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Thursday, March 6, 2008

vagueness, and a $1000 bounty for a better LP issue than abortion

Eric, it's true that the PlatCom's current draft is more about timeless principles of policy direction then it is about a legislative agenda for the next four years. The reality is that we won't have any LP-authored legislation being enacted in the next four years, just as we don't really have any legislative accomplishments from the last four years to brag about.  For more information, see http://libertarianmajority.net/campaign-program.  Note that there is an effort getting under way to propose in Denver either a campaign program or a suite of current-policy resolutions.  I'll post more information here as it develops.
 
It's a little unfair to single out abortion as an example of the PlatCom draft's vagueness, because the PlatCom deliberately chose to straddle this divisive issue.  (We also chose placeholder language for education and the environment, so stay tuned for specifics in those areas.)  The Ron-Paul-style federalist approach you propose was in fact the second most popular option (since I count our straddling language as substantively indistinguishable from the outright silence option).  I prefer your approach to the straddling language we adopted, but my favorite approach is still this: The Undefended Popular High Ground On Abortion
 
I'm now increasing to $1000 my bounty for any similarly significant position that ANY of the top five parties (D, R, G, LP, CP) could take (but hasn't yet) where both 60% of their members and 60% of Americans would currently accept it and it is not already staked out by any of the other four parties.  I doubt this situation has ever occurred in American politics before, but I'm not yet confident enough to bet that it hasn't happened before now.