Chase Foundation gives $800K/year to libertarian policy network

Chasing Free Enterprise: An Investor Gives Steadily for Libertarian Think Tanks — Inside Philanthropy - Ade Adeniji:

June 20, 2017 - "The Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation's motto is 'free minds, free markets.' Among its trustees is Derwood S. Chase, Jr., who steers Chase Investment Counsel Corporation in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"Chase, who graduated from the University of Virginia and holds a Harvard MBA, also sits on the board of the right-leaning Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada, which starts to paint a picture of the type of organizations that Chase is interested in.

"His Chase Foundation of Virginia was established in the mid-1990s, and in recent years has given in the neighborhood of $700,000 to $800,000 annually to a number of libertarian or conservative policy organizations across the country and north of the border.

"Besides the Reason Foundation and Fraser Institute, Chase, via his foundation, has also backed Acton Institute in Michigan, a think tank whose mission is 'to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.' The outfit is named after English Historian Lord John Acton, behind the well-known dictum 'power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'

"Chase has also supported places like the Atlas Network, Buckeye Institute for Public Policy in Ohio, Cascade Policy Institute in Portland, Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Goodman Institute for Public Policy in Miami, Institute for Energy Research, Manhattan Institute for Public Policy, and Montreal Economic Institute....

"As we've reported in the past, such giving has allowed the right to scale up a comprehensive policy infrastructure to influence policy at all levels of government."

Read more: https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2017/6/20/derwood-chase-philanthropy-think-tanks
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Pope misunderstands libertarians and dangers

Pope Francis's attack on "libertarian individualism" not about libertarians - Father Robert A. Sirico:

May 5, 2017 - "In a recent message by Pope Francis to the Pontifical Academy of Social Science he outlines some moral concerns about a phenomenon he sees as invading (his term) 'high levels of culture and education in both universities and in schools,' namely 'libertarian individualism'....

"When the pope speaks of libertarian individualism, he has in mind something which he says 'exalts the selfish ideal,' whereby … it is 'only the individual who decides what is good and what is bad.' [The] result is a belief in 'self-causation,' which I take to mean the denial of any givenness in human nature in favor of a radical autonomy in which morality is ... simply a matter of whatever I will it to be.

"All of this, the pope contends (and I agree), 'denies the common good.' One could add that it also denies the entire tradition of natural law via an exaltation of subjectivity and the detachment of conscience from the truths knowable via faith and reason.... He also seems to be critiquing any ethical system that sees freedom, in the sense of absence of constraint, as its own end and finality. For Catholics and other Christians, liberty is more than just negative freedom or the capacity to will X rather than Y....

"All this is standard Catholic teaching. The question that remains is whether the pope is offering a fair or accurate definition of 'libertarianism'

"Consider, for example, that there are many schools of libertarianism.... As interesting as it might be to examine the differences between these positions, I think it is more productive to outline some concepts to which I suspect all serious believers could subscribe....

"Human beings are not simply individuals, even if we colloquially employ this word to describe people. Certainly, human beings enjoy ... legitimate liberty.... Even the Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes speaks of private property as conferring 'on everyone a sphere wholly necessary for the autonomy of the person and the family, and it should be regarded as an extension of human freedom'.

"The social reality of persons to persons is what constitutes a human community. This is a bond - one which certainly comes with some constraints, but one which can’t be reduced to constraints.... Power is a form of constraint external to the person ... forced upon a person without regard to that person’s free will, such as an act of violence to conform another’s behavior. Authority, on the other hand, is a form of constraint interior to the person, some overarching code that the person himself believes in....

"From this standpoint, we start to see that many of the debates engaged in by people of all political persuasions - including self-described libertarians - concern when a bond has become an illegitimate constraint; or where a constraint, however necessary, is mistaken for a bond; or when societies are relying too heavily on constraints to do the work of what is normally undertaken by bonds. These are the questions which are, and should be, engaged in by societies that seek to take liberty, justice, and the common good seriously....

"The irony, however, is that we live in a time when a concern for liberty ... far from invading our cultures, is under siege ... threatened by the type of populism that has done so much damage in Pope Francis’s Latin America (and is presently destroying Venezuela) [and] strangled by the bureaucracies which rule European social democracies. Then there is the jihadism that is destroying the freedom of many, and literally killing thousands of Christians every year.

"So while the pope’s warnings against the radical individualism against which the Catholic Church has always cautioned are important, let’s hope that his words don’t distract attention from some of the profound violations of freedom occurring across the world."

Read more: https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2017/05/05/pope-franciss-attack-libertarian-individualism-not-libertarians/

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Spontaneous order in Pokemon GO

The Libertarian Economic Theory That Might Be Secretly Driving Pokémon Go | Atlas Obscura - Ernie Smith:

July 25, 2016 - "[T]he biggest non-politics story at the moment — the phenomenal rise of Pokémon Go — is seen by some libertarians as a validation of a philosophy that's key to their economic ideals: spontaneous order, the idea that in a world of chaos, order eventually organizes itself.

