David McElroy

The most common email I get lately is about Ron Paul. This is just a small, edited sample. In some cases, expletives have been deleted, too.

Why do you call yourself a Libertarian when you hate Ron Paul and are trying to stop him from winning????!!!!

I’m not a big-L Libertarian — a member of the Libertarian Party — but I’m generally a small-L libertarian. However, I don’t hate Ron Paul. In fact, I like the guy. (He’s my favorite statist.) As I’ve carefully explained, I admire him and I’d be happy if he won. But he can’t win, for reasons that I’ve also outlined. I don’t know how to be more clear than I’ve been.

This is our last chance to take our country back. Ron Paul has to prevail for liberty to win. Even if he doesn’t, we’re educating people and will win another time.

First, your statement presupposes that there was some golden age of freedom until the nasty progressives took over. (Or maybe the social conservatives are your enemy. I don’t know. I’m just guessing.) The truth is that there was more economic freedom a hundred years ago, for the most part, but there was much less freedom in other areas. In terrible fits and stops, there’s been some progress in the area of social freedom, even if I don’t like the methods used to get here at times. (Ask minority groups how much freedom they had in some places 50 years ago.) We weren’t all free in the past. Not 20 years ago. Not 50 years ago. Not a hundred years ago. There’s nothing to “take back.” We’re shooting for something that hasn’t been done before.

Second, there’s no evidence that people are educated in campaigns, at least not in substantial numbers. You can cite your buddy, Steve, or your friend’s sister’s boyfriend, Jim Bob, maybe. (Or maybe even you.) But if you look at the big picture — the number of people who identify with libertarian positions — it’s not really changing. When I got into libertarians politics more than 20 years ago, we were taught that we could educate people and we’d end up with a libertarian world (or at least enough to win elections). It hasn’t happened, and my campaign experience convinces me that it never will happen in enough numbers to matter. Sorry, but I’m being realistic.

Keep Reading

The older man at the next table looked a bit as though he was lost. I wouldn’t say he looked sad. He seemed more like a man who didn’t know where to go or what to do — almost like a little boy who had lost his parents. I had no idea that he had actually just lost his wife.

Jim and I struck up a casual conversation, but he didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm at first. If I hadn’t made a passing reference to his wife, I’m sure we wouldn’t have talked any further and I wouldn’t have learned his story. He had been sitting in a booth staring aimlessly out the window for close to an hour as I ate and wrote. Since I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring, I joked that his wife must have kicked him out of the house and he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

“I buried my wife two weeks ago,” he said softly.

Jim is 72 years old and seemed to be in excellent health. His wife had developed some kind of cancer early last year and it moved into more critical organs as the year went along. He had known for months that she didn’t have much time left. It’s still a shock to have her gone, though. He said he doesn’t quite know what to do.

He had once had his own accounting practice, but he hadn’t really wanted to retire, so he had stuck around working part-time for others ever since he sold his firm. For his entire life, his work and his church activities have taken up the vast majority of his time. He seemed to have done well financially, but he started talking to me about the things that have been on his mind since he lost his wife.

Keep Reading

If you’re one of the millions of people watching the Super Bowl today, take a good look at that expensive stadium in which the game is being played — and then give thanks that you’re not unlucky enough to have been one of the suckers in Indiana who paid for the thing.

Lucas Oil Stadium cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $720 million to build. Local governments in the Indianapolis area have raised motel taxes, restaurant taxes and rental car taxes to pay for the stadium. The primary tenant of the stadium is the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, who pay only $250,000 a year for the place. (That amounts to just two thirds of the NFL’s minimum salary for the kind of unused player who stands on the sidelines and holds a clipboard.)

In addition to massive direct costs, local governments in the area have shelled out millions of dollars because of operating costs that weren’t covered in the original plan. (Another tax was added after the fact to cover that.) And financing costs went through the roof during construction because of the collapse of the sub-prime lending market.

When I look at this kind of boondoggle, I’m thankful that voters in the county where I live soundly rejected an insane plan to build a domed stadium in1998. The usual kind of downtown central planners came up with pie-in-the-sky plans that year for a domed stadium and a variety of other things. It was called the Metropolitan Area Projects Strategy (MAPS). It was a virtual wish list of everything that pretty much every local group wanted to build. Supporters of the plan were trying to buy support by spreading the cash around.

Keep Reading