I’m in awe of the Bush PR team. Here’s the lead story from the nation’s most popular newspaper:

Laura Bush never really was just a demure librarian.

In private, she has always been more independent and opinionated than the docile public persona she perfected for her husband’s first presidential campaign. But a more confident, glamorous and outspoken first lady is now on display for what she wistfully notes will be her final campaign.

So the “docile public persona” was just a facade, but now we see that the real Laura Bush is confident, glamorous, and outspoken. Without, of course, voicing any public disagreements with the President. Or staking out any surprising or controversial political opinions of her own. But, a lineup of pollsters and analysts assures us, this new persona really does reflect her “real” personality.

The whole story is larded up with fawning, vapid assertions about the new Mrs. Bush. There’s “steel in her tone” when she’s asked a question she doesn’t like. She has a “modest” motorcade of only 4 cars. The Bush campaign is “confident” that she can “humanize her husband” with women. She speaks “in calm tones that seem meant to reassure.” She casts “loving gazes” at her husband when they’re together.

Maybe these characterizations are accurate, or maybe they aren’t. But it’s hard to see how the subjective impressions of two random reporters–especially relentlessly laudatory and one-sided ones–is front-page news. So how does this kind of nonsense make it on the front page of a national newspaper?

My boss says it’s presumptuous to be contemptuous of a Supreme Court decision, but I’m going to say it anyway: boy is this an asinine decision. For the first time in decades, an American citizen is held without charges, counsel, or access to the courts. The executive advances the novel defense that it has the power to do this to anyone it wants by declaring them “unlawful enemy combatants.” And the Supreme Court’s response? “You didn’t fill out the paperwork properly. Go do it again and talk to us again in 2 years.” The majority decided that Jose Padilla’s habeus corpus petition had improperly named Rumsfeld, rather than the “the warden of the facility where the prisoner is being held, not the Attorney General or some other remote supervisory official,” as the respondent.

Because, you see, “although Padilla’s detention is unique in many respects, it is at bottom a simple challenge to physical custody imposed by the Executive. His detention is thus not unique in any way that would provide arguable basis for a departure from the immediate custodian rule.” Never mind that Padilla was moved to a different jurisdiction just two days before his scheduled court date at the direct order of the president and with Rumsfeld’s direct involvement. Never mind that the administration is making an unprecedented assertion of executive power, and this case is therefore unique in almost every important respect. What matters is that Padilla’s lawyers didn’t cross the right T’s and dot the right I’s. If we make an exception in this case, pretty soon every unlawful combatant will file habeus petitions naming the wrong custodial official! What chaos that would be!

I don’t think I can say it better than Justice Steven’s dissent, in which the three other liberal justices joined:

 In the Court’s view, respondent’s detention falls within the category of “core challenges” because it is “not unique in any way that would provide arguable basis for a departure from the immediate custodian rule.” Ante, at 13. It is, however, disingenuous at best to classify respondent’s petition with run-of-the-mill collateral attacks on federal criminal convictions. On the contrary, this case is singular not only because it calls into question decisions made by the Secretary himself, but also because those decisions have created a unique and unprecedented threat to the freedom of every American citizen.

Just so.

I can only think that the five conservatives on the court are engaging in a face-saving maneuver on behalf of the Bush administration here. They know they’d do too much damage to rule of law to side completely with the administration. But on the other hand, they know that if Padilla is given access to the courts, there’s a good chance he’ll be released, because (as I understand it) he hadn’t done anything that would prove he was going to actually build and detonate a dirty bomb, and the evidence that does exist is almost purely circumstantial. That would be a serious embarrassment. By forcing Padilla to re-file his petition in lower court and try again, it delays the day of reckoning until after the 2004 election and gives federal investigators another year or two to dredge up solid evidence against him.

If I’m right, I’m not sure if I should feel comforted by that or not. On the one hand, it’s nice to think that they wouldn’t give the president unbridled discretion to lock people up without due process. On the other hand, it’s scary to have a Supreme Court whose decisions are driven by political considerations.