"The philosophy is closely associated with Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, and borrows some ideas from the 'invisible hand' theory espoused by fellow economist Adam Smith.

"The theory basically follows as such: If you do nothing to set order or regulate flow, order will eventually show itself. By forcing order onto a structure, however, you limit possibilities and outcomes, and the weight of the system eventually falls over on itself. Here's how Hayek puts it in his landmark 1974 Nobel Prize speech, 'The Pretense of Knowledge,' which argues against heavy social engineering of economic structures:

In the physical sciences there may be little objection to trying to do the impossible.... But in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority. Even if such power is not in itself bad, its exercise is likely to impede the functioning of those spontaneous ordering forces by which, without understanding them, man is in fact so largely assisted in the pursuit of his aims. 

"So, where does Pokémon Go fit into this?

"To put it simply, the design of the game is very hands-off, and its growth is basically pushed forward by the use of spontaneous social systems.

"''The game provides the opportunity for building social institutions, but it’s the actions of the individuals in the game that build it, forming a beautiful spontaneous order "of human action, not human design",' argues Tyler Groenendal of the Acton Institute.

"Young Americans for Liberty, a Ron Paul-affiliated nonprofit that brings together millennials who get excited about laissez-faire economic theory, has recommended the game as a perfect activity for its loose network of chapters.

"''You can find classical liberal ideas playing out in the real world every which way you look, even in your games,' the group's Derek Spicer writes. 'Pokémon Go is just one in the litany of examples of how spontaneous order affects how we play video games.'

"The question is, of course, whether the broader public will make that connection. Or even Pokémon Go players specifically, who already know plenty about chaos."

Read more: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-libertarian-economic-theory-that-might-be-secretly-driving-pokemon-go
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MN LP governor candidate gets Star-Tribune op-ed

The Libertarian Party alone now offers a true alternative | Minneapolis Star Tribune - Chris Holbrook:

October 3, 2014 - Tom Horner has recently been trying to convince us that Jeff Johnson and his big government GOP solutions are what Minnesota needs.... The opposite is true. Apparently, Libertarians are the only ones left to offer smaller-government solutions....

"I hope people look at a third-party option with conviction. The Libertarian Party has been proposing a 10 percent government budget reduction across the board upfront, and then an audit to find more to reduce, in addition to incrementally converting to a “fair tax” system instead of our current income tax seizure system. These steps would save the median earner in Minnesota $1,750 a year.

"If the Tom and Jeff show really wants to boost businesses and jobs in Minnesota, freedom to engage in voluntary transactions on Sundays would help; ending the prohibition on fireworks, marijuana, and other victimless crimes would help, and not trying to legislate morality would help. They seem to be interested only in boosting their partisan power, which rewards special interests."

"Lastly, the 'oh yeah, this is bad, too' commentary in Horner’s article on the GOP solution to fix the education gap by installing new principals is a joke.... Libertarians instead advocate more options for parents, like home school, on-the-job training credits, expanded vo-tech and a voucher system.

"A different style of big government overreach is not what Minnesota needs. Less government overreach is, and the Libertarian Party seems to be the last man standing to offer that."

Read more: http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/278083291.html
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Libertarians dispute Pope's economic pontifications

Libertarians become vocal critics of Evangelii Gaudium | National Catholic Reporter - Michael Sean Winters:

January 30, 2014 - "The most interesting criticisms of Pope Francis's apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, have come from libertarians who are closest to the economic views the pope denounced.

"In this document, Francis ... condemned 'trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world'.... He warned against laissez-faire adherents who 'reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control'.... The pope chastised 'the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.'

"'Speaking for libertarians, my objection to what the pope wrote derives from two things,' the Cato Institute's Marian Tupy said in an interview with NCR. 'First, there is the factual statement. The pope says the world is becoming worse, but that can be measured. In almost 200 pages, he never cites a single study, a single number, to support his claim. Tupy, who wrote an article encapsulating his objections in The Atlantic, cites a host of statistics to support his claim that 'capitalism, compared to other systems, does very well at bringing people out of poverty'....

"A similar critique of Evangelii Gaudium came from the pro-market Acton Institute, which is run by a Catholic priest, Fr. Robert Sirico. In a video discussing Evangelii Gaudium, Sirico posed a series of questions: 'Where are these unhampered markets?' he asked. 'Where is the market absolutely autonomous?' Sirico seems to be suggesting that the pope was creating straw men and attacking them, and expresses the hope that future exhortations will confront the economic questions Sirico poses."

Read more: http://ncronline.org/news/politics/libertarians-become-vocal-critics-exhortation
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