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Libertarian Cliff Hyra formally kicked off his campaign for governor Thursday, saying he would work to exempt the first $60,000 of household income from state income taxes, legalize marijuana and pardon people imprisoned solely for using drugs.

Hyra, 34, a lawyer who was raised in Northern Virginia and lives in Mechanicsville, called for an inclusive and innovative Virginia and for a state government that has respect for all Virginians, no matter their beliefs or their backgrounds.

Hyra, who is making his first bid for elective office, says his mother is a Democrat and his father is a Republican. He says he considered himself a Democrat until he went to college and that he has been a Libertarian for most of his adult life.

I feel strongly about empowering people to make their own choices, he said, because I care about other people and about our community and I fear the corrosive effects of a government that thinks that it knows whats best for everybody and is prepared to force everyone to act accordingly.

He made his announcement in bustling downtown Richmond at the corner of West Broad and North Jefferson streets. Hyra sometimes had to raise his voice to be heard above the din of passing buses and construction equipment working on the bus rapid transit project.

On taxes, Hyra would exempt the first $60,000 of household income. On his campaign website, he says he would avoid the massive marriage penalty by allowing individuals to exempt $30,000. Taxable income above that would be taxed at a flat 5.75 percent.

He says the average household would pay no state income tax and would have a savings of $3,000 per year.

During an interview Wednesday at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Hyra said preliminary calculations indicate his plan would cost somewhere between $3 billion and $4 billion.

We have some work to square that, with the states finances, he said.

He said state revenues are projected to rise and that freezing growth of government will take us part of the way there.

He said he also is looking at recommendations by a panel headed by former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder which in 2002 made a series of suggestions about slimming state government.

He also wants to look at state-owned real estate that is sitting vacant or is underutilized and could be made more efficient. In addition, he said he wants to accrue savings through reforms in the criminal justice system.

Ed Gillespie, the Republican nominee for governor, is emphasizing an across-the-board tax cut as the centerpiece of his agenda.

Gillespies proposal centers on a 10 percent cut to the individual income tax rate, phased in over three years. For the states highest income bracket which covers income above $17,000 the rate would drop from 5.75 percent to 5.15 percent.

Gillespies campaign says his plan, once fully implemented, would save a typical Virginia family nearly $1,300 a year, a figure based on average household income of $135,000.

Using the median household income of $69,945, the savings would be $674, according to the Gillespie campaign.

As for the drug issue, Hyra said Thursday that Were spending too much money enforcing the counterproductive prohibition on marijuana use.

He said that as governor he would push to legalize marijuana and until legalization becomes possible I would order that enforcement of the marijuana prohibition is given the lowest possible priority.

He said he would pardon those in prison solely for their use of drugs.

In 2016, according to the Virginia State Police, contributing law enforcement agencies reported 39,666 drug-related arrests in Virginia and marijuana accounted for 58.7 percent of the arrests.

Those figures do not distinguish between simple possession and distribution or manufacturing.

Hyra said he favors putting marijuana on the same level as tobacco and alcohol, which he said would let the business grow and generate tax revenue and improve lives of Virginians.

Hyra also called for the establishment of more charter schools, saying: I want to put choice and competition into the education system here in Virginia.

Nine public charter schools are operating in Virginia, according to the Virginia Department of Education. Three are in Richmond the Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts, the Richmond Career Education and Employment Academy and the Metropolitan Preparatory Academy.

On health care, Hyra wants to leverage the power of choice and competition to improve access and decrease costs.

He said he wants to eliminate Virginias Certificate of Public Need program, which requires anyone who wishes to build a new hospital or imaging facility go through an application process with the state.

He is against two proposed natural gas pipelines, seeing them as the federal government taking private property to benefit private companies.

Hyra grew up in Falls Church and in the Springfield section of Fairfax County. He graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in aerospace engineering and from George Mason Universitys law school.

Hyra started an intellectual property law practice in 2008. He joined Symbus Law Group as a partner in 2012 and specializes in patent and trademark law.

He and his wife, Stephanie, have three young children and are expecting a fourth in August. In 2015, they moved to Mechanicsville, Hyras wifes hometown.

In the 2013 race for governor in which Democrat Terry McAuliffe edged Republican Ken Cuccinelli Libertarian Robert Sarvis received 6.5 percent of the tally, garnering more than 146,000 votes.

Hyra asserted that hes proposing more substance than Gillespie or Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic nominee.

