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President Trump's recent executive order, titled "Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Cost," speaks the language of the principled libertarians, but its beneficiaries are likely to be the thugs.

The order prohibits any agency from issuing any new regulation unless it also repeals two regulations that cost as much as the new one. "Costs" mean the cost of complying with the regulation. The harms that were the reason for the regulation don't count at all.

David Dana and Michael Barsa observe the implications of Trump's order. The Department of Interior created a set of new regulations in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, in which BP spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest marine oil spill in history, and, Dana and Barsa wrote, it cost "nearly $9 billion for lost fisheries and $23 billion for lost tourism, not to mention the catastrophic effects on marine life and birds. Yet under the president's order, the only costs that matter are those to the oil companies. Costs to the public and to the environment are completely ignored." The regulations aren't cheap; the cost to the industry has been estimated at hundreds of millions. But that's peanuts compared to the costs of another spill.

Trump is a big fan of Ayn Rand. Like her fictional hero John Galt in "Atlas Shrugged," he wants to free business from the heavy hand of government. But this is an oddly distorted libertarianism, in which Rand's villains masquerade as her heroes: those who talk most of liberty are the looters and moochers.

Conservatives worry about "regulatory capture": the danger that regulators will abandon the public interest at the behest of regulated industries, keeping prices high and stifling competition. The solution is to get rid of regulation: the state should butt out and let the market operate. There's no doubt that capture has sometimes happened. A notorious example is the Civil Aeronautics Board: after it was abolished in 1985, airline competition intensified and prices plunged.

There is, however, another way in which unworthy special interests can seize control of government. They can work to cripple regulation, so that they can hurt and defraud people. Libertarian rhetoric has turned out to be a rich resource for them.

Barack Obama is actually a better libertarian than Trump. He spent years teaching at the University of Chicago, where the idea of regulatory capture was developed. That had an impact: when he was President, he demanded (following a principle laid down by Ronald Reagan!) that any new regulations survive rigorous cost-benefit analysis. That immunizes regulations from capture, and makes sure that regulators take account of just what worries Trump, the cost to businesses. The overall net value -- benefits minus costs -- of Obama's regulations was upward of $100 billion.

Trump, on the other hand, has replaced cost-benefit analysis with cost analysis. Benefits are ignored. This isn't even business-friendly. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill destroyed hundreds of well-functioning businesses. On the other hand, the businesses that were crushed were small and had nothing like BP's political connections.

There's room for reasonable disagreement with Obama's regulations. The calculation of both costs and benefits inevitably involves some guesswork. The cumulative effect of regulation can hamper businesses. The big difference between Trump and the standard conservatives' critique of Obama is that Trump's executive order holds, as a matter of principle, that benefits don't matter. Consumer fraud, tainted food, pollution, unsafe airplanes and trains, epidemic disease all have to be put up with, if stopping them would increase the costs of regulation.

Trump's new "regulatory reforms" show a persistent pattern. One targets a rule that requires retirement advisers to put clients' interests ahead of their own. Conflicts of interest in retirement advice, for example steering clients into products with higher fees and lower returns, costs American families an estimated $17 billion a year. You can understand why some parts of the financial industry hated the rule. That $17 billion was going into someone's pocket, and that someone finds libertarian rhetoric right handy.

The Libertarian Party, which got more than 4 million votes in the last presidential election, is enthusiastic about the order. It shouldn't be. The order is a deep betrayal of libertarianism, which holds that people should do what they want as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

Freeing businesses to hurt people is not libertarian. The libertarians -- at least, the ones who don't see through Trump -- are being played. If the crippling of the state allows economic behemoths to do whatever they like to others, then what libertarianism licenses, in the garb of liberty, is the creation of a new aristocracy, entitled to hurt the commoners. This is just a different kind of mooching and looting.

It is a new road to serfdom. It reinforces the prejudices of those on the left who repudiate capitalism. The libertarians who embrace it, thinking that they are thereby promoting freedom, are useful idiots, like the idealistic leftists of the 1930s whose hatred of poverty and racism led them to embrace Stalin. John Galt is a sap.

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Trump's 'libertarianism' endangers the public - CNN

As Kirralie Smith sits at a sidewalk table in Taree for an interview this week, there is a palpable tension. Sheis mistrustful of what she calls the mainstream media, particularly those elements she believes are biased towards the left.

