Taking an interesting plunge: The Boston Tea Party

I've probably spent a lot more time thinking about this than it probably deserves. Or maybe not.

I believe that the national Libertarian Party is day by day proving itself a hopelessly lost cause for those of us who believe that the cause of limited government, personal liberty, and individual freedom can be furthered at the ballot box.

I have been talking for several weeks about something like a Libertarian Alliance of state parties organizing from the bottom up. But while I think it's a great idea, I keep wondering whether or not it's viable, whether or not anybody will do the necessary legwork to create it.

At least for now, I'm thinking that the Boston Tea Party represents the best vehicle currently available.

Yes, I know the BTP has a checkered organizational past, and that this could be merely another incarnation for dreamers who are not necessarily doers.

The BTP has a simple platform:

The Boston Tea Party supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope and power of government at any level, for any purpose.

I'll be brutally honest: the simplicity and absolutism of this platform put me off for awhile. That for any purpose clause is not one I could swear safely on a lie detector that I embrace.

Yet then I thought: but 95-98% of the time I'd be cool with what that means, and--this is critical--95-98% agreement is higher than my current level of agreement with the Libertarian Party platform.

When I look at this year's program, I'm considerably more comfortable:

1. The Boston Tea Party calls for a complete and unconditional withdrawal of US troops from, and a cessation of US military operations against or within, Iraq.

2. The Boston Tea Party supports repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act.

3. The Boston Tea Party calls for an end to the federal prohibition of marijuana and hemp.

4. The Boston Tea Party calls for the immediate repeal of the REAL ID Act and any and all National ID plans.

5. The Boston Tea Party calls for legislation adopting an annual, regularized increase in the personal exemption to the federal income tax of $1,000 or more, and the additional application of said personal exemption to all FICA/Social Security taxes paid by employees and employers.

I can live with all that.

So while I am not severing my ties with the Libertarian Party, and certainly not with the Libertarian Party of Delaware, I have decided to join friends like Jason Gatties and Tom Knapp in taking out a membership in the Boston Tea Party.

I've always wanted to Party Like It's 1773.

Besides, I'm in early enough that if this thing really does take off, I'll have a membership number lower than 350.

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 — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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