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By Andrew Kingaking@hillsdale.netTwitter: @AndrewKingHDN

HILLSDALE In the 2016 presidential election, Americans were presented with two candidates.

Some refused to vote Republican or Democrat, and as a result, Libertarian party candidate, Gary Johnson, received a raft of support, pulling in around three percent of the vote in most states on Election Day; buoyed as high as 9.34 percent in his home state of New Mexico.

Those arent election-winning numbers, as evidenced by Donald Trumps Electoral College victory on November 8. But, the groundswell of support that Johnson received, has given Libertarians at the state and local level cause for celebration: the Libertarian Party has transitioned from a minor party to a major party in nine states, including Michigan.

The biggest difference is that youre automatically on the ballot. Otherwise, theres a very extensive and lengthy petition process to get on the ballot, said Norman Peterson, who is working with Sam Fry, of Hillsdale, among others, to finalize the formation of a Libertarian Party affiliate representing Hillsdale and Jackson Counties.

Peterson is a long time Libertarian who switched parties in the 1980s after reading economist and politician Harry Brownes book, Why Government Doesnt Work. Prior to his political conversion, Peterson had served as the Democratic Chairman for Michigans 11th District. In the newly formed affiliate, he is, again, serving as Chair.

In the intervening years, Peterson served as the director of a non-profit focused on launching charter schools. When he retired, he shifted his attention to full-time political engagement, and one of the first steps he took was reaching out to area Libertarians to gauge interest in forming a local affiliate.

Fry got an email from Peterson and responded that he would be interested. After an interest meeting featuring a presentation from State Chair, Bill Gelinau, the group began the push to officially affiliate in earnest.

The immediate step is now that weve gone through all the hoops provided by the state we have a name, we have bylaws, we have elected officers, we have delegates I simply need to draft and petition a letter to the State Executive Committee of the Libertarian Party, requesting to be accepted as an affiliate, Peterson said. With the Chairman and the Vice-Chairman helping me with every step of this, Im pretty optimistic that will be a formality.

And once formalities are out of the way, Fry believes that there is a large pool of liberty-minded individuals who are looking for an alternate to the increasingly polarized choice between the Republican and Democratic Parties.

Were going to allow people in this area to have a choice for an alternate candidate, Fry said. I think the goal would be to start running a slate of candidates for county-level and state-level office. To allow people to have a third choice, and I think, frankly, thats just about one of the most important things we can do to keep our democracy functioning.

The reality is that most people are going to be somewhere in the middle. Theyre going to agree with one party on the majority of things, but theyre also going have several issues where they disagree. I think that we need to recognize that in politics, theres a spot for people who dont perfectly conform to the ideology of either party and I think we need people who represent that.

Continued here:
Hillsdale, Jackson form Libertarian Party affiliate - The Hillsdale Daily News

LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) - When you think politics, the parties that typically come to mind are republicans and democrats, but a third party is growing across Nebraska: The Libertarian Party.

One Nebraska senator describes the Libertarian ideals as promoting as little government interference in everyday life as possible, lower taxes, and a free market.

"I vote for the people who I think are going to do the job, I want them to act on their values," said Trevor Reilly.

Reilly is the chair for the Lancaster County Libertarian Party, but just a few years ago he was in the marines and a registered Republican, then he decided he wanted a change.

"Being a prior Republican I didn't agree with a lot of it, I didn't agree with the Trump media going on, so when I found the Libertarian party, I jumped into the campaign," said Reilly.

Trevor's not the only high ranking Libertarian who is a former member of the Grand Old Party.

Senator Laura Ebke is the only Libertarian senator in the unicameral, and said the political shift is becoming more and more apparent.

"I think that what we are finding is that people, especially young folks, are more and more turned off by the partisan rancor that goes on," said Senator Ebke.

Right now there are less than 13,000 registered Libertarians, but Senator Ebke believes this is only the start.

"I'd like to see it be a competitive party I think that a long ways coming, but I think we can become an influential party," said Senator Ebke.

