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Bill Redpath was Chair of the Libertarian National Committee from 2006 to 2010. He was Chairman of the Libertarian Partys Ballot Access Committee from 1992 to 1996 and under his direction the Libertarian Party became the first non-major party to achieve ballot access in all 50 states plus DC in two-consecutive elections in United States history. He has been a six-time candidate for the party and today serves as Treasurer for FairVote.

Bill Redpath: Good morning

Charles Peralo: Yes good morning,

Jacob Linker: And what a wonderful morning it is

Charles: So I guess Ill get started. Hello there Im Charles Peralo with beinglibertarian.com and here I am with my good pal Jacob Linker and also former Chairman of the Libertarian Party Bill Redpath. Hey Bill how are ya doing this morning?

Bill: Im great Charlie and how are you?

Charles: Well Im doing well. Im glad to eb talking to you. I mean weve met before I believe. Were you at the Orlando Convention?

Bill: Ive been at every Libertarian Party convention, national convention, starting with the Seattle Labor Day 1987 Convention when Ron Paul was nominated so yeah I was in Orlando.

Charles: Okay great I mean we definitely had a fun time down there so I guess that the biggest thing to ask is what do you think of the results we got? We nominated Johnson-Weld, I voted for both Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, I liked the ticket a lot, Jacob was on the campaign as well how do you think it went?

Bill: I think overall it went well. I think that it created a lot of interest among the general public. We got the Johnson-Weld ticket got more than 3.28% of the popular vote and over triple Ed Clark who got 1.06% in 1980, so I think there were some things that occurred that I rather we could go back and change we would or probably anybody would, but overall the coverage that we got and the ballot access we came out with I think 37 states plus DC we came out with ballot access by far, I remember the days when it was in the low teens, the number of states where we had ballot access, so its things have definitely improved and the Johnson-Weld ticket and the very recent past certainly has a lot to do with that.

Charles: Well that is great. So Jacob what is the first question you have that isnt the Johnson-Weld campaign?

Jacob: So looking back at November, Maine became the first state in the nation to vote for Ranked-Choice voting, opening the door to multiparty democracy in the state. How do you look at this and what do you think this means for the push for a more effective democratic process going forward in regards to other states, cities, or districts doing what Maine did?

Bill: I think its going in a positive direction nationally. Social change however happens very slowly and its very interesting that the polls in Maine showed us way ahead but even late during the campaign in September and October I saw polls showing a significant undecided and usually in these situations undecideds, by a large majority, vote against change, but it did pass by 52 to 48 margin. I have learned of a group in Massachusetts that is going to work towards ranked-choice voting in Massachusetts. So, its I think things are looking up and things are particularly good. Where its happening however tend to be in areas that have liberal politics and its tough right now and with the electoral college situation now, it is going to make it even more difficult to get Republicans on board with electoral reform. So overall I think that its positive, but its gonna be tough to grow theres no question about it.

Jacob: So how much of what happened in Maine do you think is a product of the states unique political culture? The US has two independent Senators, one of whom is Angus King of Maine who formerly was the Independent Governor of the State. Its also the state where Ross Perot came closest to winning back in 1992. Throw on top how out of place with national norms a Senator like Susan Collins is, and you have a pretty particular political culture in the state.

Bill: Right and I think that, certainly, Maines political culture played a role no question about it. It made things easier there than it would have been elsewhere. Maine is an initiative and referendum state, it isnt going to be as easy in states that dont have initiatives and referendums, as well have to go through the legislature which is one-hundred percent composed of Rs and Ds. So, its certain that that had something to do with it but the thing that we have to explain to do, we have to explain the benefits we have to talk about more choices, more effective choices for people, because people want that intuitively. I see it out there, Ive done petitioning over the holidays in Ohio for the Libertarian Party of Ohio, the party commission there is trying to get back on the ballot in Ohio as a political party, and its clear talking to people that a lot of people are dissatisfied and are looking for alternatives.

Charles: Well if you want to talk about just how this changes the game, I didnt even know it was happening in Maine until Jacob and I, we were going to Queens to get people to vote Johnson and Weld and handing out some fliers, and I would say Jacob what would you say 80% of the reason people said they werent going to vote for Gary Johnson was?

Jacob: What I heard most often, especially from people who liked the two of them, was the standard line about not wanting to waste their vote.