But Smithhas agreed to talk because she will, she says, use any platform to express her view that Islam is an ideology of violence, intolerance and sexism.

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Kirralie Smith is a well-known anti-Islamic politician and activist, and she is being tapped as Australia's newest libertarian leader.

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The former head of the NSW gaming authority has said it was a mistake for the former NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell to grant a licence to James Packer to build a high rollers casino in Sydney without a public inquiry. ABC TV's Four Corners

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Violence has increased in suburbs surrounding the lockout precincts in the Sydney CBD and Kings Cross, according to a report from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

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Revenue from car parking is a major earner across Australia's four largest airport with Melbourne at the top of the list.

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The CSIRO Marine Debris team spent three years surveying the plastic pollution affecting Australias beaches and oceans.

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Fairfax's Nick Moir went down to Dee Why beach to look at the increased swell

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Police are investigating the death of a 55-year-old woman after her body was found in an apartment building in Sydney's west on Sunday night.

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The experienced pilot is recovering in hospital after he crashed his single engine plane into a paddock at Tumut, west of Canberra.

Kirralie Smith is a well-known anti-Islamic politician and activist, and she is being tapped as Australia's newest libertarian leader.

Smith received relatively little attention during the last federal election as a NSW Senate candidate for the Australian Liberty Alliance, the political offshoot of the Q Society, which describes itself as "Australia's leading Islam-critical movement".

("Q Society supports an integrated multi-ethnic Australia and rejects racism, which the Oxford dictionary defines as: 'Belief in the superiority of a particular race.' Since Islam is not a race or ethnicity, being critical of Islam is not racist," its website explains.)

But she is likely to receive far more press in the coming weeks as the co-defendant in a defamation action being brought by the businessman Mohammed El-Mouelhy, who was the subject of a critical video produced by the Q Society and presented by Smith.

Already Smith and the Q Society, also named in the suit, have rallied an impressive line-up of public supporters, including Coalition right-wingersCory Bernardi, George Christensen and the former MP Ross Cameron, who are among a handful of public figures set to address fundraisers to be held in Sydney and Melbourne on February 9 and 10.

We sit and both reach for our phones to turn on recording apps. Smith has already explained that she wants her own record of our conversation. The tension dissipates a little when a sky-blue ute throbs past us and Smith laughs and points out the personalised number plate, "TRUMP1". Later she will tell me that she rejects the suggestion she is right wing, rather, she says she a part of the silent majority of mainstream conservatives whose voices are now being heard due to victories of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign.

Smith says she never intended to pursue politics. She has always been happiest as a wife and mother. "I love being my husband's wife," she says to emphasise the point.

As it was, a confluence of events brought her to her mission. In 2000 Smith and her husband Greg, a tradesman, sought out volunteer work in Mali and there met the Assemblies of God missionary Faouzi Arzouni, whom she describes as a Muslim apostate who became a friend and mentor.

Two years later the couple went on another trip, a 10-day visit to refugee camps ofthe displaced of what is now known as the Maluku sectarian conflict in Indonesia, during which Christian and Muslim communities fell into violent political and ethnic conflict. Smith recalls sitting in refugee camps hearing terrible stories of violence perpetrated by Muslims.

In 2009 Smith's husband took her to a talk being given by Mark Durie, an Anglican vicar. During that lecture Durie expressed concern about buying certain supermarket products because they had been certified as halal.

Smith was intrigued and began her own investigations on the internet, learning that many brands are halal-certified, and that a portion of the fees paid for such certification is donated to Muslim charities. In other countries, Smith contends, those charities have directed funds towards groups with terrorist links. Her online investigation became a website, Halal Choices, a campaign and, with the support of Bernardi and Christensen, a parliamentary inquiry into "third party" food certification. Finally it became a political ambit, with Smith running for the ALA in a campaign launched by the anti-Islamic immigration Dutch MP Geert Wilders.

"There is no question of our country being Islamified. Now, this reply constituted a historical error as soon as it was uttered," Wilders once told Dutch parliament.

"I can report that they have had enough of burkas, headscarves, the ritual slaughter of animals, socalled honour revenge, blaring minarets, female circumcision, hymen restoration operations, abuse of homosexuals, Turkish and Arabic on the buses and trains as well as on town hall leaflets, halal meat at grocery shops and department stores, Sharia exams, the Finance Minister's Sharia mortgages, and the enormous over-representation of Muslims in the area of crime, including Moroccan street terrorists," Wilders said.