The latest registered voter numbers show the Libertarian party is growing at a faster rate than the two major parties.

These numbers from the Nebraska Secretary of State show the percentages of registered Libertarians in Nebraska are just a little more than 1% of the almost 1.2 million Nebraska voters, but it's trending upwards.

Party members understand they are still a very small percentage, but there are plans to grow.

"Starting to run people for local elections, city county offices, school board and things like that, so I think that's a win and that's a way you build a party," said Senator Ebke.

And there are now specific benchmarks Libertarians want to hit by the next presidential election.

"Right now the state party's goal is to actually get 50,000 registered Libertarian voters by 2020," said Reilly.

"If we get to 50,000 that's big, for Nebraska, that's a significant amount of the voting population, and we can make a difference in a lot of elections then," said Senator Ebke.

More here:
Libertarian Party is trending upwards in Nebraska - 1011now

With the increasingly more hawkish policies in Afghanistan and Syria, President Donald Trump has shown to be far more influenced by his advisors. It is no question why libertarians, who expected a far more hands-off president, are wary of the current direction of the White Houses foreign policy. To the libertarian there seems to be no case for any further United States involvement in conflicts and countries that have shown to impede a free market economy and international peace. However, there is one idea that is consistent with libertarian foreign policy: national and international policy-making in missile defense systems.

At first glance, a missile defense system, seems to be the antithesis of libertarianism, being a belief founded on individual rights, property rights, the free market, capitalism, justice, or the nonaggression principle, according to the Mises Institute of Austrian Economics, Freedom, and Peace. Yet upon closer analysis of libertarianisms classical liberal roots, there is a case for missile defense systems.

The classical liberal is not to be confused with the modern Democrat/Liberal. A classic example of a liberal would be someone like Adam Smith, and even Milton Friedman, who believed in the power of a free and peaceful market, that promoted well-being through, a tolerable administration of justice. Both thinkers, and all their like-minded scholars, have argued that wars promote a society where the government will take powers and do things that it would not ordinarily do. In the same breath, the discipline argues for international peace. A defensive missile system promotes peace by deterrence while also creating a peaceful environment for trade. Christopher A. Preble of Cato furthers this point by explaining that, peaceful, non-coercive foreign engagement should not be confused with its violent cousin: war.

A missile defense system becomes increasingly more vital as peace in the world continues to become more precarious. With tensions rising in Asia, from South Korean President, Moon Jae-In, wanting to reexamine mobile anti-ballistic missile installments in South Korea, to the the successful launch of another North Korean Missile, and to Chinas anger at U.S. action in the region, the U.S. has to take a stand.

And war cannot be the answer.

A missile defense system would deter conflict, and has proven to work. The current superior technology to protect the American homeland from longer range missiles is the Ground-based Missile Defense (GMD) system. The GMD was successfully tested last week in California as reported by ABC News. This test was a critical milestone because for the first time, a missile system was able to detect and destroy a ballistic missile, without previous calculations inputted into the system. In just a few years the technology has made great strides, and will continue to do into the future.

At the end of the day, defensive missile systems are cheaper than war, and dont come at the cost of life. When looking at history the U.S. government spent trillions on nation building and toppling governments in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet, these endeavors failed miserably and never supported our national interest. Furthermore, nation building policies of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama hurt our national security, creating more violence in the regions we were involved in. Missile defense are projected for an annual cost that averages just below $1 billion. Compare this to Afghanistan and Iraq where the price tag numbered in the trillions. Missile defense is a smarter investment dollar per dollar when compared to a feckless policy of nation building.

This is the libertarian case for missile defense systems.

The libertarian case is for international policies that promote peace while reducing the encroachment of a government on its people. Libertarians are not hermit isolationists or anti-governmental hippies. Rather they are fiscally minded individuals who make a strong case for smart foreign engagement through peaceful means. A missile defense system would promote peace across the world, while reducing the need for the United States to step in as a police force, entering into conflict internationally.