Charles: I know Maine is not going to do presidential races even though they could change that policy later on, but still for Senate races, gubernatorial races, congressional races, just having the Libertarian Party and the Green Party not have this curse of just being oh your vote doesnt matter just not having that is such a basic I would say 99% of the reason people dont vote libertarian, dont vote third-party just ended in Maine and I think that Rhode Island, Massachusetts I think theyll come a long way in the next few years.

Bill: Well youre absolutely right that its the wasted vote syndrome that people maybe they cant name it but they feel it they know it intuitively that whether they have a chance to win or if Im throwing my vote away, there are several answers to that but I wont go into those right now, I can if you want me to, but I dont think ranked-choice voting or single-winner elections is going to make third-party candidates electable. I think that is going to require proportional representation in legislatures for that to happen; but what it would do it would do a couple of things it would do away with the wasted vote syndrome what would that mean much more earned media, Im a many time candidate for public office and Ive been asked multiple times by reporters why should I cover you and that question goes out the window much more earned media and much more debate inclusion now youre going to have major party candidates possibly wanting or perhaps the sponsors of the debates- all the candidates in because major party candidates would want to be third-party voters second choice vote. It would have a great and positive effect for the Libertarian Party even though I really dont think it would lead to more libertarians being elected.

Jacob: One other advantage to ranked choice voting that Id read up on is that it improves the quality of the political discussion. You cant just attack or ignore other candidates because youll want to be their second choice. One anecdote I heard was a mayoral or state legislative candidate walking by and noticing someone putting up a sign for another candidate the candidate talked to that person when they otherwise would have ignored them because they wanted to at least be that persons second choice. Given how bad the political environment has been getting, am I just being optimistic here?

Bill: No youre absolutely right, and you just cant go negative you cant just trash the other guy which is what happens with the two older parties as they just ignore independents and third-party candidates and just focus so much of their energy on trashing the other older party candidate and I think that dynamic will change for the better. We had supposedly a tossup, my congresswoman Barbara Comstock in Virginia, the television airwaves, ugh. She ultimately won by a comfortable margin but there were basically two types of ads, pro-image ads for her but the vast majority of her commercials were trashing her Democratic opponent.

Charles: So it is interesting how that would change. I look at it this movement and the whole, how does it overlap with FairVote, and you mention the point of what it would take to get libertarians elected. Youre definitely right on state legislatures and obviously I think ranked-choice voting, that opens up the door a lot. Regarding the libertarian movement, one thing I noticed is just that I voted for Gary in 2012 I voted for him in 2016 I followed third party campaigns before one thing that always bothers me is, and I think about these third party debates that normally happen, these campaigns like the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, Ralph Nader, it always just becomes well youve got the two other options and were the third choice it seems that the Libertarian Party has so much to advocate, and same for the Green Party, but they just kind of keep the same method that I dont think anyone cares about, that weve gotta stop the two big parties. Do you agree on that?

Bill: Im not sure I agree with your premise, if I understand it. I certainly think that there are problems, many problems, in this nation that the two older parties are not addressing. First and foremost, the national debt situation this nation is sleepwalking to a fiscal crisis right now and the solutions are out there and theyre not that hard to understand but there is a lack of political will, not just with the two older parties but with the American people. The war on drugs is largely bipartisan, not totally but largely. The foreign policy establishment is certainly bipartisan in this nation. So I think the message ought to be that weve got to change things in this nation and address issues and do things that the two older parties are absolutely unwilling to do. Beyond that, there are obviously major differences between the Libertarian Party and the Green Party. Years ago and its a long platform today years ago I read the entire Green Party platform and I agreed with about 40% of it and I disagreed with about 60% of it. So I think there are many common areas, issues, and certainly processes issues, on which the Green Party and Libertarian Party should be in total agreement and we should work with them on those and have our honest disagreements on other issues. But changing the status quo in this nation is certainly a valid message for both the Libertarian Party and the Green Party.

Charles: Theres definitely an alliance there. I just think that when it comes to the Libertarian Party, looking at the issues, definitely national debt is a big thing. I just always say that the Libertarian Party has this issue where it gets very philosophical, it gets very nonaggression principle, very personal liberties and personal property, things that do matter but it doesnt seem to hammer in at least at the party perspective on the bread and butter issues. The war on drugs, deregulation, national debt, foreign policy things which are very very simple but the try to go to very different extremes and that does create a problem.

