What stands in the way?
By Brian R. Wright

As a longtime tilter at windmills, with little success at toppling any, I feel I’m a natural authority on the subject of what doesn’t work politically. The second paragraph of my recent ‘white paper’ suggesting such a coalition 3d party presented to assembled Libertarian Party of Michigan (LPM) leadership on December 8, 2018, reads:

In the recent 2018 mid-term elections, the LPM candidate for governor, Bill Gelineau—in the writer’s opinion the best-ever candidate for major office in terms of competence, understanding the workings of state government, personability, and practical application of principles of freedom to extant problems (and running a robust though part-time campaign)—received a paltry 1.33% of the popular vote.

The paper continues with the basic logic…

Core Proposal and Argument

Create a third party named Independents[1]—for Michigan, other states, and nationally—by uniting the four major existing 3d parties in the country {LP, Green, Constitution (US Taxpayers, UST), and Natural Law (NL)} around a minimalist platform of securing American First Principles’[2] individual freedom en masse… against corrupt public officials and their state-privileged cartel bosses.[3]

Qua national entity, the Independents’ Party stands for the secular-libertarian aphorism: “peace, civil liberties, and a noninterventionist foreign policy,” generically Þ “socially liberal, fiscally conservative.” In other words, common-sense, small-government individualistic humanism Þ zero-privilege, full-cost capitalism. Note that studies have shown 20-25% of Americans self-identify with this spectrum location. Continue reading →