Read more:
The Libertarian Case for Defensive Missile Systems - The Libertarian Republic

As of this week, New Hampshire has three sitting Libertarians in its House of Representatives. First elected in 2016 as a Republican, Brandon Phinney, representing wards 4 and 5 in the city of Rochester, announced he's joining Caleb Dyer (former Republican) and Joseph Stallcop (former Democrat) as Libertarians, giving the L.P. a three-man caucus. (In the 1990s for a period there were four sitting Libertarians in the New Hampshire House.)

Libertarian Party

"The Libertarian Party platform gives us, as legislators, the best possible framework to expand social freedoms, support a free-market economy, and ensure the checks and balances on government power are enforced," Phinney said in the Libertarian Party's press release announcing the switch.

Phinney works for the Carroll County Department of Corrections. (Being one of the 400 members of the New Hampshire House is a part-time job.) "We do what we can to rehabilitate offenders, implement new programming in the county to help addicts get treatment, and we manage inmate behavior," he described his day job in a phone interview this week after he announced his move to the Libertarian Party.

His work in corrections "has given me inspiration as far as government's role in policing" and led him to realize "we need to be ending the drug war. I know the system is broken. I know there are people in jail who don't need to be there."

Before running for office last year, Phinney had been deployed for a year to the United Arab Emirates with the New Hampshire Army National Guard working as a construction engineer.

He has also been slightly famous in atheist circles for being a rare out-and-proud atheist politician. Phinney himself doesn't like to make too much of that, and points out that it isn't his atheism per se but his atheism combined with his previous GOP membership that made it seem like news, since Republicans "have a tradition of being faith-based." (He even once sang for a metal band named Godcrusher.)

Phinney says his initial attraction toward government work came from "issues in the past with the family court system" and a desire to reform such policies in a more father-friendly direction, though he doesn't want to discuss his personal specifics and says they are not currently an active problem in his life.

The issues he likes to front and center as a legislator that he discussed in our phone interview include some that fit well with the Libertarian Party platformsuch as marijuana legalizationand some that don'tlike increasing state programs for veterans. But he describes his overarching way of judging proposed legislation as having "three criteria, which are, will [a bill] expand government growth? Will it have a burden on taxpayers? And is it in the interest of freedom?"

Like fellow L.P. convert Stallcop, the former Democrat, Phinney at first considered running as an independent but found the ballot access issues too troublesome and thought the Republicans were the major party that were "closest to what I felt." He has since realized that the Republican platform didn't "actually represent what I thought should be the role of government in our lives."

He quickly found caucusing with the GOP wearying and "stopped going" to the meetings; "every time something controversial came up they wanted the Party to vote united." Phinney didn't always want to go along with their desires but "they didn't want to hear" any dissent from the Party line.

He says his friend Dyer helped him see the way clear to the L.P. switch. He'd been thinking about it since February and knew for weeks before the official announcement he intended to do it. The only Republican he informed beforehand was Gov. Chris Sununu, during a conversation over why he, Phinney, was not going to be able to vote for the budget the Republicans proposed since it raised spending too much. The $11.7 billion budget will put state spending on an "unsustainable" course, Phinney believes. (He found Sununu "nonjudgmental, understanding of why I felt that way" about the Party switch.)

Like Dyer, Phinney is also confident many other New Hampshire House members are philosophically more compatible with the L.P. than the two major parties, but are afraid to make the switch out of fear of losing re-election, a fear he hopes he and Dyer can prove groundless in 2018. His own town of Rochester, he says, tends to "lean purple" and he hopes name recognition from retail politicking and his incumbency will make the L.P. switch irrelevant to his constituents. Even running as a Republican he says his constituents "knew I have these philosophies, they get it, no problem."

Although he has a tendency to stutter and thus found door-to-door contact with voters sometimes nerve-wracking, Phinney says it's essential to winning in New Hampshire's small districts. He won his first race with 2,323 votes, only 117 votes more than a Democrat who Phinney says didn't even campaign. He does not yet know who, if anyone, he'll be running against next year from the two major parties. He advises would-be voters to look beyond Party labels and "see how I voted. That's what actually matters. If I voted in your best interest, keep me in. If I haven't, vote me out."