Bill: I think that it depends from candidate to candidate. I say that maybe the Johnson-Weld campaign did things right to maximize their vote numbers. I would say it times it seemed to me that there was and they may have been right but for my taste I would have preferred a harder hitting campaign on the substantive issues. It seemed to me at times that both Johnson and Weld were focused too much on being well liked and likeable and maybe thats what scores, Im probably several standard deviations from the typical American voter I would also say this much I am not an LP radical, I describe myself as a CATO Libertarian, the CATO institute does libertarianism the way I like it and I think its the way it should be presented Ive been a six-time candidate for office, Im out there petitioning and I see little to no appetite in the general public for radical libertarian solutions to public policy problems. I do think theyre open to highly libertarian solution and I think that we cannot jump, there has to be a path from here to there, and we cant just make jump. If you want to keep social security as it is, then just propose doing away with it immediately you will never get change if thats the only other policy option. Social change is incremental and I just dont see an appetite among the general public for radical libertarian solutions.

Charles: Yeah youre definitely speaking my language, youre definitely speaking Jakes language there. Look I have a lot of very radical views compared to most people, but when it comes to the Johnson-Weld campaign you brought it up and hit the nail on the head right there. I was looking at it and asking why dont we have a formal social security plan, why dont we have a medicare plan, why dont we have a healthcare plan, why dont we have a tax and budget plan that makes more sense and is more detailed they didnt really do that and that was a big problem there. It was disappointing and I think Jake has a question to follow up on this.

Jacob: One thing I remembered was that the lack of a Veterans Affairs section on the Johnson-Weld site was one of the reasons, more like excuses, that the IAVA excluded Governor Johnson from the Commander-in-Chief Forum. I actually went down to the forum and stood outside the venue along the west side highway with about 40 people in protest of the exclusion, not that we really got much attention for it. Do you think that not focusing on certain flashy issues hurt them? Of course looking at how the two big parties ran their campaigns, there just didnt seem to be much interest generally in issues

Bill: I dont agree. There are some people who run for public office and they say if you want to emphasize three issues okay fine but sometimes I see people say that they only want to talk about three issues. I dont think that you can do that while running for office. There are certainly issues you can emphasize, and Veterans Affairs, there were a lot of issues addressed, I wanna say there were 15 on the Johnson-Weld website, you cant address all of the issues on there and Veterans Affairs may well rank below the top 15 or 20 issues. But you gotta pay attention, there was a Reason Magazine article written and I forgot written by who, on Social Security. Well Gary Johnson is the best of the candidates but his position is lacking specifics, and even non-radical libertarians are proposing what the average person perceives as radical changes to society and we need to have our ducks in a row. We are proposing major changes to society and we cant just shoot from the hip, weve got to be prepared, and we have to address specific plans as to how we are going to get from here to there and yes I would have liked to have seen more policy specifics in that regard from the Johnson-Weld Campaign.

This has been the first of two parts of BeingLibertarian.coms interview with former LNC Bill Redpath. Stay tuned to read the second part.

DISCLAIMER: This interview has been edited for reduction of stuttering, repetition, and vocalized pauses as well as succinctness.

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Liberland President Vit Jedlicka and supporters at the inauguration.

Joshua Keating

Foreign leaders were few and far between at Fridays inauguration in Washington. Benjamin Netanyahu declined an invitation. Justin Trudeaus office sent his regrets. Thats not unusual: Foreign governments typically send their ambassadors,= while the prime ministers and presidents stay home. But at least one head of state did make the trip.

Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs.

I met up with Vit Jedlicka, president of the Free Republic of Liberland, and his delegation of about 20 people, just outside the Federal Center metro stop Friday morning. They were running a little late, after a successful pre-inauguration night out at an Americans for Tax Reform gala but were in good spirits, excited to be representing the worlds newest country (according to them anyway) at the swearing-in and enjoying their time in D.C. so far. We got an Uber driver to accept Bitcoin yesterday, the president told me with evident satisfaction.