I want to push actual ideas, he said, adding: I think if you want actual change, you should support me.

Hyra stressed that he wants to run a civil campaign.

In the interview Wednesday at The Times-Dispatch, he said with a laugh: If I didnt respect people who disagree with me, I would not respect hardly anyone.

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Libertarian candidate for governor of Virginia calls for tax cut ... - Richmond.com

TUPELO Mayor Jason Shelton will provide a keynote address this Saturday at a political event in Biloxi hosted by the state Libertarian Party.

Shelton is a Democrat and will join a roster of speakers that otherwise tilts Republican and Libertarian.

At least some deological diversity is precisely the point of the gathering, which is dubbed Loungin with Libertarians.

Promotional material for the event describes it as a venue for Libertarians and adherents of other political viewpoints to interact and network.

This is the fifth such Loungin event. It will be held at the White House Hotel in Biloxi.

Shelton himself is an advocate of a more collaborative and less ideologically blinkered political discourse. He has criticized the major U.S. political parties as a preoccupation with partisan advantage to the neglect of a functioning government.

With that in view, Shelton is happy to consider his appearance at a Libertarian event as en effort to help leverage his elected officer to broker a different kind of political environment.

I do feel a personal responsibility to do what I can to make it better, Shelton said in a recent interview with the Daily Journal. As mayor of Tupelo, you have a pretty high profile job.

Shelton himself is comfortable in a bi-partisan environment. He has twice now been comfortably elected as a Democrat in a traditionally Republican city and maintains a strong working relationship with a City Council under the control of a Republican supermajority.

Though he hasnt ruled out a run for higher office, Shelton has avoided strongly ideological fights during his tenure in office and has focused instead on what he calls good government.

Other speakers at the Saturday Libertarian event include a Republican member of the Biloxi City Council and the independent mayor of McLain. A member of the state Libertarian Partys executive committee will also deliver remarks. Other guests expected to attend include the newly-elected Republican mayor of Ocean Springs who identifies as largely Libertarian in outlook.

Libertarians generally align themselves with the Republican Party because of their strong support of a minimal federal government, low regulation and light taxation.

The party typically differs from traditional Republican stances, however, on foreign policy and national security issues as well as civil liberties and drug policy.

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Shelton to keynote Libertarian event on coast - Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

Within the past week, Ive had a drastic and sudden change of heart regarding my political ideology. For years, I considered myself a Thoreauvian Minarchist, a term I made up to reflect the influence Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau had on my libertarianism. My ideology, until my recent conversion, can be summed up as a melding of the Founding Fathers rationale for the formulation of government, as can be found in The Federalist Papers, with the self-reliance and spirituality of Transcendentalism.

As Emerson and Thoreau would say, I am still following my own genius, but it has led me into a new ideological realm: modern progressivism.

First, a little background. In my extended family, my grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles are conservatives, whereas my cousins are mostly liberals. My mother is not very political, but she could be described as right-of-center, and my father is a Reagan Republican. My extended family is quite large, and we would often discuss politics at reunions. I pride myself in understanding and appreciating both left and right sides of an issue, though I typically agreed with the more conservative side; I was more or less a conservative for a long time, but became disillusioned when the size of government never shrunk when the GOP held the reins of government and studied, and then embraced, libertarianism.

However, I am jumping ship yet again. The recent political strife over repealing and replacing Obamacare has enlightened me to a fact heretofore unknown to me. In 2010, I was very much against the imposition of Obamacare, but in recent weeks Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has warned that if Obamacare is repealed, people will die.

I took a few philosophy classes in college, one of which centered on logic. By applying a critical lens to what Warren has claimed, I realized that if Obamacare is not repealed, people will not die. I may be an outlier, but I do not want to die. I eat healthy, exercise regularly, and am risk-adverse to the point of not engaging in any sport or activity that requires a helmet, I dont attend Scottish soccer matches, and I drive well below the speed limit, often with my four-ways flashing.

There is nothing wrong with changing a position upon the availability of new information. I was very critical of Obamacare upon its passage and implementation, but upon learning that Obamacare is a source of immortality, I am now one of its staunchest supporters.

***

When I first started seeing all these ads and interviews about people dying, I thought, Im pretty sure everyone dies eventually. Sadly, Im not as eloquent as one of my favorite writers.

Ernest Hemingway has a few good quotes about death. From A Farewell to Arms, his novel about a double-amputee: The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. But you will receive good treatment if cared for by doctors subsidized by the state.