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Jim DeMint decisively won the run off in South Carolina’s Republican primary. While I don’t like everything he’s campaigning for, one thing is clear: everyone saw the race as a referendum on free trade, and free trade won in a rout. Given the Republican leanings of the state and President Bush’s popularity there, DeMint is the odds-on favorite to prevail in the general election.

Not only will that bring a reliable free trade vote to the Senate where it’s desperately needed. More importantly, it makes it clear that– even in textile-heavy South Carolina–protectionism and xenophobia are losing issues. Hopefully that’ll strengthen the backbone of politicians wavering on trade across the country.

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I’m at Cato’s conference on peer-to-peer networks and file sharing. Rep. Rick Boucher gave the morning keynote. He’s great on this issue generally, but I heard him make a fallacious argument that I hear pretty frequently.

The problem, Boucher argued, is that record companies are packaging 14 crap songs with one hit on a CD, and making us pay $20 for it. What we need, he said, is for the recording industry to let us buy the one song we want, without forcing us to pay for all those tracks we don’t want.

I’ll leave the implicit music criticism to someone else, but this argument fundamentally misunderstands the economics of the situation.
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Obernews guest blogger Adrienne links to a story on left-wing protester classes being held in preparation for the Republican convention in New York this summer.

Organizers won’t publicly disclose their plans for civil disobedience. But activists describe sit-ins and blockades at delegate hotels, pie-throwing at high-level officials, and street theater outside Broadway shows attended by convention-goers. A man who calls himself Jonny America plans to mimic Paul Revere’s ride along Lexington Avenue, shouting “the Republicans are coming, the Republicans are coming!”

I realize these protesters are not, by and large, foot soldiers for the Kerry campaign, and that most of them are more interested in “making a statement” than actually affecting the outcome of the election or the direction of future policies, but still: are these guys trying to marginalize themselves and the “progressive” movement?

The narrative that these protesters apparently want to promote is a simple one: Republicans are just evil. They are, as that last sentence hints, like the redcoats– an invading army of outsiders intent on imposing their will on an unwilling population. And the situation is so desperate, the protesters imply by their actions, that they must expose and publicize their crimes far and wide so the American people will be aware of the crimes of their leaders and revolt.

Here’s the thing: most Americans don’t believe that. There are plenty of people who don’t like Bush very much, but few of them outside the Democratic base and the radical fringe believe that he’s radically more evil than the average politician. Most people look at the Bush/Kerry race and see politics as usual So when protesters impede the orderly functioning of one of our democracy’s long-standing institutions, it makes them look whiney and hysterical rather than casting Republicans in a negative light.

But it’s worse than that. Although the protesters are not likely to convince middle America that Bush is Darth Vader in all respects, their protests do play into one part of Bush’s campaign message: “I’m a Republican and therefore I’m more badass than Kerry.” Because the truth is, many of us, especially men, have a certain grudging respect for Darth Vader. Sure, we’d rather he didn’t blow up planets and strangle people, but we admire that he knows how to kick ass. And those dark clothes and deep voice are pretty cool. And so–especially when we’re conducting an ongoing War on Terrorism–we want a slightly badass president. If the left convinces us that Bush is Darth Vader, many people will decide that that’s exactly what the country needs and pull the lever for him.

I don’t think Karl Rove could come up with a better backdrop for the convention if he tried. Every time some whiney, anti-American college student throws a pie at a bigshot Republican and gets arrested, it’s palpable evidence that Republicans are the grownups in charge of running things smoothly, while the left is full of America-hating rabble who get in the way. “Sure, Republicans have trampled a few civil liberties and given us a half-trillion dollar deficit,” voters will say, “but we’re in a war, and you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelette. At least I know he’s a grownup who will get the job done.”

My site just got its 10,000th hit. My three readers must hit reload an awful lot. Thanks for reading!

