Archives for April 2012

Free speech isn’t very popular. It might be enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but that doesn’t mean most people like allowing it. That also doesn’t mean that the courts haven’t found ways to limit speech when they want to.

I heard a snippet of an interview on a TV news show Saturday while I was in a restaurant. The interviewer and a guest were talking about something untrue that one side had said of the other in a political battle between Democrats and Republicans. The interviewer seemed aghast at the blatant dishonesty.

“Shouldn’t it be illegal for them to say this since it’s not true?” he asked.

If you did a poll, I suspect a majority would agree with the interviewer, but that’s because they haven’t thought through the alternative to allowing unfettered free speech. If political dishonesty were declared illegal, who’s to judge what’s true? When two sides see the world in a different way, is one of them lying? And what about unpopular positions? Are those who warn that the mainstream is enslaving them guilty of telling lies?

And this brings us to anonymous speech. It’s come to be accepted today that a person who wants to engage in political speech is required to put his name on the piece. Ironically, using this standard, the collection of articles that successfully advocated for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution — the Federalist Papers — would be illegal today. It was accepted as an obvious right of free speech to hide your identity at the time, but those of the progressive left decided that’s not a good idea. So those who want to express their opinions are required to do it in a way that the money is essentially traceable in some way.

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For hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, today is Easter. It’s a day when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, which is central to the Christian faith. For many other people, it’s just a time to feel superior to religious people — on the assumption that religious people live by faith and the atheist world lives by “reality.” I’d like to suggest that faith is at the root of what everyone believes.

Faith means having a belief in something that you can’t prove with certainty. There’s no question that much of religious belief is completely based on faith. But what about the rest of life? What about all the other things that you accept as true, but which you couldn’t prove if your life depended on it?

On a mundane level, you have faith in a lot of things that you can’t prove. Have you been to Moscow? Or to the North Pole? Or to Cairo? Most of us haven’t been to those places, yet we believe in them, because we’ve seen pictures and read stories and heard experiences from other. We believe the evidence is strong that they exist, enough so that we wouldn’t question their existence.

You believe in atoms and various sub-atomic particles, even if you don’t have a clue what they really are. You can’t see them. You don’t really understand them. But you were taught in science class that they were the building blocks of all matter, so you believe. Can you prove it? No, you can’t. You just have faith that the people who should know something about this really do.

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Cleaning out the notebook…

If you wonder why the national Libertarian Party is harder and harder to take seriously, consider this recent comment from LP National Committee member Wayne Allen Root:

“I think the important thing now is to make sure Obama is not elected,and that means in my mind, I would love for a libertarian like Gary Johnson the two-term governor of New Mexico would actually get elected President, but I think we all know that’s not going to happen so therefore it’s got to be Romney there is no choice.”

Root was the LP’s vice presidential nominee four years ago, so he’s not exactly a nobody in the party (even if he should be). He exposes the real problem with the LP. Everyone know that Libertarian Party candidates aren’t going to win, so they’re not entirely in agreement about what their purpose is. They’re schizophrenic. Are they a political party or an educational organization? Political parties exist to win elections. How many LP campaigns have you ever known of that were honestly run to win (with a halfway legit shot at winning)? I can’t think of any.

Root’s comments point to the contradiction of being a serious Libertarian if you want to make a difference in elections. If you want to influence the outcome of a campaign, about your only real option is to vote for one of the two major parties. So what good is the LP doing? I can’t figure that out. Even if I still believed in some form of limited coercive government, I don’t see any real purpose for the LP. Maybe you see one that I’m overlooking.

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