Dunn runs for Senate as Libertarian in NM

Libertarian Aubrey Dunn joins Senate race | Legislature | New Mexico Legislative Session | santafenewmexican.com - Steve Terell, Santa Fe New Mexican:

February 6, 2018 - "State Land Commissioner Aubrey Dunn Jr., who recently changed his voting registration from Republican to Libertarian, filed to run for U.S. Senate on Tuesday against incumbent Democrat Martin Heinrich and Republican building contractor Mick Rich.

"Dunn, who won the land commissioner race four years ago, is one of an entire slate of Libertarians who filed for congressional and state offices on Tuesday. Dunn’s son, A. Blair Dunn, is running for attorney general, while other Libertarians are running for secretary of state, land commissioner and two of New Mexico’s three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

"The Secretary of State’s Office last week designated the Libertarian Party as a major party in New Mexico. The party won that [status] after former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson’s relatively strong showing in the 2016 presidential election in this state. Johnson, who was a Republican when he was governor between 1995 and 2002, got about 9.3 percent of the vote in the state, which is the best a third party has done here since independent presidential candidate Ross Perot won 16 percent of the state’s vote in 1992.

"Although Libertarians appeal to some on the left because of the party’s liberal views on social issues such as marijuana, abortion rights and gay rights, they tend to hurt Republicans because of their strong views on easing regulations, lowering taxes and shrinking government. The emergence of an active Libertarian Party in the state raises the question of whether GOP candidates will suffer.

"'I think I’ll pull equally from both my opponents,' Dunn said Tuesday. "Progressives in this state have made strides in taking over the Democratic Party, leaving many conservative Democrats behind'.... 'This is a winnable race for Libertarians,' he said, pointing to a recent poll that showed Heinrich with an approval rate of less than 50 percent....

"Besides Dunn, the best-known Libertarian candidate to file Tuesday was former state Rep. Sandra Jeff, who is running for secretary of state.... Jeff is a former Democrat from Crownpoint. She often sided with Republicans during her three terms in the state House....

Read more: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/legislature/libertarian-aubrey-dunn-joins-senate-race/article_781091a1-54ca-5b7f-b0c0-2abb91987b97.html
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Has the Libertarian Party rejected Ron Paul?

Has the Libertarian Party Rejected Ron Paul and Judge Napolitano? - Steve Byas, The New American:

February 5, 2018 - "The national Libertarian Party was back in the news late last week, with a dispute over whether the LP had refused to allow Ron Paul — probably the nation’s best-known libertarian — and Judge Andrew Napolitano to speak at the party’s 2018 convention. The convention’s coordinator, Daniel Hayes, said Paul 'has no idea what the LP represents.'

"Apparently, the Mises Caucus, a faction of the LP, had expressed interest in Paul appearing at the convention, but Paul typically has a speaking fee of $35,000. Hayes has denied that Paul would not be allowed to speak; rather, Hayes said, Paul could speak, if the honorariums for Paul and Napolitano (which would have totaled $70,000) were paid by someone other than the LP — though a question arose about whether an outside group can actually pay for a speaker at a political party event, under federal campaign laws.

"While the Libertarian Party may not have actually rejected Paul from speaking at the event, it is quite clear that the LP has moved to the left in recent years, and Paul's libertarianism is no longer the accepted brand any more among the more socially liberal leadership of the Libertarian Party.

"Incredibly, the LP leadership has even compared Ron and Rand Paul to the Bushes and the Clintons. LP Chairman Nicholas Serwark attacked the Ludwing von Mises Institute, comparing it to a Nazi organization. And while the Mises Institute has become somewhat controversial within the LP, the party does make room in its circle for a Socialist Caucus!

"Paul, for his part, expressed disappointment.... 'It used to be that they would ask me, you know, quite frequently.' He added that he believed the LP has abandoned its principles, especially with its nomination of Gary Johnson and William Weld to head the ticket in 2016. 'When you look at the leadership, so often you see that they melted away.'

"Paul lamented that the LP 'failed to live up to what should have been its role as an ideological alterntive to Washington’s one-party system. As was quite obvious in the 2016 presidential election, the Libertarians yielded to prevailing attitudes on war, welfare, the Federal Reserve, and more. In believing that winning was more important than standing for something, they ended up achieving neither'....

"The 2016 LP nominee for president, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, hardly qualifies as a limited-government candidate himself. He opposes the abolition of the Federal Reserve System, and supports the Environmental Protection Agency, despite there being no authorization in the Constitution for either one.... More important, apparently, is support for same-sex 'marriage.' Johnson infamously dismissed concerns about forcing bakers to celebrate same-sex marriages, by saying, 'I just see religious freedom, as a category, as just being a black hole'....

"Liberty is apparently no longer the principle driving the Libertarian Party."

