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The latest in Libertarian drama comes this week following a debate among three prominent figures in the Libertarian party, Marine Corps veterans Adam Kokesh and Larry Sharpe and National Vice Chair Arvin Vohra. Vohras statements have led many in the party to call for his resignation and he has definitively lost the argument within the majority of the party, especially after some unapologetic apologies.

Having met Vohra at the National Convention and personally talking to him on some other issues, I might have voted for him myself had I been a delegate. The cause of outrage? How Libertarians should view the military, particularly its service members. I recommend watching the initial YouTube debate titled Freedom and the Military hosted by Vin Armani.

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Continued here:
LEONE: Libertarian views on US military forces - Seguin Gazette-Enterprise

They came in a U-Haul.

Colorado, the birthplace of the national Libertarian Party, is now something else: host of the partys trove of physical archives since its founding in 1971 in Colorado Springs.

Or was the party founded in Westminster?

Thats a friendly dispute among some Libertarians who debate whether the official formation of the small government individual freedom party, which took place in the Springs, supersedes where its ideas were hashed out around party founder David Nolans Westminster dining room table.

Regardless, Colorado, a state with about 1 percent of its registered voting population claiming membership in the party, has always had an outsized role in Libertarian history. Now, just this spring, the partys physical history relocated from a storage facility in Alexandria, Virginia, to Parker, Colorado.

Leading the effort to bring those records to the partys birthplace was Caryn Ann Harlos of Castle Rock, the state partys pink-haired spokeswoman who serves as the national partys representative for nine western states. On a December trip to the East Coast on party business, she asked to see archives many thought were destroyed in a flood when they were housed in the basement of the famous Watergate building. Instead, Harlos found a room of records largely intact. Boxes of newsletters, convention material, even contents from the desks of former party officials.

I got a burr under my saddle and was like This stuff needs to be preserved, she said over the phone recently.

The national party set up a committee and formulated a $10,000 budget to make it happen. Party people packed the archives in a U-Haul and a staffer drove it west.

For the past several weeks, Harlos, a paralegal with two decades of document management experience, has, in her own words, been becoming one with the records.

There are tape recordings of old conventions, there are video tapes of old TV spots, there are bumper stickers, there are buttons, theres a lot of handbills and fliers and stuff from older presidential campaigns, she says about whats inside. She found handwritten 1974 convention minutes on the back of an old press release.

Her goal is to organize and digitize the documents, and then upload them to the online crowdsourced Libertarian history site Lpedia.

She stresses it is not a public Libertarian Party museum or anything, but anyone who wants to take a look can make an appointment with her.

There are people very passionate about the history, she says. I have people planning weeklong vacations to come and work on these records in Colorado.

Call it Libertarian tourism in Colorado.

Says Harlos: Being the birthplace is really [a]big thing and weve always taken great pride in that.

Read this article:
The Libertarian Party's national archives now live in Colorado - The Colorado Independent

Being Libertarian

Freedom Philosophy: Free Market Environmentalism Being Libertarian The environment isn't very popular with libertarians. My suspicion is that support for the environment is viewed as a vessel for regulation and taxes (specifically a carbon tax) an anathema to liberation. There are, however, very libertarian ...

See original here:
Freedom Philosophy: Free Market Environmentalism - Being Libertarian

Being Libertarian

The Red Dirt Liberty Report: Cryptomania Being Libertarian Like the majority of libertarians, I watch these cryptocurrencies with interest and cheer on climbing valuations in hopes that it might mean broad acceptance of these currencies, at some point, as a replacement to traditional currencies. I see the ... Eight Reasons To Be Skeptical About BlockchainForbes all 84 news articles »

Read the rest here:
The Red Dirt Liberty Report: Cryptomania - Being Libertarian

May 31, 2017 by Samuel Hammond

This op-ed was originally published by Spotlight on Povertyon May 31, 2017:

The argument for a child allowance is straightforward: giving families cash is one of the most effective means for reducing poverty and promoting child well-being, as evidenced by the experience of over 20 countries around the world that have instituted some form of periodic, per-child cash payment to needy families.

With few or no conditions on how the money can be used, parents end up making surprising and surprisingly effective choices. In addition to leading to increased spending on direct inputs, like education or pediatric health care, research has found per-child cash benefits increase spending on so-called household stability items. Covering these less obvious expenses, including routine bills and household goods, helps to dramatically reduce parental stress and create an overall healthier household.

That should come as no surprise to a libertarian. Libertarians and classical liberals from J.S. Mill to F.A. Hayek designed their philosophies around the immense variety of human wants and needs, and there is no reason to believe that human diversity is any less in the case of children. The libertarian motto should be to leave paternalism to the parents, not just because paternalism by the government is wrong, but because parents are in the best position to harness their local knowledge and direct scarce resources to their highest valued use.

The conservative appeal of a child allowance is even more obvious, with conservative governments historically being the ones to introduce child allowances in the countries that have them. That includes the United States, whose Child Tax Credit (CTC) was championed by Newt Gingrich based on the rejection of the idea that, as he put it, the bureaucrats deserve the money more than the parents. It was later expanded under George W. Bush, and more recently, Republican Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio have advanced proposals to expand it even furtheralthough all have been shy of full refundability.

In the shadow of the Tea Party movements anti-government fundamentalism, more family minded conservatives are slowly rediscovering the CTC. Reihan Salam has argued a fully refundable CTC should be part of a policy package for the Republican party to re-engage traditional families. And Patrick Brown has suggested a more generous CTC would be an effective, but less contentious, strategy for reducing abortion rates.

Canada has what may be the worlds most generous child allowance in the world, at $6,400 per year for children under the age of six, and $5,400 per year for children under the age of 18. While its recent expansion occurred under a Liberal government, the benefit itself was established by the Conservative Party in order to undercut calls for a national daycare program.

A national daycare program, the argument went, would impose a particular way of life on single-earner families and families who rely on relatives for child care. Cash, on the other hand, provided a neutral medium for supporting families from a variety of backgrounds, and in turn created a powerful political wedge to break the opposition parties monopoly over child welfare issues.

Strengthening the Child Tax Credit has an appeal to fiscal conservatives as well. For $59 billion per year in new spending, the United States could make the CTC fully refundable, and double it to $2,000 for children under six. While this is not an insignificant sum of money, as I argued in my report Toward a Universal Child Benefit it could be paid for several times over by consolidating existing, less effective federal programs for children.

Indeed, the federal government already spends $318 billion per year on childrenno small amount. And yet its effectiveness is diluted across more than 100 fragmentary programs. While most of adult public assistance comes in the form of cash or medical reimbursements, spending on children is largely in the form of in-kind benefits like school lunches, diaper vouchers, tax reimbursements, and a whole lot of administrative overhead. The result is not simply a convoluted, bureaucratic mess, but also an easy target for rent-seeking, whether from industry interests or politicians trying to leave a legacy.

It is easy to understand why progressives in congress like Rosa DeLauro have come around to the idea of a child allowance. Providing a basic income guarantee for households with young children would put a major dent in deep poverty, and strengthen the economic security of millions of families. It is less obvious why a conservative or libertarian should want to jump aboard the child allowance bandwagon, but the evidence suggests there is much for conservatives to like. And if history is a guide, they may even be the ones who ultimately make it happen.

Samuel Hammond is the Poverty and Welfare Policy Analyst for the Niskanen Center and author of Toward a Universal Child Benefit.

More here:
Op-ed: What Libertarians and Conservatives See in a Child Allowance - Niskanen Center (press release) (blog)