Stacy Litz accepting a leadership award.

If there is one that libertarians agree on, it is that a person should be allowed to ingest whatever they want, be it raw milk, alcohol on Sunday, or even marijuana. Eating, drinking and smoking certain things might be bad for you, but if it doesn’t hurt anyone else then that is your choice. Consequently, libertarians also hate the War on Drugs. It creates violent black markets, makes drugs more dangerous and addictive, and helps fund CIA sponsored terrorism.

We also lament seeing someone’s cancer stricken grandmother being carted off to jail for taking medicine prescribed by her doctor or someone’s straight-A son having his life ruined because the government didn’t approve of his bad habit.  It’s always worse when it is personal.

In Philadelphia things got very personal for some of our local libertarian activists. As George Donnelly has explained, one of the prominent young leaders in our community became a secret agent of the state.

How could a libertarian anarchist become a police informant, you ask? It’s quite simple really. According to the grapevine, a bright college-age libertarian lady studying in Philadelphia stands accused by Pennsylvania state police of selling drugs they don’t like to an undercover cop on seven occasions. She’s looking at seven felonies.

Faced with a disaster of these proportions, the young lady reportedly accepted an opportunity to expedite her release from jail (and possibly reduce her sentence) by going to work as an informant. Three people have been arrested as a result of her collaboration, I am told.

The dust still has not settled on this, but it seems like the worst situation possible. One of our best may have been corrupted and turned into the very thing we are fighting to stop.  Which makes some of the recent posts on her blog a little more colorful. For another account of what happened, read this.

Cheerful and consistent.

The title may be misleading, but it is true at least in one case. Newt Gingrich took a lot of heat during the GOP 2012 primary when he was attacked for draft dodging.

Though he relentlessly pushes military spending and talks like a bigtime hawk, Gingrich avoided the Vietnam War through a combination of student and family deferments. (He married one of his high school teachers at age 19, and quickly got her pregnant.) In the presidential debate on January 7, 2012, Gingrich claimed that “I never asked for a deferment, I was married with a child, it was never a question.” That sounded pretty like a pretty solid defense until Ron Paul pointed out that he had a wife and two children when he was drafted — and he went anyway.

It was a good political move on Paul’s part, since he is trying to appeal to the a party that seems to have an insatiable appetite for war. However, libertarians honor those who say no to war, so the message might be confusing to Paul’s libertarian base.

Didn’t Gingrich do the right thing by refusing to fight an unjust war? He may have done it for the wrong reasons, but in the end he did not end up helping to kill innocent foreigners like Paul did. Even self described libertarian Bob Barr thinks Gingrich is a great guy.

Former Georgia Republican Rep. Bob Barr supports Newt Gingrich’s campaign for president, and told The Daily Caller other libertarians should consider joining him.

Barr was elected to Congress in 1994 and worked alongside Gingrich as he became Speaker of the House. Barr left office in 2003 and in 2008 ran as the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, receiving more than 500,000 votes nationwide.

Explaining his support for Gingrich, a politician not often considered a libertarian darling, Barr told The Daily Caller, “I’m very comfortable and happy supporting Newt,” adding, “it’s not to say that other candidates like Ron Paul don’t have very good ideas.”

The former congressman has served as a surrogate for Gingrich’s campaign, primarily reaching out to groups supportive of the Second Amendment. He said he has some policy differences with Gingrich, but finds his political track record reassuring.

“Of all of the Republican candidates, he is the one best equipped and with an actual track record of accomplishing important conservative and libertarian goals,” said Barr. “A track record to me is a much better indicator of where these candidates truly stand than what they may say.”

Maybe Bob Barr is on to something. Maybe libertarians should be giving millions to Gingrich instead of Paul. In all serious, Gingrich is such a statist he bears more resemblance to the destructive Stay-Puft marshmallow man than a libertarian. Plus, I recall Ron Paul took the time to explain his mistake at his 2008 Rally for the Republic, in which he chastised himself for being the Universal Soldier.

The First Philadelphia Libertarian Meeting of 2012 is tomorrow,

MONDAY JAN 16 7:00 PM

We’d love to see you there.

How anyone could confuse the radical libertarian Ron Paul for a moderate liberal like Fred Krugar is anyone’s guess. Maybe they really thought Ron Paul was the first openly gay presidential candidate.

Ron Paul might not be the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president, but he’s certainly more philosophically libertarian than most of the recent LP candidates.

So, in honor of this typical media smear, let me direct you to his money bomb for today, which is appropriately called: Black This Out.

Was he just chatting away with his friends? No, he was rather serious. In fact he was having a serious discussion with his supervisor. What could be so serious that he would endanger his riders by talking and driving at the same time?

Well, he was warning his supervisor that he was going to soon be over his federally mandated maximum driving hours for the week. To convince his supervisor, he even took the time to calculate out loud how many hours of driving time he had remaining. This got a little complicated, so he took his eyes off the road to find his notebook, in which he recorded his driving hours.

So while the bus driver was reading, calculating, chatting on the phone and driving, I was sitting there thinking about how much safer I am thanks to arbitrary federal limits on bus drivers.

Thanks government.

Higher Grounds
631 N 3rd St
Philadelphia, PA 19123

Check out the meetup page for more details.

Extreme Ironing

Media bobble-heads and the political zombie hordes take it for granted that being extreme is bad and being moderate is good. Politicians would agree, since that is the easiest way to maintain power. Yet, there is nothing inherently wrong with extremism.

We want our food to be extremely tasty, the weather to be extremely pleasant and our benefactors extremely generous. It is only in the realm of politics, where people are artificially pitted against each other, that moderation seems to be a virtue.

Few would argue that we should take a moderate view of robbery. One extreme is no robbery, the other extreme is lots of robbery. A moderate view is that there should not be too much or too little robbery, which is absurd.

Similarly, libertarians take the extreme position that all human interaction should be voluntary, not just the part that the government hasn’t gotten around to regulating. If you don’t want to have sex with someone, that is your choice. If you don’t want foreign families obliterated to keep up Boeing stock and the president’s erection, you shouldn’t have to pay for it.

The fundamental question is, who should decide what is best for each individual? Should each person choose their destiny, or should others force them to do things that they do not want to do?

Currently, the government dictates what people can eat, drink, smoke, who they can marry, who they can associate with, where they can travel and whether or not they can bake cookies to raise money for charity.

On the other hand, Libertarians think that if you want to drink raw milk, that’s fine since you’re not hurting anyone else. Hell, you can drink gasoline if you like, just make sure that your corpse doesn’t hit anyone on its way to the ground.

Now, personally, I don’t want anyone to commit suicide. However, if an adult decides that life isn’t worth living and I can’t convince them otherwise, then what right do I have to strap them to a bed and force them to live in anguish for the rest of their life?

That’s basically it. Libertarianism doesn’t specify what is good and what it bad, it only prohibits interfering with the lives of others. This simple, unshakable rule (called the non-aggression principle) means libertarians won’t compromise your happiness for their own ends. That’s what makes us extreme — we’re extremely respectful of the lives of others.