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Please welcome my friend Jonathan Dingel to the blogosphere. So far, he’s chosen to focus on a topic he knows well–trade and globalization–and give the issue a careful, in-depth treatment. Most recently, he’s posted a cogent defense of child labor. Also of note is an in-depth critique of the Cato party line on competitive trade liberalization, in which he argues that bilateral and regional trade deals divert political capital from much more important WTO negotiations, create distortions in the traditing system, and provide more opportunities for well-connected interests to twist the rules to their own advantage. Too bad Brink Lindsey doesn’t blog any more, as I’d love to see his response.

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Like Julian, I’ve got a trifecta of gmail accounts to give out. The first three people to ask nicely will get them.

In case you’ve been living under a rock and/or not reading the Bit Bucket in recent weeks, GMail is the best web-based mail service ever, which the government should leave the hell alone.

Update: That’s all I’ve got. Thanks for playing.

Update 2: Huh, I guess I get three more. At this rate, the scarcity of accounts is going to wear off pretty quickly. It’s a fantastic marketing gimmick on Google’s part, though. Anyway, let me know if you’d like one.

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Some nasty spyware popped up on my computer this morning. In the course of a minute a dozen pop-up ads appeared on my screen, despite the fact that I was visiting web sites that don’t do pop-ups. Ad-aware found more than a hundred evil files on my machine.

I think I’m relatively computer-savvy and rather paranoid about security. I download very few programs and think I have a pretty good idea of which programs are likely to have virii. Yet this is the second time this has happened to me.

This scares the crap out of me. Not so much because they did any great damage, but because it means that either (a) I’m not nearly as observant as I think I am, or (b) a stock Windows box has open security vulnerabilities that can install themselves on peoples’ machines without the user’s knowledge and consent. Either way, this is scary.

I’m undecided about whether all of this is Microsoft’s fault. On the one hand, Microsoft wrote my OS, my browser, and my email client, so any security vulnerabilities are their fault. And for my personal use, I’ve got a Mac, and Mac virii are almost unheard of. So certainly Microsoft deserves some of the blame.

Plus, now that I’ve used it for about a year, Microsoft’s software really sucks. A few quick examples: Outlook freezes up for about 30 second when I do a search in my email inbox. Apple mail client does roughly the same search on 2500 messages in realtime–the results are literally ready by the time I’m done typing. And even if it takes longer than that to do a search, the whole interface doesn’t freeze up, as it does under Outlook. When I paste a sentence into a paragraph in Word, it will randomly change the formatting of the whole paragraph in inconsistent ways, based on factors I haven’t been able to figure out. When I “select all” on a double-spaced document, the ruler disappears. I could cite lots of other examples.

This is the result, I think, of bureaucratic incompetence. Microsoft is an enormous company that’s been consistently profitable for more than 20 years. Old software like Windows, Word, and Outlook is likely to be encrusted with the software equivalent of barnacles. Since Microsoft’s most popular products have had no particular competitive pressures of late, they haven’t bothered to fix many of the problems. Microsoft software is like an old house that’s been remodeled a dozen times by incompetent amateurs. Each remodeling doesn’t quite fix the flaws introduced by the last, while introducing some of their own.

Now admittedly, most of the problems are annoying rather than show-stopping. But if they take the same lackadaisical attitude toward security, that’s a much more serious matter, and there’s no way mere mortals can tell the difference from everyday use. Even one security hole is enough to render the entire system vulnerable to compromise. Worse, if the fundamental design has flaws, it can be almost impossible to fix them without breaking compatibility with existing software. In that case, you’re stuck with the impossible choice of papering over the problems with the knowledge that sooner or later more exploits will be found, or fixing the problem and breaking most of the world’s software in the process.

On the other hand, I might be giving Microsoft too little credit. Because 90% of the market uses their product, every feature of Microsoft’s software is scrutinized intensively. It’s therefore not really a fair fight to compare them to competing operating systems on the basis of the number of break-ins, since the vast majority of virus and spyware authors are going to target the most popular system.

