Sometimes I almost cringe when someone starts talking about the "voters." As if that word had any real meaning. It doesn’t, and trying to appeal to the "voters" is a waste of time, IMHO.

Why? Well, read this article and come back and ask me:

Why Preaching to the Choir is a Good Thing

http://www.copyblogger.com/preaching-to-the-choir/

Topics covered:

Too Many Marketers are Like Panhandlers

Why Evangelism Doesn’t Work

The alternative to evangelism is recruitment.

“Come if You’re a Good Fit” Instead of “Come As You Are”

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If you read and understand that blog post you’ll see why BLISS is a good idea…why the social hour is important…and why "Build the LP" is important. Oh yeah, and LATS too.

I am waiting for your comments…sean

I had some dealings with e-gold a few years back. They foolishly decided not to list one of my old sites on their site. It was a strange decision too as my old site was one of the only places regular people could actually earn e-gold (by writing articles). So, yes, perhaps I am still bitter.

I still like the idea of digital gold though. Like the Liberty Dollar people, they should be free to run their own businesses as they want to.

Here’s the article. Please leave comments below!

Bullion and Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold

"MELBOURNE, Florida — In a sparsely decorated office suite two floors above a neighborhood of strip malls and car dealerships, former oncologist Douglas Jackson is struggling to resuscitate a dying dream.

Jackson, 51, is the maverick founder of E-Gold, the first-of-its-kind digital currency that was once used by millions of people in more than a hundred countries. Today the currency is barely alive.

Stacks of cardboard evidence boxes in the office, marked “U.S. Secret Service,” help explain why, as does the pager-sized black box strapped to Jackson’s ankle: a tracking device that tells his probation officer whenever he leaves or enters his home.

“It’s supposed to be jail,” he says. “Only it’s self-administered.”

Jackson, whose six-month house arrest ends this month, recently met with Wired.com for his first in-depth interview since pleading guilty last year to money laundering-related crimes, and to operating an unlicensed money transmitting service. His tale is one of countless upstarts and entrepreneurs who approached the internet with big dreams, only to be chastened by sobering realities. But his rise and fall also offers a unique glimpse at the web’s frontier halcyon days, and the wilderness landscape that still covers much of the unregulated and un-policed web, where fraud artists prospect for riches alongside pioneers, and sometimes stake, and win, a claim on their territory…."

Continued:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/e-gold/

So, what do you think?

This originally appeared in the September 2005 issue of The Free Market

There are many varieties of libertarianism alive in the world today, and they owe a great debt to the work of Ludwig von Mises. His top American student was Murray N. Rothbard, and Rothbardianism remains the center of its intellectual gravity, its primary muse and conscience, its strategic and moral core, and the focal point of debate even when its name is not acknowledged. The reason is that Rothbard forged a blend between Austrian economics and natural-rights political theory of the old liberal school to create a modern libertarianism, a political-economic-ideological system that proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the trappings of left and right and their central plans for how state power should be used. Libertarianism is the radical alternative that says state power is both unworkable and immoral.

“Mr. Libertarian,” Murray N. Rothbard was called, and “The State’s Greatest Living Enemy.” He remains so. Yes, he had many predecessors from which he drew: the whole of the classical-liberal tradition, the Austrian economists, the American antiwar tradition, and the natural-rights tradition. But it was he who put all these pieces together into a unified system that seems inevitable once it has been defined and defended. The individual pieces of the system are straightforward (self-ownership, strict property rights, free markets, antistate in every conceivable respect) but the implications are earthshaking.

Once you are exposed to the complete picture – and For A New Liberty has been the leading means of exposure for more than a quarter of a century – you cannot forget it. This book has been out of print but will appear early next year from the Mises Institute. More than any other of his works, this book explains why Rothbard seems to grow in stature every year (his influence has vastly risen since his death) and why Rothbardianism has so many enemies on the left, right, and center.

Quite simply, the science of liberty that he brought into clear relief is as brilliant in the hopes it creates for a free world as it is unforgiving of error. Its logical and moral consistency, together with its empirical-explanatory muscle, represents a threat to any intellectual vision that sets out to use the state to refashion the world according to some pre-programmed plan. And to the same extent it impresses the reader with a hopeful vision of what might be.

Rothbard set out to write this book soon after he got a call from Tom Mandel, an editor at Macmillan who had seen an op-ed by Rothbard in the New York Times in the spring of 1971. It was the only commission Rothbard ever received from a commercial publishing house. Looking at the original manuscript, which is so consistent in its typeface and nearly complete after its first draft, it does seem that it was nearly effortless joy for him to write. It is seamless, unrelenting, and energetic.