Smith says she does not believe there is an imminent threat of adopting Sharia law, but is concerned about what she calls "creeping Sharia".

"We are being encouraged very strongly to tolerate Sharia finance, halal certification, the hijab," she says.

"Sharia is definitely present in Australia I believe there are honour killings and it is all reported under domestic violence or another name," she says. As evidence she says she has close friends who are pastors who work in churches who have provided sanctuary to victims.

But Smith's concerns are broader than creeping sharia. During the US election she was horrified by Hillary Clinton's support for abortion rights. She opposes political correctness, Safe Schools andbig government regulations imposed upon farmers by distant bureaucrats.

"I pretty much oppose everything the Greens stand for," she says.

She was also appalled by the Liberal Party's abandonment of Tony Abbott for Malcolm Turnbull.

This broader political outlook, and Smith's articulate direct manner, has led some observers to speculate that she is a potential leader for a new conservative movement, one energised by the international populist surge.

She is, says John Adams, a former Coalition adviser who has written about the need for more intellectual depth in the new conservative movement, a more capable and charismatic messenger than, say, Pauline Hanson. ("I think Pauline has a lot of good sentiment, I am not sure about the ability," says Smith of Hanson.)

In the months since the campaign Smith has kept in touch with supporters via videos on her Facebook page. In them she is relentlessly bright and articulate, upbeat about Christmas and Australia Day, though scandalised by the recent billboard that showed a pair of little girls celebrating in a hijab andcheerily opposed to the "threat" of multiculturalism. She denies ever having had media training, though confesses that she is constantly asked if she has.

Asked if she plans to run for office again Smith says she cannot answer the question as her entire focus is directed towards the defamation action and her family.

"People say this is sexist, well I am sexist, I love being a wife and mother, that is the best I have ever done in my life I love being my husband's wife."

In the next breath she adds that sheand her husband have made the decision to use any platform to put forward their message.

"I want to be able to look my children in the eye and say I did everything I could to stand for what is right."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the Reverend Mark Durie's relationship to the Q Society. He is in fact an occasional speaker for the Q Society.

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Islam-critical Kirralie Smith seen as potential ...

Writing in the March/April issue of Politico Magazine, Tim Albertas headline posesa question that has been all too popular nowadays. Namely, does the age of Trump signal the end of the libertarian dream?

From the piece:

After generations of being relegated to the periphery of American politics, they are seeing some of their most precious ideals accepted and advocated for at the highest levels of government. But in many policy areas, there has never been a president who poses a greater threat to what they hold dearone who is poised, potentially, to reorient the GOP electorate toward a strong, active, centralized and protectionist federal government.

RELATED:Rand Paul can save health care reform

Indeed, so far the Trump administration has beenpretty schizophrenic when it comes to liberty. On one hand, the confirmation of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is thegreatest political victory school choicecommunity has experiencedon the federal level. Similarly, President Trumps two-for-one deregulatory special, while questionable on its implementation, signals a serious effort to dismantle the regulatory state.

On the other hand, Trump is so far removed from libertarian ideals on other issues, itboggles the mind. He wants to spend $1 trillion on big government infrastructure projects. He wants to build up the military and once threatened to bomb the shit out of ISIS. His protectionist agenda threatens less immigration, travel, and trade across Americas borders.

This split in policy has similarly split libertarians politically and professionally.As a young professional in Washington, Ive seen many close friends and acquaintances in the libertarian network get tapped by the administration for a potential job. Some say yes, reasoning that its better to have a seat at the table than be on the menu. Others say no,reckoning that theres no need to abandon their ideals if theyre already satisfied at a job where they can keep them.

Of course, theres no right or wrong answer. A well-functioning administration should ideally have both practical libertarians on the insidedoing the hardwork implementingpro-libertychange as well as idealist libertarians on the outsideholding them to their most cherished values. This dual dynamicseems to only avail itself during Republican administrations, presenting libertarians with a rare opportunity in the age of Trump to actually achieve some policy victories.

In short, anyone bemoaning the end of the libertarian moment in the age of Trump isnt looking close enough. Certainly, libertariansmay have seemed stronger when we were a united opposition front to the Obama administration. After all, its much sexier to be a critic than thanan actual agent of change. Nevertheless, Trumps ascent to the presidencyis itself a vindication of libertarian policy on certain issues (education, regulation) and an invitation on othersto join the team and fight for liberty (taxes, spending).