Still, like I said, this scares the crap out of me. It means that I really don’t know what software might be running on my computer, or who might have access. Right now, spyware usually announces its presence with a deluge of ads, and I run Ad-aware to fix it. But there’s no reason the same tactic couldn’t be used to install more subtle and sinister software: keyboard sniffers, backdoors that allow remote users to log into the machine, software that scans hard drives for interesting information and phones it home to the mother ship.

As a practical matter, this isn’t likely to happen on a large scale, because there are ways to detect these sorts of software and catch those who deploy them. Security types can and do scan the network traffic coming out of a machine looking for quirky behavior, and so if a machine was phoning home to a mother ship, someone would notice, and the organization on the receiving end would be shut down, if not thrown in jail. If the government did it, there’d be a firestorm of controversy.

But it’s still a problem people ought to be worried about, and as far as I can tell, most people aren’t aware of the implications or don’t care. The integrity of one’s desktop or laptop computer is extremely important to the security of the Internet as a whole. Having a computer with unpatched security holes is a like a blind man leaving his front door wide open. Most of the time no one will take advantage, but you can never be completely sure, and the consequences are potentially severe.

So whether it’s Microsoft’s fault or not, I think this is a compelling argument for running something other than Windows, because so far at least, only Windows has this problem. Not only would this give Microsoft a chance to clean up their act, but a bit more diversity would slow the spread of virii and make the work of spyware writers more difficult.

I can’t think of a mainstream worldview less inspirational than the dreary outlook of folks like Dale Kunkel, who spoke at a recent Cato Policy Forum, Kids, Cartoons, and Cookies. “Should We Restrict the Marketing of Food to Children,” the panel asked? Kunkel’s answer was yes, and his arguments made me wonder if he’s got blood in his veins.

Kunkel is a “public health” advocate. He argued, in essence, that parents are powerless in the face of nagging from their kids, and therefore, in “fairness” to kids’ limited mental abilities, we need to ban any advertising that targets them, so they don’t nag their automoton parents into feeding them Oreos three meals a day.

In the world of “public health” experts, people are not individuals with desires and goals who make choices and suffer consequences. They are simply masses to be desribed by statistics, and it’s the job of the “public health” policymaker to maximize those statistics at all costs. Any policy that gets people to eat less triple fudge ice cream, smoke fewer cigarettes, or exercize more is presumptively good, whether the actual people involved like it or not.

Here’s the problem: Some of us like triple fudge ice cream, cigarettes, and watching TV. Some of us like to play sports that pose risks of serious injury. A few of us even like to have sex despite the very real risks of STDs and unplanned pregnancies. I don’t know a single person whose sole goal in life is to maximize his life expectancy. This is social science run amock.

What bothers me most about this attitude is its absolute humorlessness. When you make the above argument to someone like Kunkel, all you get in reply is a blank stare, or at most a half-hearted concession that individuals have the right to take risks if they choose. But it’s clear they don’t really care. They pay no attention to any quality-of-life factors that seem frivolous or that can’t be captured with a statistic. The social value of a bowl of triple-fudge ice cream is assumed to be zero, no matter how much the person eating it might enjoy it.

The corollary of this attitude is that personal responsibility is a bourgoise fiction, because if people persist in liking triple-fudge ice cream despite the obvious public health evidence that it’s bad for you, then people must be irrational. If they were rational, they’d know that triple fudge ice cream makes you fat, and being fat makes you get a heart attack, and heart attacks are bad, and therefore, no one should eat triple-fudge ice cream. And if people are acting irrational, it must be the evil corporations’ fault, and the government needs to step in and save them from themselves.

