Skip to main content

So who is this Libertarian trying to crash the party in Indiana's 9th House District?


In Indiana's 9th Congressional District, Dr. Michael Schansberg is doing something unprecedented: he's appearing statistically in polling for a US House race.

Current polling gives Schansberg 4% in what is an admittedly safe Democratic district, with Dem Baron Hill at 51-40 over GOP candidate Mike Sodrel.

So skeptics can, I suppose, dismiss Schansberg as a fairly meaningless protest vote totaling only about 40% of the margin separating the Demopublican candidates.

On the other hand, Dr Schansberg isn't a lightweight, either. He's Professor of Economics at Indiana University at New Albany and an anti-abortion Evangelical Christian candidate all at the same time.

This leaves him pretty far to the right of me, at least on social issues, but it appears that he's making his stand on basic economic issues, and he does it with some rare humor:

Baron Hill is a fiscal conservative — for a Democrat. (But that’s like saying that he’s among the best students who earned a D or F in a course.) Mike Sodrel is a fiscal moderate among Republicans (compared, for example, to fiscal conservatives like Mike Pence). That’s like going 7–9 in Big Ten basketball— and from what I understand, that's not good enough.


One might believe that we should have more police on the streets. How should we solve this? We could take your money; send it to Washington; have them take a cut of it and attach some strings; and then send it back to us— so we can hire more police. Or we could just hire our own police!


Hill is in a tough spot here since he argued that Sodrel should be blamed for the higher gas prices that occurred while he was in Congress. Of course, gas prices have increased much more since Hill returned to Congress and so he’s stuck with the silly argument he made two years ago.


On balance, I'd personally find it tough to become a real Schansberg partisan since I disagree with many of his social views, but I truly like his integrity (he doesn't mince words; I know where he stands), and he's got a lot to offer on economic issues.

Check him out.
Labels:

Comments

Eric Schansberg said…
Thanks for bringing more attention to my candidacy!

Grace and peace to you, eric
July 20, 2008 at 6:49 PM
Steven H. Newton said…
I'm trying, as much as possible, to raise the attention level for any seriously campaigning Libertarian candidate around the country. We certainly can't count on the MSM to do it.
July 21, 2008 at 1:12 AM
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

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

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 ...
31 comments
Read more