MattWelchReason

The 19th Classical Liberal & even anarchist traditions, from which libertarianism takes much DNA, was filled with black abolitionists like Frederick Douglas and Lysander Spooner and the early proponents and defenders of the 14th Amendment. 20th century libertarianism's shortlist of heroes includes Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Paterson. Reason was edited by lady-people for the '80s & '90s, and is managing-edited by one now. FWIW, etc.

I'm not sure I'm building any political movements, but I can tell you that my personal motivation, one I know is shared by many, many of my small-l libertarian friends, is to challenge and fight back power because of its horrifying effects on the powerless, which tend to be disproportionately lower-class and minority. To pick one of thousands of examples out of a hat, libertarians are probably the most exercised bloc of people outside of the Congressional Black Caucus when it comes to the misuse of eminent domain authority in poor and minority neighborhoods.

It is axiomatic that poor people will be the first to bear the brunt of government power, as we have been witnessing these past months in criminal justice cases around the country. There's a reason why two of the first politicians to talk about Ferguson were Rand Paul and Justin Amash, and that places like Reason have been covering the militarization of police and criminal injustice for more than a decade.

Most non-anarchist libertarians will tell you that the environment -- particularly in places such as air and water, which have fuzzy property rights at best -- is actually among the most sensible areas for the government to regulate. I grew up in Long Beach, California, and could not see the mountains (20 miles away) most of my childhood. Now they're clear as a bell most days, and a good part of the reason is environmental regulation. I like to breathe, and see clean water in nature.

The good news is that stuff's cleaner all around. It's also true that there is a direct correlation between societies getting richer and having cleaner environments, for all sorts of interlocking reasons (richer people have higher standards, for one). It's also true, as I witnessed with my own aggrieved eyeballs, that centrally planned economies are literally deadly on the environment. Google Northern Bohemia sometime....

On fracking, it seems incontrovertible to me that replacing coal-mining with fracking is a net gain for the environment, because it reduces carbon emissions. And many of the Yoko Ono-style fears about burning faucets & whatnot are BS. To the extent that we need better pipes, and better rules governing such things, let's get 'em! But it seems to be a comparatively favorable tech.

I would have voted yes. There are some libertarians who are horrified by that answer (including my co-host Kmele Foster, probably!), because of the private-property intrusions, and there are plenty of others (including legal theorist Richard Epstein) who counter that public accommodation was something the government just needed to get into.

I think people oughtta be able to talk about this stuff without being branded a racist (that is, assuming they aren't being all racisty about it), but yeah, I would have voted for it.

Unsatisfying answer alert: It's hard! The two major parties write the rules of their own competition, and have a guaranteed revenue stream in the form of tax dollars. So third parties -- God love 'em! -- can file legal challenge after legal challenge, and begin to chip away at that stuff, but I don't think there's a magic bullet.

In general, I think the best action in politics lies OUTSIDE of politics, or at least of traditional political structures. There are ad-hoc left-right coalitions fighting against NSA surveillance, for criminal justice reform, and so on, and more importantly there are legitimate non-political outsiders just changing the political landscape. Think of the way that California's Prop. 19 -- which lost! -- nevertheless paved the way for pot legalization in this country. So, look outside of the system for ways to reform the inside.

Rand Paul has said -- and I wholeheartedly agree with him -- that Republicans who want to cut individual welfare while voting for corporate welfare can take a long walk off a short pier (my phrasing).

I disagree with you strongly about the wisdom of seeing government as a jobs program. In the rare instances when countries actually cut government -- Canada in the '90s, New Zealand in the '80s, America after WW2, most of post-communist countries after communism -- there is almost always an unexpected boom in growth, living standards, and eventually employment.