At its root, this is a form of puritan intolerance every bit as close-minded as religious fundamentalism. “Public health” has replaced God’s will as the overriding value to be promoted. The old puritans wanted us to leave boring lives so we can be with God in the next life, but the new puritans want us to lead boring lives so we can live as long as possible in this life. The temptations of Satan have been replaced with the temptations of evil corporations. But the basic attitudes are identical: both sets of puritans acknowledge that it’s ultimately up to the sinner to change his ways, but they don’t care what the sinner actually wants, and they certainly don’t see anything wrong with a little coercion to help the process of repentance along.

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I have a serious wireless fetish, so maybe I’m not an objective observer, but this has got to be Apple’s coolest new product since the iPod: a tiny WiFi base station that allows you to play music to a stereo and print to a USB printer wirelessly. And it’s $129. $129!

In strictly technical terms, this isn’t that amazing of a product: wireless cards, remote USB printing, and audio out ports are all off-the-shelf technology. The integration with iTunes is clever, but it’s hardly rocket science.

What makes this product so cool is that Apple took these standard components, glued them together with a little software magic, and created a product that’s going to be a natural extension of normal peoples’ lives; it fills a hole in competitors’ product lines so naturally that in retrospect it seems obvious that someone should have introduced it sooner. And if it works as advertised (and I intend to buy one and find out very soon) it requires no technical knowledge whatsoever to operate. Plus, $129! Given that wireless card by itself costs around $50, $129 is a pretty amazing price.

I feel like this thing was designed specifically with me in mind: in my bedroom, I don’t have room for a desk, so I’ve got an inkjet printer and a stereo on a shelf. If I wanted to print, I had to set the laptop on the floor next to the printer. Now, I’ll be able to plug both into an Airport Express so I can play music from iTunes to my stereo speakers and print stuff, all while I’m sitting on my bed across the room.

The nation lost a great American today.

Politics is often a cynical business, and libertarians’ attitude toward politicians is especially cynical. A political philosophy grounded in a suspicion of political power is naturally hostile to those who wield it. For me personally, I’m just too young to have a strong opinion of Mr. Reagan’s policies. I came of age politically early in Clinton’s term, and by that time the conventional wisdom about Reagan had gelled and begun to go stale.

From watching this afternoon’s coverage of Reagan’s death, however, it’s apparent that Reagan stands head-and-shoulders above other modern presidents as an orator. Reagan managed to project both dignity and a common touch in a way that no other modern president has managed to match. More important, from my perspective at least, is that he is the only modern president to consistently and compellingly articulate libertarian themes. This was brought home to me when I was watching his farewell speech to the nation, originally delivered on January 11, 1989. This is among the finest articulations of what makes America great that I’ve ever read:

The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.

And how stand the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that; after two hundred years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

“If there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” I think Ronald Reagan understood that this is a defining attribute of America: we’re the descendents of people who had “the will and the heart to get here.” This fact largely determines our national character. We’re ambitious, restless, and suspicious of authority. We welcome immigrants to our shores but we expect them to pull their weight. We’re intolerant of social hierarchies.

We’re a nation dedicated not to an ethnicity, religion, or homeland, but to the ideals of liberty and opportunity. I fear we’re losing that heritage. Time and luxury have made us increasingly comfortable with paternalism, and September 11 persuaded many Americans that we couldn’t afford to have doors in our walls. Being “American” is increasingly defined as having a American flag in your yard and not criticizing our foreign policy too much. And while our politicians still pay lip service to liberty, when’s the last time you heard “it’s a free country” end a political argument? I’m too young to remember it, but I’m told that, not too long ago, that was a common occurance.

I think Reagan, whatever the merits of his policies, should be remembered as the man who reminded America of what makes us exceptional– not our wealth, not our lmilitary strength, certainly not our cultural or racial makeup, but the fact that we’re a nation founded on the promise of giving liberty and opportunity to everyone with the will and the heart to get here.