Jedlicka, a 33-year-old libertarian politician and activist from the Czech Republic, planted (literally) the flag of Liberland on the banks of the Danube on April 13, 2015. At 2.7 square miles, it would be the third smallest country in the world after the Vatican and Monaco if it were recognized as a country. The territory is a disputed area between Serbia and Croatia, butunusually for a territorial conflictthe issue is that neither country wants it. The land is under Croatian control, but the Croatian government wants to cede it in exchange for other parcels of land controlled by Serbia. Liberland claims this makes the territory, terra nullius, or unclaimed land, and therefore available for the creation of a new country, in this case, one for those who share Jedlickas libertarian beliefs: Taxes will be voluntary in Liberland, and public services provided through private enterprise or crowdfunding. According to Jedlicka, about 240 people, living throughout the world, are now officially citizens of Liberland, and more than 435,000 have expressed interest in citizenship online, including 12,500 from the United States.

The only problem is that no one is currently able to live in Liberland. Croatia has prevented Liberlanders from crossing the land border into the territory or establishing permanent residences there. (Though Jedlicka notes with satisfaction that a member of Croatias Parliament came out in their defense this week.) The fact that nobody actually lives in Liberland yet, and no other governments have recognized it, hasnt stopped Jedlicka, who lives in Prague, from promoting the project around the world, hence the visit to D.C.

Liberland supporters in the U.S. scrounged together the tickets for the delegation by asking members of Congress. They didnt necessarily know they were inviting us, concedes Dave Molineaux, a Liberlander from Charlottesville, Virginia. Molineaux says he got involved in Jedlickas project after reading about it on libertarian news sites, deciding it was something I can really get behind. Hes optimistic that the U.S. will eventually recognize Liberland.

Also on hand was Liberlands just appointed vice president, Bogie Wozniak, a mustachioed Chicago retiree, originally from Poland. An enthusiastic Trump supporter, Wozniak had helped coordinate the publication of a Polish translation of the presidents 2015 book Crippled America. (Polish title: Donald Trump: Prezydent Biznesmen). He didnt see a contradiction between backing the America first president and the nation-building project in the Balkans. First we make America great again. Then, Liberland.

I asked Dave Vice, a Liberlander from Utah, if he thought Trump shared Liberlands values. Hell get there sooner or later, he said, suggesting that Trump was part of a global anti-establishment wave.

Jedlicka is relatively bullish on Trump too, he told me as we made our way through the security checkpoints onto the mall. Hes an entrepreneur and were going to be entrepreneur-friendly, he said. I think he will understand how we strive to get rid of regulations. Maybe he will move the United States a little bit more toward Liberland. He also said he hoped he could leverage the Trump familys Czech connections to Liberlands advantage. He said he was in communication with the offices of several elected officials in D.C. but declined to name any he might be meeting with.

Along with the crowd, we were funneled onto a knoll, southwest of the Capitol steps, with a partially obstructed view of the Jumbotron. I thought wed be a bit closer, mumbled one member of the delegation. For much of the ceremony, Jedlicka struggled to get a strong enough cell signal to livestream a message to people at the opening of a new libertarian think tank in the Czech Republic, happening at the same time. The man in a suit and tie speaking Czech into his phone got a few quizzical looks from the MAGA crowd around us.

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I heard it was you Talkin' 'bout a world Where all is free It just couldn't be And only a fool would say that - Steely Dan

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom. - Bob Dylan

Here's a ramble that's been hanging in my drafts for a while: Why do so many tech folks identify as libertarian? What do they mean? Is politics ripe for tech disruption? It's a brand new year, and all old posts must go!

When I say libertarian, what gets me going is the person who, whenever something is messed up, thinks "OMG, if the government would step out of the way, a market solution would appear and work so much better!" ... Even for activities which historically have a strong government role, roads, schools, money and banking, safety standards, pollution, etc.

If you think this sort of immaculate, spontaneous order is a straw man, oh boy, just go to a Gary Johnson event and hear him questioned about whether it's OK for the state to issue drivers licenses and speeding tickets. Not to mention debates about whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a worse infringement on liberty than Jim Crow and segregation, or it's moral for the government to tax people to save them from an asteroid impact, or whether parents should have the legal right to not feed kids and let them die. And those thought experiments aren't anomalies, the libertarian scene is a hotbed of non-seriousness to downright kookiness.

I like freedom as much or more than most. But the idea that freedom is, in and of itself, a sufficient condition for desirable outcomes for everything has never seemed a compelling, complete theory that can deal with public goods, coordination problems, financial stability, most of the things we consider economic policy. It just begs the question, it's the 'assume a can opener' of political ideologies. Once you give everyone freedom, you still have to design a market system and system of laws to solve social problems, define and assign property rights, decide what gets traded and how1.