It is also striking how Rothbard chose to pull no punches in his argument. Other intellectuals on the receiving end of such an invitation might have tended to water down the argument to make it more palatable. Why, for example, make a full case for no state when a case for limited government might bring more people into the movement? Why condemn the US? Why go into such depth about privatizing courts and roads and water? Why enter into the sticky area of regulation of consumption and of personal morality? And why go into such detail about monetary affairs and central banking and the like?

Trimming and compromising for the sake of the times or the audience was just not Rothbard’s way. He knew that he had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to present the full package of libertarianism in all its glory, and he was not about to pass it up. And thus do we read here: not just a case for cutting government but eliminating it altogether, not just an argument for assigning property rights but for deferring to the market even on questions of contract enforcement, and not just a case for cutting welfare but for banishing the entire welfare-warfare state.

Whereas other attempts to make a libertarian case, both before and after this book, might typically call for transitional or half measures, or be willing to concede as much as possible to statists, that is not what we get from Murray. Not for him such schemes as school vouchers or the privatization of government programs that should not exist at all. Instead, he presents and follows through with the full-blown and fully bracing vision of what liberty can be. This is why so many other similar attempts to write the Libertarian Manifesto have not stood the test of time, and yet this book remains in high demand.

Similarly, there have been many books on libertarianism that have appeared in the intervening years that covered philosophy alone, politics alone, economics alone, or history alone. Those that have put all these subjects together have usually been collections by various authors. Rothbard alone had the mastery of all these areas to be able to write an integrated manifesto – one that has never been displaced. And yet his approach is typically self-effacing: he constantly points to other writers and intellectuals of the past and his own generation.

In addition, some introductions of this sort are written to give the reader an easier passage into a difficult book, but that is not the case here. He never talks down to his readers but always with clarity. Every page exudes energy and passion that the logic of his argument is impossibly compelling, and that the intellectual fire that inspired this work burns as bright now as it did all those years ago.

The book is still regarded as “dangerous” precisely because, once the exposure to Rothbardianism takes place, no other book on politics, economics, or sociology can be read the same way again. What was once a commercial phenomenon has truly become a classical statement that I predict will be read for generations to come.

Books by Lew Rockwell

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is founder and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author, most recently, of The Left, The Right, and The State.

From:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/uncompromising-rothbard-fm0905.html

An unlikely coalition of environmental and libertarian taxpayer groups are joining forces to fight legislation that would create a national disaster insurance pool to protect home­owners in hurricane-prone areas.

The group — SmarterSafer.org — is getting behind legislation sponsored by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) that would provide $100 million annually over four years to states to strengthen homes, apartment buildings and small businesses against heavy-hitting storms.

Thompson’s package of three bills, expected to be introduced Wednesday, would provide grants for mitigation activities such as building new water barriers to prevent flooding, securing roofs and garage doors, and putting storm shutters on windows. It would also authorize an additional $100 million over five years to bolster emergency response during storms by upgrading communications, creating mobile nurse units and improving evacuation of the elderly from their residences.

For More info:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/24115.html

What do you think about this? Please leave a comment or two below!

I will send the questions by email to the lucky Florida libertarian and then post the answers on this site.

For the first interview I’ve managed to get Jim Kearney, former chair of the Broward LP; his blog is at: LibertarianViewpoint.com.

So…do you have any questions for JimK? Just leave them in a comment below and I will forward them to him.

And if you’d like to be interviewed do the same. I’ll have a contact form up soon if you’d rather do it anonymously.

Maybe you are too?

If so, leave a comment below. Give me your greatest question, thought, insight, whatever about libertarian strategy.

I’ll start a series of posts and maybe we can learn something!

Throwing Paint on Faux Libertarian Coats

Faux libertarianism is somewhat similar to regular libertarianism.

Except it is abandoned as a philosophy when it comes to matters of policy.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/96434

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I know some of you disagree with me on this, feel free to leave comments below and/or write something for FloridaLibertarian.com. This is a non-partisan blog, though strategy and tactics will be discussed! I look forward to reading your thoughts on the topic.

In Liberty,

sean

This time it’s crocs vs. dogs…Crocodile numbers rise in south Florida, but at what risk to dogs?

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/outposts/2009/04/alligator-numbers-rise-in-south-florida-but-suddenly-dogs-are-vanishing.html

I have two questions about this:

1. how would libertarians handle this? Will libertarians just do nothing? Let the crocs win? Let the dogs win? Or, are they split on the issue?

and

2. what are the pythons going to do about it?

Leave your thoughts below.