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Tuesday, 08 August 2006 16:11 |
 | | Carl S. Milsted, Jr. |
If you look at the blurb below this column you will see that I am chair of the Libertarian Party of Buncombe County. However, much of what I have written in this column is quite at odds with the Libertarian Party platform. Indeed, there are some radical party members around the country who wish I would leave.
Historically,
the LP platform has been a strident, uncompromising document deriving
nearly all of its positions from one principle: that it is wrong to
initiate force or fraud upon the innocent, no matter how good the cause
for doing so. As such, the LP platform suffered from the same moral
tunnel vision as the Marxists (equality trumps all other values) and
some deep ecologists (back to the Pleistocene).
In my columns I
have tempered the standard libertarian positions to take into account
the values of other political factions in an attempt to create a grand
synthesis. The amount of tempering needed is quite small, since freedom
allows different people to pursue different ends, but even that small
amount of tempering is enough to inflame the ire of the absolutists on
my side.
Fortunately,
there are signs that the Libertarian Party might be growing up. Over
the past few years, I have gotten to know quite a few leaders within
the party who realized that political reality and the common good both
require some tempering of the party??s positions.
Because of this,
many of us in the Buncombe County LP opted a year and a half ago to cut
back on local activism and focus our efforts on creating the
Libertarian Reform Caucus (www.ReformTheLP.org).
Due in part to
our efforts, the LP made some historic changes at our national
convention in Portland, Ore., last month. More than two-thirds of the
old platform was repealed. The platform no longer calls for zero
taxation or defaulting on the national debt (see
http://www.lp.org/issues/platform_all.shtml for the new platform).
This is not to
say that our platform is fixed. It is a bit of a mess right now;
important portions are missing, as we didn??t have time to replace some
of the deleted planks that needed replacing.
But we did
demonstrate that change is possible. I would like that change to be in
the direction of the ideas promoted in this column. But for that to
happen, we need to recruit more freedom-lovers from the left and from
the environmental movement between now and 2008.
If you like the
ideas I??ve written about over the past few months and would like to see
a political party backing them, let??s talk. The Buncombe County LP has
a weekly social at 7:30 p.m. every Monday at El Chapala on Merrimon.
The food and drink are good and cheap ?? and the conversation is
stimulating.
I hope to meet some of you there.
?ΓΏ
Carl S. Milsted Jr. is chairman of the Libertarian Party of Buncombe County.
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