Policies are market designs. Markets are sophisticated mechanisms, complex social institutions that have highly co-evolved with economic and political frameworks. There is no such thing as a pure free market, just as there's no such thing as a pure human 'state of nature'. Free markets depend on laws, cultural norms, technology which are like David Foster Wallace's water. They may seem natural and invisible because we've internalized them...but try explaining them to an alien or an uncontacted Amazon tribe. Laissez-faire is not even wrong, it's not even a thing. Free markets are games within a game, they are institutions humans create to serve objectives, they have to obey natural laws but they don't exist in a social and cultural vacuum, they are intensely developed to be fit for purpose.

And market designs involve values and choices. Freedom is not the only human value that matters. Policy involves difficult tradeoffs between freedom, some notion of effectiveness, and some notion of fairness. Here's a fancy graph!

That's my political science 'theory of everything'. (Inspired by Keynes) People organize to pursue their individual and group values2. They can choose to maximize different values. One universal value is freedom, or maximum power to the individual. Another universal value is fairness within the in-group according to some value system... each accorded status, power, material reward in accordance to their contribution and merit, with no one taking undue advantage of anyone else. Another value is 'efficiency', which is a catch-all for other possibly non-universal group values: economic efficiency and growth, national power and world supremacy, religious or sectarian values.

Extreme pursuit of individual freedom leads to libertarianism. Extreme pursuit of fairness leads to communism. Extreme pursuit of narrow group values at the expense of freedom and fairness leads to fascism.

Are tech types libertarian in that extreme sense of primarily maximizing freedom? Clearly not!

The vast majority of Silicon Valley political contributions go to Democrats. A tiny sliver of CEOs identifies as Republican, sometimes keeps it secret, or wears it as a badge of contrarianism. Someone like Travis Kalanick used Ayn Rand as an avatar, but loves Obamacare, which lets gig-ers get healthcare without putting the onus on their employer/platform.

The simplistic stereotype is that the tech elite are Randian technocrats who just want the government to get out of the way while they solve the big problems that confound the politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats, and make the world a better place.

But I think the proper analogy is that Silicon Valley techies view government as code, the operating system that defines the operation of society...an operating system maybe overdue for disruption and a major upgrade. And Silicon Valley types think they know code, know complex systems, and are just the ones to do it.

Let's explore the analogy between OS code and government a little. If you're not a coder type, skip ahead a bit.

Government defines rules between the people, corporations, the administrations, foreign policy. An operating system defines rules, protocols, APIs between the users, administrators, programs and processes, hardware, networking with other computers.

Government defines a market design that allocates public goods between competing interests. An operating system defines rules that allocate hardware (e.g. CPU time, peripherals) between different processes and users.

Like an operating system, you want government to have as small a footprint as possible, use as few resources as possible, and give users and developers maximum freedom to fully utilize all the computing resources at their disposal.

Like computers, economies have grown bigger, more powerful, and more complex. Both operating systems and governments have taken on greater roles over time. Add multiprocessing, now you need a good scheduler, memory protection. Add multi-user and networking, need much better permissioning and security.

As systems get better and more complex, users expect more and more from the OS in terms of services, coordinating and scheduling complex tasks, security, supporting complex peripherals. So, as the system gets better, the percentage of work done by the OS vs. individual programs tends to grow, and the resources it uses grow as well.

That's an essential paradox of operating systems and government. A better society is one where individuals are maximally empowered, and can also coordinate with others in complex ways. It's a hallmark of improving civilization to give more people access to a more complex network of interactions, because they are safe, they have good norms of behavior and trust each other, they have clear laws well enforced, they have access to basic services. The more complexity is supported, the better the society. More complexity and interaction tends to mean more complex laws and regulation, and more shared resources supported by government.

That government is best which governs least, but as society grows more complex, the bar will tend to rise.

In code, you want to abstract problems into modules that solve parts of a problem well. In politics you have the concept of subsidiarity: national, state, local governments; solve every problem at the lowest level of government that can effectively deal with it.3

The qualities that make good code are agreed upon...efficient use of resources, easy to use, simple to understand, easy to read and maintain. But code involves hard tradeoffs...fast, good, or cheap? Pick any two. What actually is good code is partly subjective. People get into religious wars about methodologies and languages...agile vs. extreme...functional vs. object-oriented, etc.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Government changes very slowly, tech changes very rapidly. So any optimization in government, i.e. writing really detailed regs applicable to the current state of technology and the economy, is generally a premature optimization. Therefore government is the root of all evil? Well anywhere there's something really wrong it's probably a government failure, by definition. But it's a catch-22, you don't optimize, government is bad; you optimize, and eventually you end up in an unplanned-for situation where the optimization makes things worse.