RELATED:Who are we? | The liberty movement in the Trump era

The movement is sure seem silent or even fractured in the next few years, but looks may be deceiving. Behind the stillness are hundreds of libertarians infiltrating the administrative state, influencing federal bureaucracies that havent been subject to internal restraint for years. Behind the split are libertarian think tanks and advocacy groups who have the ear of the ruling Republican party and can successfully pressure them to make pro-liberty policy victories.

In short, Mr. Libertarian has gone to Washington, and the opportunities are endless.

Continued here:
Mr. Libertarian goes to Washington - Rare.us

Editors Note: Seriously is a satire column, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. The vies expressed do not necessarily represent the views of the Collegians editorial board.

Claiming that Libertarians everywhere want to resist the temptation of government and grow closer to God, Executive Director of the Libertarian Party Wes Benedict announced that the Libertarian Party is giving up paying taxes for Lent.

We as Libertarians want to refocus this time of year on our most Heavenly duty: to not do a goddamn thing for anyone else, Benedict said, noting that while Libertarians would be participating in the Catholic tradition of Lent, its not like theyre religious or anything. Our country was founded by people who wanted to be free from religious persecution and we hope the statists respect our religious rights to not give a fucking dime to benefit anyone other than ourselves.

When questioned by critics, Benedict defended the move as living as God intended, probably, free from the shackles of shared social responsibility and having to actually cooperate with other human beings.

I dont know the Bible, like, super well, Benedict said, but the devil is totally a statist. I mean, forcing people to give up their souls and suffer for eternity? Hes like the IRS!

When asked by reporters why the party didnt simply give up government for Lent, Benedict said that the idea hadnt been discussed.

Damn, thats a good idea! Why didnt we think of that?

At press time, Benedict could be overheard loudly debating the merits of the Sixteenth Amendment with tax collectors, arguing that the constitutional right of the government to collect taxes was freaking bogus.

Disclaimer: Seriously is a satire blog, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. All articles from Seriously are creations of fiction, and presumably fake publications. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians and/or celebrities, in which case they are fictitious events based on real people. Photos used do not have any connection to the story and are used within the rights of free reuse, as well as cited to the best of our ability. Seriously is intended for a mature, sophisticated, and discerning audience.

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Seriously: Libertarian Party to give up paying taxes for Lent - Rocky Mountain Collegian

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From its inception,X-Menrelied heavily on political undertones and took on sensitive subjects including racism, segregation, AIDS, and war. The latest (and best)film in the franchise isLogan no exception and while being more character-driven than previous films, it shows why Wolverine is the most libertarian superhero of all time.

The film takes place in the year 2029 and the character of Wolverine has aged significantly, is living off the grid with Professor X, and is making a living bydrivinga limo using a car sharing app whats more libertarian than Uber?His superhero days are long behind him and the only time he acts violently is when hes provoked.

Throughout the film, Wolverine constantly fantasizes about living on a boat with Professor X and being free of dealing with anyone a poor mans version of Peter Thiels dream of seasteading.

His fantasies are interrupted when a new character named Laura emerges, she has the same super powers and has suffered at the hands of military scientists who conducted experimentations on Logan and gave both of them adamantium claws.

(**SPOILER ALERT **)

Logan wasnever been a believer in mutant brotherhood and the identity politics that surrounds the X-Men comics. Hes a loner, a recluse, and a libertarian, he doesnt want to be part of any institutions and questions other mutants for their needing to belong.When Professor X demands they protect Laura he at first rejects the idea insisting its not my problem but has a change of heart when he learns shes his cloned-daughter who raised in a military lab.

His decision to protect Laura and Professor dont come out of any identity-based philosophy, but only for the fact that he choose to treat them like family.

The last X-Men decides he has to get his daughter to safety in a community 0f mutants, away from the long reach of the military-industrial complex that destroyed his life.

Over the course of the 9 X-Men movies featuring Wolverine, the character is a constant struggle to live independently of the government intrusion, the police state that tries to document and imprison mutants, and the identity politics that forces mutants to live their entire life based upon the features they were born with.

Its inLoganthat Wolverine finally is able to achieve those libertarian dreams for his daughter.

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'Logan' proves Wolverine is the most libertarian superhero ever - Red Alert Politics