From his essay titled, Notes on the Next War: They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. But if you do not die on the battlefield, rest assured Veterans Affairs will neglect you and you will perish in a waiting room from an infection caused by a routine hip replacement.

Another from a letter he wrote to his family when he was 19: And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered. And it is most preferable for death to come while protesting on a college campus some conservative bastards right to free speech.

The one I relate to the most is from my favorite short story Hem wrote, Indian Camp:

***

Democrats/liberals/progressives/hippy douchebags, whatever you want to call them, fancy themselves as fighting for the vulnerable. To them, everyone who isnt part of the 1% are the unwashed masses littering 19th century Parisian streets. They act as though they are champions of the poor and destitute, protecting them from the indifferent landed gentry riding in their horse drawn coaches trampling beggars underfoot. And yes, I will confirm for those of you suspecting, that I just watched Les Misrables, which stars Wolverine, Jor-El, and Catwoman.

Democrats fancy themselves pro-science (jurys still out on that one), but they are definitely not pro-math, and I daresay they are not pro-reality. They piss and moan that if Trumpcare passes and envelopes Obamacare, proposed Medicaid cuts (which are just reductions in projected annual increases) would lead to poor and middle class Americans dying in the streets.

Forgive me for changing metaphors midstream, but if you desired to keep a vulnerable people afloat, as well as add to their numbers, and were capable of logic, you might try to renovate the ship so it could accommodate more passengers, or design and build a new and improved ship. You wouldnt put more passengers aboard an already sinking ship, would you?

National Review writers state, Medicaid is really the low-hanging fruit of the entitlement wars. If Congress cant reform Medicaid, how can it ever be expected to make changes to Social Security and Medicare, which have wider and more powerful constituencies? & Arkansas is taking significant steps toward reversing Obamacares devastating impact. Other expansion states should take note. Mises.org ran an article stating, Believe it or not, the data suggest that if anything, ObamaCare actually caused more Americans to die and at the Federalist, [R]esearch has shown that being on Medicaid produces no better health outcomes than being uninsured.

I never would have allowed him to treat me if he wasnt also suffering from cancer, dear old dad said. How could I trust him to know how to properly provide treatment? From years and years of medical school and practice? Are you nuts?!

***

And thats the way it is, as far as you know.

Image: Fox News

This post was written by Dillon Eliassen.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

Dillon Eliassen is the Managing Editor of Being Libertarian. Dillon works in the sales department of a privately owned small company. He holds a BA in Journalism & Creative Writing from Lyndon State College, and needs only to complete his thesis for his Masters of English from Montclair State University (something which his accomplished and beautiful wife, Alice, is continually pestering him about). He is the author of The Apathetic, available at Amazon.com. He is a self-described Thoreauvian Minarchist.

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Shortcuts & Delusions: We're All Gonna Die! - Being Libertarian (satire)

Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute recently wrote an article arguing that libertarians should abandon any arguments regarding natural rights. As Lindsey sees it, the concept of natural rights is an intellectual dead end and that adherence to natural rights arguments should be abandoned. His perspective can largely be boiled down into two categories: strategic pragmatism and the inadequacy of the natural rights doctrine in constructing a libertarian legal order.

Libertarians always have and always will debate strategy. This question is not very interesting to me as it can ultimately only be answered empirically. Lindsey argues that Instead of spinning utopias, libertarians should focus instead on the humbler but more constructive task of making the world we actually inhabit a better place. Im very open to this argument, and as soon as the Cato Institute can demonstrate that it has actually effected change in government policy in a libertarian direction, I am willing to consider capitulating to Lindseys arguments for a more pragmatic strategy. As of yet, however, his constructive approach to libertarianism has had no more reductive effects in government than the purist approach to libertarianism he loves to attack, so it is objectively impossible for him to proclaim his views to be any less utopian than the radicals who stubbornly cling to their principles.

More interesting to me is the claim that natural rights are insufficient in determining a full-blown, operational legal order. This statement is interesting because I was not aware that any natural-rights libertarian scholar ever claimed that it could. Lindsey argues that the problem lies not with the concept of natural rights, but in that concepts overextension because these principles fail to determine the specific guidelines upon which all disputes would be precisely adjudicated.