Read more: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/28209-has-the-libertarian-party-rejected-ron-paul-and-judge-napolitano
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Trump saves U.S. from cheap washing machines

George F. Will: Protectionism rewards bad deeds | New Hampshire - Union Leader:

January 28, 2018 - "Like Horatius at the bridge, or the boy who stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled, or the Dutch boy who saved the city by putting his finger in the dike - pick your analogous heroism - the Trump administration last week acted to stanch the flood of foreign-made washing machines that are being imported because Americans want them. The stanching will be accomplished by quotas and stiff (up to 50 percent) tariffs, which are taxes collected at the border and paid by American consumers.

"Americans also will pay higher prices for washing machines made domestically by Whirlpool, which sought this protectionism, from which it instantly profited: In Monday's after-hours trading, Whirlpool's stock rose 3 percent. When protectionism is rampant, no bad deed goes unrewarded.

"The washing machine drama about 'putting (a faction of) America first' cannot be industrial policy - government rather than the market picking winners and losers. And it cannot be government redistribution of wealth. And it cannot be crony capitalism. It cannot be those things because Republicans oppose those things and control policymaking.

"Next, and soon, will come a government decision about the problem, as our protectors see it, of menacingly inexpensive steel imports, concerning which the administration is pretending to deliberate. The charade of thinking will end with the imposition of yet more steel tariffs/taxes, joining the 149 (some as high as 266 percent) targeting many of the over 110 countries and territories from which America imports steel....

"Imposition of the new tariffs/taxes will be done solely by the President, exercising discretion granted to Presidents by various laws, including one passed in December 1974, when Congress evidently thought that Watergate, then fresh in memory, had taught that Presidents were not sufficiently imperial. Then, as now, Congress seemed to think it had more important things to do than set trade policy....

"In 2002, George W. Bush imposed tariffs that caused steel prices to surge, costing more jobs in steel-using industries than then existed in steel-making. (Today there are upward of seven times more steel-using than steel-making jobs.) The tariffs cost $400,000 a year for every steel-making job saved, and cost $4 billion in lost wages. Especially hard hit in 2002 were three states - Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania - that in 2016 voted for today's protectionist President....

"Fomenting spurious anxieties about national security is the first refuge of rent-seeking scoundrels who tart up their protectionism as patriotism.... The coming steel tariffs/taxes will mean that defense dollars will buy fewer ships, tanks and armored vehicles, just as the trillion infrastructure dollars the administration talks about will buy fewer bridges and other steel-using projects. As Henry George said, with protectionism a nation does to itself in peacetime what an enemy tries to do to it in war."

Read more: http://www.unionleader.com/article/20180128/OPINION02/180129347
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Bettina Bien Greaves dead at 100

Bettina Bien Greaves, R.I.P. | Liberty Unbound - Mark Skousen:

January 28, 2018 - "All scholars dream of having one or more disciples who will make sure their legacy is kept alive and their works and theories prominently trumpeted before the public eye.

"For the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, there was quite a following, including two couples, Hans and Mary Sennholz, and Percy and Bettina Greaves. On January 22 the last of the four, Bettina Bien Greaves, died at the astounding age of 100. (Mary Sennholz also lived to be 100)....

"Bettina Greaves deserves to be honored as Mises’ most devoted student, and in July a room will be dedicated to her at the annual FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas.

"From the time she first heard Mises speak in 1951 at a Freeman seminar in Washington Square in New York City, Bettina was smitten. With a background in shorthand and secretarial work during the war years, she attended Mises’ famous New York University graduate seminar, taking copious notes on every lecture from 1951 until 1969. Although she had no formal training in economics, Greaves was the queen of the Austrian school and never deviated from it. She joined the Foundation [for] Economic Education (FEE) staff in 1953 and worked at the FEE mansion for the rest of her career. She survived everyone, including founder Leonard Read. After retiring, she stayed on as a board member and even donated her home in New York to FEE....

"She focused her career on advancing the works and ideas of the Austrian school, including the contributions by Henry Hazlitt and Hans Sennholz. She wrote many articles for The Freeman, gave lectures, and compiled anthologies about Austrian economics. She spearheaded FEE’s program to provide libertarian material for high school debaters with packets on foreign aid, government regulations, medical care, and other issues. She compiled and edited Free Market Economics: A Syllabus and Free Market Economics: A Basic Reader, a two-volume set that was distributed to thousands of students and teachers....

"But her main interest was always in her mentor, Ludwig von Mises.... She compiled, edited, and translated many of his books after his death in 1973. She also worked with her husband Percy [on a book] ... published in 1974, called Mises Made Easier (but never easy!). With the help of Robert W. McGee, she published an exhaustive Mises: An Annotated Bibliography (FEE, 1993, 1995). When the Liberty Fund decided to publish the complete works of Mises, Bettina was asked to be the editor, writing introductions for each volume."