Checks and balances slow things down. They're sort of like bias and variance. You want to tune your system so that it adapts to change...but if it responds too quickly you can get instability and overfitting. You want your government to respond to the people and to changing circumstances, but not pivot abruptly on every whim. Direct democracy can be a double-edged sword. Brexit, Proposition 134.

Sometimes you need to patch code pretty quickly and you accumulate technical debt, expedient solutions which need to be more carefully implemented later, or create maintenance and other problems in the long run. Hard cases make bad law...the solution that seems just in a complex case doesn't always generalize. You don't want to optimize code too much for the current use case, you need to be flexible. And you need laws that reflect universal principles. Sometimes worse is better...a simple, cheap solution everyone understands is better than a highly optimized, over-engineered one.

The euro is the ultimate in political 'technical debt'. Build something that works today, even though it will need major re-engineering to be robust over the long term, and hope you can implement version 2 in time to avoid collapse.

As you add complexity, a well-designed system can iteratively get better and better. Up to a point. There comes a tipping point where it becomes impossible to maintain and iterate on. Sometimes you accumulate too much technical debt, or change is just too fast, and you need to start over from scratch. Security exploits, bugs multiply. The same may be true of society, the tree of liberty, etc.

Any computer system can get hacked. When you have a good market design, it's a good basis for powerful interaction and coordination. But all systems can be gamed and exploited. Unless people are mostly decent and bad actors are sanctioned, you can get moral hazard and a tragedy of the commons. We don't write systems or build hardware in which the components are told, here's what we want to do, you guys work out the protocols5. APIs and protocols are specified in gory detail using things like RFCs.

You can write awful systems in any language, and you can write pretty good systems in any language. It's the same with ideologies. There are countries with moderately socialist orientations that work pretty well, and there are socialist countries which are disasters. There are countries with mostly market-oriented solutions that work pretty well, and there are free-market countries of weak-state and strong-state varieties which are disasters.

Personally, I'll take Sweden over Pinochet's Chile. In my opinion there are no countries at the extremes of any axis that work well over a long period of time. Somalia, with no working government, is in some sense the apotheosis of small government and maximum private freedom, and not exactly paradise on earth.

Ideologies are like development methodologies, people get pretty worked up about them, you need some methodology, but any reasonable methodology that isn't applied so strictly it gets in the way is probably OK, and having decent developers is more important than which methodology they use.

If you're concerned about Obamacare trampling on liberties, and not about people unable to get care, being bankrupted, facing impossible choices and preventable deaths, you risk turning into an architecture astronaut caring more about buzzwords and ideological purity than actual solutions, outcomes, lives. The user wants code that works, and doesn't care about scrum or Ruby.

Ultimately, I think the Silicon Valley brand of libertarianism is really the cult of disruption; healthy skepticism of government as premature or partial optimization and technical debt; nerd suspicion of wooly MBA/JD pointy-headed boss types; desire to empower people with tools, knowledge, ability to make their own choices, build their own solutions; when that requires a strong guiding hand in the form of code, or government intervention (education, net neutrality), so be it.

When you translate the rules of society into code, is it always a win for the freedom and power of the individual? Not unless you're careful. Technology can be a sustaining technology for totalitarianism as well as a disruptor. It can be a tool for surveillance, social control, databases of Muslims.

I like Uber, but a lot of the code is a pricing black box designed to maximize the value of Uber, not a free auction market. There are still questions of fairness to e.g. the disabled, blacks. You can use big data to understand customers better and offer them more and better choices, or selectively charge people more.

Build a true 2-way market where drivers can offer services and riders can bid for them transparently, maybe even based on a blockchain ledger, and that's a true libertarian solution. If you work on free software, you are a true libertarian and a scholar and I salute you. Until then, you're paying lip service to freedom while creating a new layer of code to regulate behavior, while maximizing your own rent-seeking.

It can sometimes look like tech hubris, liberty for me, the nerd, and not for thee, the unwashed mashes.

