Skip to main content

A Michael Munger interview you may have missed

This from Now Public on May 19, 2008, which I missed at the time, but which contains some excellent points (some excerpted below):

1. What motivated you to run for Governor of North Carolina?

I have been a political scientist for nearly 25 years. I have testified before the U.S. Senate on campaign finance law, I have written books, and many articles about campaigns. But I have never seen a campaign from the inside. Then, once I started the campaign, I became very involved in the ballot access movement here. That is the most important issue, I think. But there are other issues I care about, including ending corporate welfare and ending capital punishment in our state....

4. What can the Libertarian Party offer North Carolina that the Republicans and Democrats are unable or unwilling to offer?

There is no real difference between the state-sponsored parties. Both depend on the state for their existence, using public financing and the public purse to pay off their supporters. Both the Democrats and Republicans run on slightly different versions of the same platform: "Vote for me, and I'll give you other peoples' money!" I would cut spending on make-work pork-barrel projects all over the state, increase the restrictive ceiling on charter schools, commute death sentences to life imprisonement without parole, and stop municipal aggression. North Carolina is one of only seven states that allows involuntary annexation by cities, and that has to be stopped. Cities should not be able to annex country folk against their will....

7. What made you decide to become a Libertarian?

I was registered Republican for a long time. But the Republicans never followed through on their promise to change big government. In fact, the Republicans in Congress, and the Republican President George Bush, have dramatically expanded government in nearly every way. I have always thought of myself as a "small l" libertarian. But the war in Iraq, and the huge spending increases on pork-barrel projects by the Republican Congress, made me change my mind in 2003. I became a Libertarian after the war started, and the Republicans continued spending like drunken sailors on shore leave.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...
32 comments
Read more

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...
70 comments
Read more