Read more: http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/1808
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Libertarians & everyone else react to #TheMemo

Here's What Rand Paul, Mark Meadows, and Others in Washington Are Saying About the Nunes Memo - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Scott Shackford:

February 2, 2018 - "Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, released his short memo today after the White House agreed to its declassification. The document claims that the FBI withheld from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the 'Steele Dossier,' used as justification to snoop on former Donald Trump adviser Carter Page, was funded by Democratic Party sources and pushed by FBI officials with an agenda against Trump....

"House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) calls the memo 'partisan spin'.... Yet she doesn't actually counter any of the claims in the memo itself.... John McCain (R-Ariz.), no friend of Trump's, does not want the Nunes memo to threaten the investigation of whether Russia colluded with members of Trump's campaign during the election outcomes....

"But some Republican lawmakers, like Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), have been philosophically consistent. This tweet may sound like what we've been hearing from other Trump supporters:

So, there it is. The FBI took an unverified political dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and they used it as a central piece in their request to get a warrant for spying on American citizens and political opponents in the Trump campaign.

... but Meadows, as a member of the House Freedom Caucus, supported reforms to the FISA amendments that would have put tighter restrictions on using secret surveillance of American citizens....

"Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who tried to organize a filibuster to stop FISA from being reauthorized without reforms, applauded the memo's release for similar reasons....  Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) who attempted to get surveillance reform through the House and failed, has a like-minded thread of tweets....

"The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is no fan of Trump's, but it's one of the major civil liberties groups concerned about unwarranted FBI surveillance of Americans. And in the wake of the Nunes memo, it wants more information to come out. From Christopher Anders, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington Legislative Office:

Rather than one side or the other cherry-picking facts, all Americans deserve to see all of the facts, including both the minority report and the underlying documents. The goal should be more transparency, not less, particularly when a congressional committee chairman makes serious charges of abuse but does not provide the facts to either prove the charges or allow Americans to make up our own minds.

Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2018/02/02/heres-what-leaders-are-saying-about-the
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Seven management secrets of Atlas Shrugged

7 Management Secrets From 'Atlas Shrugged' That Beat Misinterpretations - Robert Tracinski, The Federalist Society:

July 25, 2017 - "Business and management is not the subject or theme of Atlas Shrugged, but it is the setting. As one of the few novelists to make a serious and sympathetic attempt to portray people who run businesses, she frequently sets up her characterization and plot points by showing us how the heroes and villains operate in the business world, how they make important decisions, and how they treat their employees. We can look at that and derive a few basic rules for how an Ayn Rand hero does business. Call it 'The Management Secrets of ‘Atlas Shrugged'....

1. Know the business from the ground up. Many of Ayn Rand’s business heroes ... worked their way up from the bottom.... Hank Rearden rose up out of the iron mines before becoming a mine owner.... The same goes for Ken Danagger, who is described as having started work in the coal mines at age 12.... At age 16, railroad heiress Dagny Taggart starts a summer job as the night operator at a rural train station. Francisco D’Anconia, heir to a vast copper fortune, spends his college years working at a dilapidated copper foundry.... This is why the heroes in Atlas Shrugged are able to start up again in Galt’s Gulch..... They can readily downshift into the roles of foremen and mechanics, and they have no compunction about walking to work swinging a lunchbox....

2. Earn respect.... Rand’s heroes are clearly inspirational leaders, but it’s not because they jet off to Davos or give TED talks about 'thinking outside the box'.... It’s because they earn the respect of their employees and business partners.... Rand’s heroes inspire their employees because they lead from the front. They never demand that anyone give more, in terms of knowledge, work, or devotion, than they give themselves....

3. Always take responsibility.... This is one of the reasons why the business heroes in Atlas Shrugged all have their businesses named after them — Rearden Steel, D’Anconia Copper, Wyatt Oil, Taggart Transcontinental — while the villains run companies with vaguely collective names like Associated Steel. Part of the point Rand was making is that behind every productive organization there is a person who created it and keeps it going. But from the characters’ perspective, they name their businesses after themselves as a way of stressing their responsibility, the idea that everything their company does is literally done in their name.... The whole method of the business villains in Atlas Shrugged is to evade responsibility, constantly whining that 'it wasn’t my fault,' or 'I can’t be blamed.' We can see this most clearly in the Taggart Tunnel disaster, which happens because, with Dagny briefly gone, a whole chain of Taggart executives from Jim on down pass the buck....

4. Deal with the best talent. If Ayn Rand’s heroes expect a lot out of themselves, they look for the same qualities in the people they hire and do business with. At the beginning of the novel, the basic plot idea is introduced to us in the form of Dagny’s struggle to find and retain talent.... Later, in Galt’s Gulch, Dagny realizes that the foreman at Andrew Stockton’s foundry is the disappeared coal tycoon Ken Danagger.... 'She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. "Aren’t you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?" "That’s the only sort of men I like to hire…. Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong"'....