The English Language is full of expressions that reference common activities from past eras that are no longer a part of daily life for most English speakers. Yet the expressions persist because they’ve taken on a life of their own. The problem is that most people never think about where those expressions came from, and so they mangle them in ways that make them non-sensical, but nevertheless sound roughly like the original expression.

I’ve been noticing these sorts of mistakes a lot lately, so, as a public service, here’s The Bit Bucket Guide to Commonly Misused Expressions, or “Pedantic Eye for the Semi-literate Guy”:

“Reign in”: This is a horse-riding expression– to “rein in” a horse is to pull on the reins to get it to slow down or stop. The “g” is superfluous. This expression seems to get misused more than it’s used correctly.

“Tow the Line”: This could be some kind of boating reference, I suppose, but the original reference is to a foot race: to toe the line is to keep your foot behind the starting line until the race starts. This should be “toe the line.”

“Tough Road to Hoe: I’m not sure how (or why) you’d hoe a road. You can, however, hoe a row of crops on a farm. This should be “Tough row to hoe.”

“Neck in Neck: This is a horse-racing expression. I have no idea what it means for two horses to be “neck in neck,” but when two horses are “neck and neck,” their necks are exactly even with each other, indicating a close race.

“Beg the question”: This isn’t in the same category as the others, since it’s a misuse of a correctly spelled expression rather than a misspelling of a common phrase, but it annoys me enough that I’m gonna stick it in here anyway. “Begging the question” is a logical fallacy that involves assuming the conclusion you’re trying to prove. It is wrong to use the phrase “that begs the question” to mean “that leads me to ask the question.” Frankly, this is misused so commonly that it’s probably best to stop using it at all unless you’re writing a paper for a logic class.

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So the Libertarian Party has chosen its 2004 presidential candidate. Their choice is more than a little embarrassing. They passed over a polished, well-organized second-rate talk show host and a charismatic, well-organized second-rate movie producer for a random guy off the street who styles himself a “constitutional scholar” despite the fact that he has no formal legal training, a guy whose web site still–close to a week after the nomination–states that it’s “Being Updated” and has next to no content.

This is a new low for a party that’s had more than its share of low points. I was never crazy about Harry Browne, but he was a moderately successful author, and his campaign was professional, well-organized, and moderately media-savvy. I always took comfort in the fact that– no matter how lackluster the Party’s candidates for lower office might be–I could count on not being too embarrassed by the guy at the top of the LP ticket. Well, no longer. Here’s the first interview I’ve read of Badnarik:

The IRS didn’t come into existence the day the Constitution was ratified in 1789. The 16th Amendment and the IRS didn’t come into our lives until 1913—over 100 years later. How did the United States government exist until then without the income tax? The most important part of that answer is that the federal government was extremely small, as outlined by Article I, Section 8. Since the government was so small, the founding fathers arranged for it to be funded by excise taxes on foreign imports so that American citizens wouldn’t have to bear the burden. Contrary to what most people think, the money collected by the IRS is less than 15% of the government’s annual revenue, and most of that goes towards paying the INTEREST on the national debt. (The debt continues to grow because Congress always operates at a deficit.) If we eliminated the IRS, the government would not come to a grinding halt, as is generally believed. So to finally answer your question, I am opposed to ANY individual taxes until we eliminate all of the unconstitutional agencies, and I suspect we wouldn’t need a tax after that.

There are so many problems with this I don’t know where to start. The IRS collectsover a trillion dollars in individual income taxes each year, around half of the total revenues. Throw in corporate income tax and payroll taxes, and this number rises to about $1.8T in a $2T budget. I have no idea where the 15% figure comes from, but it’s apparent he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Secondly, the idea that the founders wanted to only tax foreigners is absurd. The Constitution authorises duties (tariffs) and excises, the latter being taxes on domestic products like whiskey. And President Washington certainly seemed to believe domestic excise taxes were constitutional when he led the army against the Whiskey Rebellion. Thirdly, as anyone who knows anything about economics will tell you, a tariff on imports hurts domestic consumers just as much as foriegn producers. Congress also does not “always operate at a deficit.” (it had a surplus in 1999 and 2000)

But more important than these glaring factual errors is the fact that Badnarik sounds out of touch with reality and completely unprepared to be president. He doesn’t bother to mention any specifics about which agencies would be cut, he doesn’t cite specific numbers as to how much cutting would be necessary, he certainly hasn’t drafted a budget proposal. He’s a half-assed armchair pundit who thinks it would be really neat to run for president.