The first correction that must be made to Lindseys argument is that no serious libertarian thinker argues that natural rights are the beginning and end of libertarian legal theory. What these principles allow us to do is to establish, first, a property ethic and, from this, a theory of justice. Hans Hermann Hoppe offers what is arguably the most complete natural rights doctrine known as his Argumentation Ethics. Even natural rights libertarians who do not accept the ethics of argumentation generally agree on the principles it purports to prove: The Private Property Ethic (or, the Libertarian Property Ethic) and its logical derivative the Non-Aggression Principle, which we may call the libertarian theory of justice.

This forms an ethical basis for libertarianism without which we would have no means of determining what constitutes a libertarian position to begin with. In fairness, Lindsey is not claiming that natural rights are necessarily wrong; he is just saying that libertarians should abandon these ideas whether they are correct or not for pragmatic reasons, of course.

Brink Lindsey may desire a libertarian community that is held together only by a label representing a hodgepodge of contradictory political positions after all, this is the formula that has made the Republican and Democratic parties so successful! but we nave purists often desire something more consistent and principled to associate ourselves with, and there is no means of establishing principles aside from ethical philosophy. What the ethical philosophy of natural rights allows us to do is direct our own individual behavior according to libertarian principles and to prescribe political solutions that are ethically consistent with these principles. This does not mean that there is a precisely determined, canonical position on every conceivable issue for libertarians, but these disagreements stem from the fact that ethical philosophy can (and should) be debated. But it cannot be dismissed altogether.

However, Lindsey is correct in arguing that the establishment of this theory of justice is insufficient in determining legal structure and answering certain questions regarding positive law. He does concede that more sophisticated presentations of radical libertarianism do take note of some of these complexities but adds the caveat that they present these open questions as minor blank spaces in an otherwise determinate legal structure, to be filled in by custom or common-law jurisprudence. The problem with his objection is that this demands natural rights theory to be something more than it is intended to be. Thus, it isnt the natural rights libertarians who are overextending the theory of natural rights; it is Brink Lindsey who is doing so.

Natural rights libertarian theorists such as Murray Rothbard and Hans Hermann Hoppe also combine ethical principles with the economic methodology of Ludwig von Mises praxeology to determine what economic system is most compatible with the Private Property Ethic in maximizing prosperity (they determine, as anarcho-capitalists, that a purely free market is the most compatible with this end), and they derive from this economic framework the most compatible legal framework that, combined with the libertarian theory of justice, will most effectively handle disputes. The complete libertarian political framework provides both an ethical and a pragmatic answer to political questions, but Brink Lindsey appears to live in a world in which a libertarian must choose to deal exclusively with one category or the other. This one-sided approach to libertarianism is neither desirable nor possible (after all, even if one were to make an exclusively pragmatic argument, as Lindsey advises, then the assumption of any goodness of the results of the policies prescribed tacitly depend on some ethical value judgment to begin with).

Economic theory does not empower us to determine the specific manner in which a legal system will manifest in a given society. It simply tells us that on the assumption that human beings value peace above conflict institutions will emerge that will best facilitate the administration of justice according to the preferences of consumers. This is the economic basis for private courts.

Concomitant to private courts is the establishment of private law, which legal theorists will refer to as common law. As previously quoted, Lindsey assumes that no libertarian has ever offered any answer as to how common law will fill in the blank spaces of the otherwise determinate legal structure. This may be the case if one confines himself to the world of the Cato Institute, as Brink Lindsey appears to do in citing only Cato Institute adjunct scholars in reference to his arguments. But if he were to venture out into the wider libertarian world, Lindsey would find a plethora of scholarship on the issue of common law jurisprudence. Edward Stringham edited an entire collection of scholarly articles regarding anarchic legal theory. Bruce Benson has been conducting scholarship in this field since the 1980s, and his work The Enterprise of Law details the centuries-long Anglo-Saxon history of private dispute adjudication (this work is nearly three decades old, so it may be fair that Lindsey has not yet had time to read it). Even one of the Cato Institutes own senior fellows, John Hasnas, has written a great deal on the establishment of common law through the tort system!

Common law systems throughout history do not address rights violations in a uniform way, and it would be absurd to suggest that any theoretical system of private courts would do so either. However, what can be said is that in the absence of a coercive government, courts will manifest, there will exist an avenue for bringing perceived rights violations in front of an arbiter, and there will be a mechanism through which restitution can be enforced. Lindsey is perplexed by the fact that natural rights doctrines fail to determine the nuances of questions such as the specific boundaries of property rights (in a previous article attacking the Non-Aggression Principle, he asks How far below the surface should property rights in land extend? How high into the sky?), the extent to which a person may lawfully go in defending his or her property, or the precise magnitude of restitution paid to a victim in specific circumstances. These questions, of course, cannot be answered through natural rights theory (except for maybe the property rights one), but it is not a failure of the concept of natural rights that it cannot answer questions that lie beyond its scope! Such questions can only be answered by the individual arbiters in a given system (anarchic or not), and in the case of private law, a natural rights libertarian is in the position to contract with arbitration firms that best conform to libertarian ethics.

