This is part of a discussion taking place on the Broward Libertarian People’s yahoo group. If you’d like to join in, head on over to:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LP-Broward/

And sign up!

Mornin’ Jim,

There are a lot of questions and I think I need a better way to deal with them all. I’m thinking about answering some of them on my blog.

Voting for someone who is a libertarian in another party is understandable, though it’s not a good strategy for advancing liberty. Ron Paul has been at it for 30+ years and only recently has had some success. Had he done what I now advocate I don’t think we’d be in this position.

In addition, he has helped reinforce the mistaken idea that the GOP stands for smaller government. That is perhaps the most damaging thing.

Barr was a mistake from the beginning. He’s not a libertarian at all and was a horrible candidate as well. He’s exactly the type of candidate we should be guarding against and yet people keep advocating that we run candidates like him. Why do people want to keep making the same mistakes over and over again?

I was arguing that we (as in the LP) should not run statists just to "do something" or "get on the scoreboard" or something meaningless like that.

The LP ought to stand for something – libertarianism. We don’t need to sell out. It doesn’t work, has never worked, and will never work. It only means more problems later on.

The ideology is not the reason we aren’t doing better. The lack of focus and the lack of leadership is.

Right now the answer is in building a trained cadre, not in running candidates that are doomed from the start. That should have been our priority from the start.

For example, given its population Broward should have a cadre of maybe 250-500 people. With that we could not only run candidates but elect people as well.

Getting and training those 250 people should be our focus, and nothing else.

For example, one of the possible candidates is speaking at the meeting on Wednesday, right? The BLP should be able to have at least 100 people come out and see him speak. We should have a list of 10,000+ names right now (that have been invited to see him speak). But we don’t. And we won’t get anywhere near 100 people to come to the meeting. We’ll get 10 if we’re lucky.

I’m also going to disagree with you slightly about another related point. I don’t think we have to actually elect people (though that would be best). We just have to get big enough where we can’t be stopped and we look like a threat. Right now, we’re not really on their radar, so we’re pretty much meaningless.

Let me know if that answers your questions.

In Liberty,

sean