It gets worse. Here’s his plan for his first day in office:

a) Declare that all four national emergencies are immediately terminated, as well as the presumption of Emergency War Powers. Senate Report 93-549 has found that the “national emergencies” announced by FDR in 1933 because of the Great Depression, by Truman because of the Korean War, and two initiated by Nixon because of the Vietnam War, are still in effect today. (Skeptical readers can search the internet for this report and read it for themselves.)

b) Declare that all 20,000 gun control laws in the United States are unconstitutional and unenforceable. I would also issue a valid executive order to the BATF and other pseudo police agencies informing them that any agent who confiscates a weapon of any kind, from someone who is not currently engaged in a murder or robbery, will not only be terminated from their position, but they will also be prosecuted for violating the unalienable rights of the citizens they have sworn to protect.

c) Issue another valid executive order to my subordinates executives working for the IRS. That order would instruct them to come to work, make a pot of coffee, and begin working on their resumes’ pending a federal grand jury investigation as to the legitimacy of the Sixteenth Amendment and the Internal Revenue Code. High ranking officials from that department would be closely monitored as flight risks, pending indictments for fraud in the event that evidence proves that they knew that no statute exists that requires Americans to fill out a 1040 form and relinquish a significant percentage of their hard earned money to an unconstitutional government that refuses to operate within a budget.

d) Declare the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to be unconstitutional, and prohibit that organization from printing even one more dollar of fiat currency. I would immediate appoint Bernard Von Nothaus, Monetary Architect for the Liberty Dollar, to be my Secretary of the Treasury, placing the stability of our economy in his capable hands.

e) I would announce a special one-week session of Congress where all 535 members would be required to sit through a special version of my Constitution class. Once I was convinced that every member of Congress understood my interpretation of their very limited powers, I would insist that they restate their oath of office while being videotaped. Those videos could then be used as future evidence should they ever vote to violate the rights of Americans again.

f) I would take a short break for lunch.

So if he gets elected, large swaths of the federal government will have cause to fear not only for their jobs, but for their liberty as well. Point (c) comes dangerously close to crazy tax protestor talk. Point (d) shows no understanding of how the Federal Reserve System works, and no appreciation of the importance of maintaining a stable money supply. The markets would go into a tailspin if he were to get elected on fears of inept monetary policy screwing up the economy. He seems to be unaware that cabinet secretaries are nominated and must be confirmed by the Senate, they aren’t just “appointed.” Point (e) demonstrates a complete lack of appreciation for the separation of powers. Presidents can’t force Congress to convene, force them to listen to his lecture, and they sure as hell can’t force them to take oaths on videotape.

This is pretty standard stuff for rank-and-file libertarians. Any fringe political movement has its share of crazies. The LP is full of losers who get a kick out of pretending they’re part of a real political party, but who wouldn’t have the first clue what to do if they actually got elected. What’s remarkable and depressing is that for the first time, one of those crazies is the standard-bearer for the national party. For the first time, the LP has nominated a candidate who is completely unqualified to be president.

I left the LP more than a year ago, so I have no great stake in who they nominate except that, unfortunately, the LP is the first organization most people think about when I mention that I’m a libertarian. With this nomination the LP may have gone from being an annoying irrelevance to being a serious embarrassment to the broader libertarian movement. To the extent that they get any media attention at all, they will reflect poorly on those of us who do know something about policy, and are trying to advance libertarian ideas in an intellectual serious way.

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