Brian Holtz // Sep 10, 2009 at 12:28 am
I have high hopes for the LP becoming more green, but I have little hope for the Greens becoming less anti-liberty and less neophobic.
The LP needs to support a Green Tax Shift, using market means to achieve green ends.
The LP needs to move toward geolibertarianism and EcoLibertarianism, of the sort expressed in the Free Earth Manifesto.
Brian Holtz // Sep 10, 2009 at 5:18 pm
I listed 25 anti-liberty and neophobic positions; thanks for not denying that the Green Party supports all of them.
I generally favor the freedom to be unemployed, poor, and sick, except that I advocate a ecolibertarian Nature’s Dividend, financed by fees on people who initiate force by monopolizing, depleting, polluting, or congesting the natural commons. If you don’t agree that people should otherwise have full rights to their body, labor, peaceful production, and voluntary exchanges, then do you have the courage to say so?
I oppose any and all “corporate rule” that involves fraud or initiation of force. If by “corporate rule” you include a) people not offering you the transactions you want, or b) people offering you transactions you wish you didn’t want, then you should just say so.
Of course, it makes it harder to call people “fascist” when you admit that your views are just national socialism minus the nationalism.
Brian Holtz // Sep 10, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Prof. Fred Foldvary and other geolibertarians have been pushing progressive green libertarianism for decades, and there are good prospects for the LP to become more green. Here is Foldvary in 2007 asking Does free plus green equal victory? Here is Dan Sullivan in 1992 writing Greens and Libertarians: the yin and yang of our political future. Note also the Common Ground Declaration of Third Parties ‘96, a summit held that year. Even better is the platform of the Democratic Freedom Caucus. It’s only about five deletions away from being better than the LP platform.
The Georgist single-tax-on-land movement goes back even further, and has included many prominent libertarians including Milton Friedman and David Nolan.
Brian Holtz // Sep 10, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Medicare is massive inter-generational theft. It would be totally ludicrous to suggest that 95% — or even 67% — of my Medicare “premiums” flow through to healtcare services for people in my age/income pool. It’s especially true for those of us with six-figure incomes, because Medicare payroll taxes aren’t capped. That’s theft, pure and simple.
Then there’s also the way that Medicare uses legislative fiat to force artificially higher prices for care delivered outside its system, as a side-effect of its legislated requirement for discounts from retail prices. And I haven’t even begun to talk about Medicare’s wrong-headed mix of coverages, or how easy it is for providers to game its billing system.
To invoke Medicare as an example of “better government” is to show just how intellectually bankrupt that concept is.
Brian Holtz // Sep 10, 2009 at 9:59 pm
I serve the interests of those who should be protected from theft, which in my ethics is everyone. You apparently serve the interests of the mob as they covet and appropriate the possessions of the minority.
I didn’t invent the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of Medicare, I’m just reporting it. Readers here can judge for themselves whose analysis of Medicare (as bad vs. better government) is more “vacuous”.
http://www.greenpartywatch.org/2009/09/05/is-there-hope-for-a-greenlibertarial-alliance
Brian Holtz // Sep 10, 2009 at 7:26 pm
I guess I missed the “reasoning” behind Lou’s apparent analogy that Green is to “socialist” as libertarian is to “fascist”.
On the other hand, if as many Greens reject socialism (both concept and label) as libertarians reject fascism, then there should be much more common ground here than I’d hoped. However, last time I checked, the Green platform included heavy doses of community social control of the means of production.