Fear of a Libertarian New Hampshire

Phinney has lived in New Hampshire since the late 1990s, predating the Free State Project, which advocates the libertarian-minded moving to New Hampshire to sway its politics in a liberty direction. While Phinney thinks it's a "great idea to get people who want to minimize the scope and power of government to come to this state" he has no specific opinion about anything any given Free Stater has said or done. He is aware that some New Hampshire residents "view them in a not-so-favorable light. I personally don't have an opinion as long as they are not hurting anyone."

The FSP's existence helps draw out concerns that make political progressives unhappy with the thought of libertarians in their midst. The folks at FreeKeene, not institutionally affiliated with the FSP, recently summed up a 90-minute anti-libertarian presentation by Zandra Rice Hawkins of the group Granite State Progress.

Hawkins is trying to get her fellow citizens of New Hampshire to believe the FSP's mission involves attempted secession from the U.S. (it does not), to worry that the FSP's internal communal self-help and attempts to help their communities' food needs are just sinister cover for their radical mission of dismantling government, and to condemn them for their alleged connection to the national website CopBlock which encourages keeping an eye on and curbing the power of police to harass citizens.

Compare those fears with how Phinney expects to guide his future as a state representative, believing that all he and his fellow Libertarians are "trying to do is minimize government interference in lives and businesses and just try to keep as much money in people's pockets" as possible.

To many Americans, that sounds like common sense. To those living in quivering fear of a Libertarian New Hampshire in which people might just, to sum up some of Hawkins' worries, keep a watchful eye on police, act undignified in court, pay other people's parking meters, or advocate for legalization of drugs and prostitution, it sounds like something that requires organized opposition, including trying to keep a public record of Free State Project associates involved in New Hampshire politics. She is especially worried that some of them even fly under the Democratic Party's banner.

As the recent moves of Phinney, Dyer, and Stallcop to the Libertarian Party show, the libertarian-minded certainly can keep using major party labels if they wish. But in New Hampshire, they may not have to. The electoral success or failure of Dyer and Phinney in 2018 will tell.

Read more from the original source:
New Hampshire Now Has Third Sitting Libertarian Party Legislator - Reason (blog)

Ryan Blessing rblessing@norwichbulletin.com, (860) 425-4205 rblessingNB

Libertarian Bill Russell, who ran for mayor of Norwich four years ago, is again in the running for the position after being nominated Wednesday by the Libertarian party.

Russell's name was added to the ballot Thursday, and the party also made six nominations for City Council.They are James Fear, Darlene Woodbridge, Staceylynn Cottle, Janice Loomis, Nick Casiano and Richard Bright.

It also expects to nominate six Board of Education candidates, Russell said.

"I've been going door-to-door and everybody absolutely loves what I have to say," Russell, a 22-year member of the Libertarian Party, said. "Democrats and Republicans have run this city into the ground. So much can be done to reduce the budget and bring industry and people back to Norwich."

A political newcomer four years ago, Russell said in 2013 he favoreda strong-mayor form of government that would give him ultimate authority over spending and budgetary decisions to reduce the tax burden on residents.He also proposed privatizing or selling off nearly every piece of city-owned real estate not essential for day-to-day operations, including Dodd Stadium and the citys ice arena, golf course and Intermodal Transportation Center.

Russell also has opposed the city buying the site of the former Shetucket Iron and Metal Company on the harbor. The issue has come to the forefront again since a July 29 auction of the property was set.

Russell joins a crowded field for the mayor's race.Democrats H. Tucker Braddock and Derell Wilson, Republican Peter Nystrom and unaffiliated petitioning candidate Jon Oldfield all have announced they are running for mayor.

Incumbent Deb Hinchey, a Democrat, has decided not to seek re-election.

View original post here:
Libertarian Bill Russell nominated to run for Norwich mayor - Norwich Bulletin