This last point was addressed in a simple but profound article by Ben Powell. In You Are an Anarchist. The Question Is How Often? Dr. Powell points out that, even for people who are classically liberal for natural rights reasons, No system will perfect human morality. And, because it is costly to monitor and prevent deviant behavior, some such behavior will exist under any governance system. So even a well-functioning anarchy would still have rights violations. The question remains one of comparative institutions. It would be nave to assume that even the purist libertarian political system (say, anarchy) would usher in a state of perfect and universal adherence to the Non-Aggression Principle; nirvana is not for this world. Muggers will still mug, and killers will still kill. The question is not how do we avoid these rights violations completely? The question is merely what society would best deal with them? What society would minimize rights violations? The natural rights philosophy does not give us the answers to how all the precise nuances of a legal structure will manifest, but it does give us a means of judging whatever legal systems emerge in the absence of government.

But to even ask these questions, one must first establish and defend the concept of rights at all. The libertarians who adhere to natural rights doctrines are simply arguing that in order to make the world we inhabit a better place, we have to have some means of establishing what that actually is, and that necessitates an ethical philosophy. These libertarians are not arguing for natural rights because they are libertarian; rather, they are libertarian because they recognize natural rights. Ignoring these ethics does not make libertarianism more practical, it just eliminates libertarianism altogether. All that is left in Brink Lindseys pragmatic world is the arbitrary political position that government should be smaller to some vague extent, and this would be good for reasons we have no means of offering.

Only in the world of Brink Lindsey is this approach to libertarianism more determinate than the philosophy of natural rights.

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Natural-Law Libertarianism And The Pursuit Of Justice - The Liberty Conservative

The Libertarian Party of Cuba has continued to experience state tyranny from the Castro regime simply for having formed a party of liberty-minded dissidents.

Less than a month after their initial detainment, members of the Libertarian Party of Cuba were yet again detained. On June 22nd, justbefore the party was set to be inaugurated in the Camaguey province, the partys president, vice-president and spokesman were detained, and were released over a day later.

Three days later, the state police came tothe party headquarters in Havanaand threatening tostop an event that the party had planned. The existence of any party besides the Communist Party is strictly prohibited by Cuban law; the country is a one-party state, and that law is implemented with the utmost force. The Castro regime widely enforces its law against illicit association by forcefully stopping events by political parties or movements, and indiscriminately detaining people who partake in said illicit association.

Zach Foster, US Spokesman for the LP of Cuba, recently provided further details of theevents:

The director of the new Libertarian Library in Camaguey, Alexis Muoz, says there was no disturbance and that the police came without warning, without provocation, and arrested Caridad, Heriberto and Nelson [all party members] with no justification or attempt to inform them of the charges. The team was previously arrested en masse at the Havana HQ on June 31, and on June 21 Nelson was robbed, kidnapped, and dumped outside of town by the secret police.

Nelson and Alexis were released from their latest arrest on Monday evening.

According to The Libertarian Vindicator, members of the party have recently begun teaming up with the Feminine Front, a group within the party focusing on the states mistreatment and imprisoning of women, as well as joining with the Orlando Zapata Movement to protest in front of the prison where the two were being detained.

The partys Facebook page states that the protesters were forced to leave after clashes with the police.

Spokesman Foster gave another statement pertaining to Nelson and Alexis release:

Cuban LP national spokesman Nelson and Camaguey province president Alexis were both released from jail today!!! We owe a debt of gratitude to LP Tennessee and all the individuals who publicly stood with us. For all those who didnt, your silence is forgiven but forgotten.

Keep up on the newsand give the Libertarian Party of Cuba support by liking theirFacebook page.

Photo credit: Libertarian Party of Cuba

This post was written by Nicholas Amato.

The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.

Nicholas Amato is the News Editor at Being Libertarian. Hes an undergraduate student at San Jose State University, majoring in political science and minoring in journalism.

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Libertarian Party of Cuba Experiences Further Tyranny - Being Libertarian