5. Set an innovative vision. Rand’s business heroes ... are visionaries who are looking for revolutionary new machines and the kind of innovations we would describe nowadays as 'disruptive.' There are two such disruptive innovations that embody this idea. Roughly the first third of the novel’s plot is driven by Hank Rearden’s invention of a revolutionary metal alloy that is strong[er], lighter, cheaper, and longer-lasting than steel.... By the end of Part One ... Rearden Metal is now regarded as a proven technology [and] it is time for our innovators to move on to the next big thing, ... the revolutionary motor they find abandoned at the Twentieth Century Motor Company.... The search for the motor drives the plot up through the end of Part Two and brings us into Part Three.... So the business leader’s search for innovation is at the heart of the novel and is the key driver of the plot.

6. Make every deal win-win. This is a point that very few of the casual mainstream commentators get.... If you actually read Atlas Shrugged, you notice that her heroes are very insistent on making mutually beneficial deals and never trying to get something for nothing out of their customers or business partners. They expect the other guy to pull his weight in any business deal — and they expect that they will have to provide a lot of value in return.... It is the government officials and the altruistic 'humanitarians' who keep trying to set up deals in which one side gets all the benefits and the other side takes all the losses.... Rand makes a specific point to show why these one-sided altruist set-ups have to fail. If you create a deal in which one side takes all the burdens and all the losses, you are ensuring that one of the parties to the deal will eventually be unable to fulfill its obligations and the whole thing will collapse.

7. Don’t prop up the Jim Taggarts.... This is shown in Atlas Shrugged, not by the positive example of her main protagonists, but by their biggest error. In taking heroic action intended to save the railroad and the economy, Dagny actually ends up bailing out her worthless brother, time and time again.... This isn’t about claiming credit or public glory. This is about not accepting a role as the person who always bails his boss, colleagues, or business partners out of their own mistakes, putting them in the position to make more mistakes that need more bailing out in the future ... In the current therapeutic terminology, the person who always bails a chronic drunk out of trouble is 'codependent' or an 'enabler'....

"So Rand did have a few things to say about management, after all.... Ayn Rand uses the business decisions of her heroes as a way of moving forward the plot and characterization and of expressing her big philosophical themes.... Observers of the business world can debate how well these management ideas work and which companies and CEOs truly implement them."

Read more: http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/25/7-real-management-secrets-atlas-shrugged/
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60% of Americans see need for a third party

Are Republicans Ready to Join a Third Party? - The New York Times - Juleanna Glover:

January 28, 2018 - "At think-tank conference tables, over coffee at the Senate Chef and at the incessant book parties on the Washington social circuit, disaffected Republicans are wondering whether, if they came up with a truly great candidate, they could jump-start a new party, just as the original Republicans did in the 1850s.

"And if surveys have any truth to them, plenty of Americans are ready to join them. A September Gallup poll found 61 percent of American voters support the idea of a third major political party, the highest level of support Gallup had ever recorded. Young voters seem especially eager to junk the two-party system; NBC reported in November that 71 percent of millennials want another choice."

"In a world in which Alabama voters elected a Democratic senator, all kinds of previously unimaginable possibilities make a new kind of sense. A third-party presidency in 2020 is no less likely today than the prospect of Donald Trump’s election appeared to be two years ago.

"A viable third-party candidate — say, someone with credibility inside one of the parties who bolts from it — would have appeal to voters across the spectrum. There are many Republicans wary of a second term for Mr. Trump, and yet right now they are entirely reliant on the Democrats to deliver a winning centrist candidate out of a primary process that almost made Bernie Sanders their 2016 nominee. A contest between Mr. Trump and a liberal Democratic candidate ... would leave the middle up for grabs. And a big contingent of politically orphaned political strategists, academics and donors would be ready to lend support....

"Abraham Lincoln was the last representative of a new political party to be elected president. He won in 1860 as the nominee of the anti-slavery Republican Party after he gained notice for his debates with Stephen Douglas during his 1858 Senate run. Lincoln lost that Senate race, but he became famous as a voice of moral clarity. Lincoln’s eventual win resulted not from a party affiliation but from the moral authority he commanded as an opponent of slavery....

"A popular, well-known candidate could co-opt a minor party and inherit its ballot access. But with money and expertise, starting a new party isn’t out of reach: The financier Peter Ackerman and the political reformer Kahlil Byrd led a 2012 effort, Americans Elect, that got on the ballot in a majority of states.....

"In the post-Trump world of American politics, there are all kinds of potential candidates who make sudden sense. Those quixotic enough to daydream about a new political party aren’t foolish enough to envision a candidacy driven by policy papers or party platforms. Personality and principles — either adoration or abnegation thereof — will propel the election of the next president."

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/republicans-third-party-.html
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