days, social conservatives really just want the government to leave them alone.

The COVID-19 crisis has only accelerated the process of joining together the two remaining wings of the party. A government that closes churches but keeps big box stores open, a government that closes schools but keeps bars open, a government that closes playgrounds, small businesses and movie theaters but allows the elite to continue to golf, has lost the trust of the average Republican, no matter what wing of the party you inhabit.

And to be clear, I want big box stores, bars and golf courses to remain open. I want them all to remain open, because this is America and having the government close them down is not what this country is all about.

What would a libertarian Republican agenda look like in the era of President-elect Joe BidenJoe BidenPennsylvania GOP leader on breaking with Trump on election: 'I'd get my house bombed tonight' GOP Texas senator questions 'legal theory' behind Trump's lawsuit to challenge state's election results Nearly 30 staffers, members of Michigan legislature tested positive for COVID-19 this year MORE?

Well, first, it would become fiscally responsible again. Mitch McConnellAddison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellMembers of Congress should force leadership to hold a COVID-19 relief bill vote On The Money: Momentum stalls for COVID-19 relief bill | Congress barrels toward 'COVID cliff' | House passes stopgap bill to avoid government shutdown Senate rejects attempt to block Trump's UAE arms sale MORE, predictably, has been ahead of this curve and has tried to bring a semblance of spending sanity back to the conversation. This should continue.

Second, it would seek to make dramatic changes to school funding, giving parents more power to select the best schools for their children. Education dollars should flow to the kids, not to institutions that care more about the unions than they do the students.

Third, it would continue the Trump administrations effort to bring capital and hope to our most impoverished neighborhoods. Criminal justice reform works better if former inmates have employment opportunities and those jobs come from investments incentivized by enterprise zones.

Fourth, it would promote burden-sharing by our allies and strongly resist efforts by neo-conservatives to use the American military for any operations that dont protect our national security.

Fifth, it would work to protect small businesses from the capricious and overzealous actions of state and local officials to close them for health emergencies. The bar to close these businesses must be set higher than what we have seen in places like California and New York.

In sum, the agenda would make it the default position of our government to trust the people more than the bureaucrats, promote self-responsibility over collective responsibility, and protect freedom as our highest national value.

Get ready for the libertarian moment. It is coming to a protest near you.

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at http://www.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former Speaker Dennis HastertJohn (Dennis) Dennis HastertFeehery: The libertarian movement Feehery: How GOP takes back the House in two years Feehery: The 5 Ways Republicans can channel Trump without Trump MORE (R-Ill.), as communications director to former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) when he was majority whip and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).

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Feehery: The libertarian movement | TheHill - The Hill