Writes Brad

With evisceration of the LP platform in recent years by “small government” statists longing to join the ruling class, the Ron Paul GOP presidential campaign has served not to shout out the irrelevancy of the Libertarian Party so much as serve as the heavy duty exclamation point punctuating that death cry that the LP already delivered to itself.

A shutdown of the Libertarian Party would get radicals and moderates out of each others hair. Radicals could pursue the long neglected non-electoral strategies for long-term radical change and moderates could apply their energies to seeking small reforms inside the major parties, as Ron Paul does. Sufficient social space for needed overlap between wings and their ideological cross-fertilization would exist organizationally in groups like ISIL and the Advocates for Self-Government, as well as out on the internet in political discussion forums of all sorts generally.

The first step in a campaign to shut down the LP would be to develop content for a web site comprehensively laying out both radical and moderate libertarian cases for shutting down the Libertarian Party as counter-productive to the cause of libertarianism.

So far Brad has raised a grand total of $10.00 in an effort to raise $2500 to promote his anti-LP website, shutdownthelp.info. Brad's proposal is meet with skepticism by the libertarians over at Third Party Watch

Responds Stephen Gordon:

My friend Brad forgot one key group of people: There are those of us who would prefer to pursue electoral strategies but don’t have the stomach to work within the major parties, at least for any prolonged period of time. Many of us find neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party reformable. To use some of Spangler’s logic, the Ron Paul presidential campaign has underscored this point.

FD has noted that Jeremy over at Social Memory Complex has posted that "Libertarianism is not intended to be a convenient source of polite dinner conversation topics."

My thoughts are that Brad would be better served by not calling his potential audience "arrogant pricks" and the likes of Jeremy at SMC are warranted in their hesitancy in advocating dissolving such a visible vehicle of liberty, flaws and warts notwithstanding. Of course, I'm well aware of the inherent contradiction of proposing Counter-Economics as a strategy to replace the state and then working within a political party whose moderate aims would in fact work against the very essence of such a strategy.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase Rothbard, we should not forego the good of the present for the perfect of future liberty(This means, for example, I don't vote for McCain even though his prohibitionist tendencies would open up more counter-economic opportunities).

And rather than Brad expending effort to tear down the LP and the "liberty/reform" efforts of others--essentially a negative enterprise--it would be more profitable to actually, say, follow-up on ways to improve the web presence of the Molinari Institute and to create a community for the practicalities(you know, the actual practice, not just theory) of counter-economics. In some ways, Counter-Economics is seeping into the popular culture. Showtime and AMC, for example,both have television series (Weeds and Breaking Bad, respectively) that feature white, middle-aged, middle-class participants turning to the counter-economics of drug dealing. AMC's "Breaking Bad" revolves around a high-school chemistry teacher resorting to setting up a Crystal-Meth drug operation to provide retirement income for his family rather than rely on the State(the teacher has been diagnosed with a terminal disease). AMC actually conducted a viral web marketing campaign to promote the show. When Coporate America starts promoting (for entertainment purposes only, of course :) ) how to set up your own drug operation as a means to circumvent the functions of the State, it occurs to me that Agorism would be better served by moving out of the theoretical stage and into the marketing and experimental stage. Less theorists and more practitioners...