Since we've expanded the scope to theories of everything, what really separates left and right? Some interrelation between interests, learned values, psychological makeup:

Decent people can solve problems using left and right solutions, just as programmers can solve problems with different languages. But there is good code and bad code. Indecent, extreme, and disagreeable people aren't going to solve anything.

We've become a nation of architecture astronauts, spending our energy on ideological flame wars instead of shipping code that works.

There's a fine line between being a critic and a contrarian, and being a hater tearing down the progress other people are trying to achieve. Once you get to the extreme of opposing all mandatory vaccinations, I would say you've left reason behind. Given what we understand about network effects, advocating freedom to engage in antisocial behavior without sanction seems like rejecting the categorical imperative and reason-based Western morality.

Elevating individual freedom to the highest and only moral good, and following that to its extreme conclusion on matters of asteroids and vaccinations, seems like bad code. In the extreme, it leads somewhere between indifference to the possibility bad choices may create human suffering and outright cruelty. Of course, gentle libertarian-oriented friends, I don't ascribe cruelty to you, but I urge you ask yourself how far extremism in the name of liberty should be taken before it becomes a vice, or at best self-defeating.

Men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. -- Edmund Burke

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. -- James Madison

1 Suppose individuals solve problems by freely agreeing on institutions like democratic governments with civil liberties and also taxes, police forces, prisons, some middle ground between non-violence and slavery? If people freely enter into a contract that imposes sanctions for violations, is it still freedom?

2 Yes, Virginia, people identify, and act with their tribe, nation, other institutions, not just as individuals. People have aspirations as individuals and also for their social unit. Have you ever been to a football game or other 'sacred' ritual where people dress, paint their face, eat and drink, sing, chant and play music in the proper manner to appease the universe and bring success to their in-group (and disaster to the out-group)? The original sin of communism and totalitarianism is not respecting the individual and private property; the original sin of libertarianism is not respecting the drive to identify and find meaning through an in-group, 'something bigger than me'.

3 If you think this is an easy problem, think again. Refactoring is a bitch. Some argue the 2nd Ave Subway costs more because it had to go deep below all existing infrastructure. If one entity owned all the buried infrastructure, you wouldn't dig up the road one week to fix electricity and the next to fix water, you would presumably do everything in one shot, or redesign an integrated subway/water/gas/electric/telecom package and have something more maintainable that saved money. But then every time you need an electric fix, you have to go through the monolithic infrastructure agency, maybe wait until you can schedule water/gas/electric simultaneously. Sometimes you need agencies that cross jurisdictions, like the Port Authority which coordinates transport activities that impact the NYC area with NY and NJ. Maybe guns are the poster boy for this problem. You can't regulate guns in Chicago if they are unregulated in Mike Pence's Indiana. So I would prefer a national registration system, with local authorities in charge of local regs, but then at least they would be able to look up what residents bought in another state, require training, insurance, follow the trail of guns used in crime.

4 Proposition 13, which freezes California property taxes at 1975 levels, achieves the unusual feat of being rash direct democracy (variance), and locking in an outdated policy over the long term (bias). Premature sub-optimization.

5 Actually, that's what machine learning is. But even in supervised learning, you define how the components can interact, and what they are trying to optimize and iteratively improve. Sci-Fi time! Imagine a society of the future where a giant computer is taught the human happiness 'loss function' and some kind of mother 'hello Google' and smartphone notifications directs everyone in the most optimal way.

6 Case in point: Civil rights. Was Jim Crow really more tolerable than the Civil Rights Act? Under normal circumstances a law targeting specific groups and specific outcomes, as opposed to universal principles, is bad code. But it's perverse to deny blacks the right to participate in democracy, enforce a system of segregation by extralegal means and unequal application of the law, and then say that system is less of a cruel insult to freedom than a law that ends it. When that system was maintained in many cases by unequal application of equal laws such as bogus 'literacy tests', I fail to see an alternative to mandating reasonable outcomes as a last resort in this sort of extreme situation. It's hard to do social science without thinking about outcomes; Noble principles and intentions should be eventually be checked against results. Ambrose Bierce said politics is a contest of interests, masquerading as a contest of principles. Better people acknowledge they are fighting for their interests, but also think of others and shared principles. The worst sort actually believe they are fighting on principle, and only their opponents are fighting for their own narrow interests. Whatever your ideology, at the end of the day you have to ship code that works.

The rest is here:
Is Silicon Valley Truly Libertarian? Is Politics Society's OS, Ripe For Disruption? - Huffington Post