The Libertarian Party, in convention last weekend,

1. Re-elected Bill Redpath as chairman of the National Committee,
2. Adopted a platform that is at once solidly libertarian and suitable for public consumption,
3. and nominated Bob Barr for President of the USA and Wayne Root for Vice-President.

   More details can be found at Brian Holtz's Libertarian Intelligence. Commentary will be posted on my personal political weblog and many others.

Armed resistance against a government which has overstepped its bounds is central to the American mythos even if alien to our political tradition. While we had little trouble taking up arms against King George's regulars over taxation without representation, we can't bring ourselves to, for example, make sniper attacks on la migra for raiding our businesses and breaking up our neighbors' families and livelihoods because they never got a permission slip that the government refuses to offer, or even to riot like Frenchmen over new legislation. I'd venture to say that we're better off for it, but that's a matter for another time

When it comes to inanimate objects, however, anything goes. Show me a red-light camera and I'll show you a target for a supressed .22 caliber rifle with a well-aligned scope. Or spraypaint, epoxy, or boltcutters, for that matter.

I predicted, when Tucson's cameras were installed, that citizens would adopt countermeasures such as license-plate covers to defeat the system. I didn't count on angry citizens rendering the system useless, but given that the cameras are prime evidence of contempt for citizens at City Hall, it's no surprise.

Are we attracting voters that will help us win elections? Here are some reservations I have and suggestions for the future.

Ron Paul has gotten quite a few people angry about the Federal Reserve, largely using a narrative with no basis in fact. Ordinarily, the monetary system works well enough to justify ambivalence, but of late, the Fed has adopted an inappropriately reactionary stance, responding to the banking crisis and manipulating interest rates in ways that look more like symbolic reassurance for the rubes than than they resemble anything prescribed by any normative work from modern economics.

Thus even those of us who never believed that the Fed Just Prints Money so that government can spend and spend have had good reason lately to look for alternatives, be they adoption of the Friedman k-Percent Rule, or more radical proposals, such as free banking.

Last night at the Pima County Libertarian Party meeting, Joe Cobb, one of the US's experts on commodity money and free banking, treated us to a freewheeling lecture and extended question and answer session on the advantages of a monetary system in which the supply of money is determined, from the bottom up, by market mechanisms, without the intervention of a government or a government-appointed bureaucracy. He even managed to pull off the near-impossible: to change my mind about what is, at its heart, a technical question, without handing me a stack of journal articles to read.

I ate an illegal dinner tonight.

If your thoughts are running to ambergris-scented breast of bald eagle or a traditional Indonesian curry, spiced with cannabis, you've gone too far afield. Dinner was a glass of Ommegang Hennepin and a few illicitly sold tamales.

Vernon Smith, who won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (split with Daniel Kahneman) for his contributions to experimental economics, gave a public lecture this afternoon at the University of Arizona on the history of his work .

Smith was a member of the University of Arizona faculty from 1976 to 2001, and there conducted most of the work that later won him the Nobel Prize, before leaving to join the libertarian powerhouse at George Mason University as distinguished senior faculty.

His work is of particular interest to libertarians, who advocate privatization, the breakup of government-mandated monopolies, and implementation of market mechanisms to replace command-and-control regulation.

For once, we were on the winning side of a local issue. In case you missed it, below is our release regarding the ballot propositions decided in Tucson's general election last week:

PIMA COUNTY LIBERTARIAN PARTY OPPOSES PROPOSITIONS 100 AND 200

The Pima County Libertarian Party opposes the passage of both Proposition 100, the City Council pay raise, and Proposition 200, the so-called "Water Users' Bill of Rights", in next Tuesday's Tucson city elections.

If you were at the Pride in the Desert festival earlier today, you may have noticed a booth sponsored by the Arizona Stonewall Libertarians. As of 2 PM, when I left to tend to lab business, we had collected seven new Libertarian Party registrations, and expect at least as many more in subsequent hours.

Founded last year by Stonewall Riots veteran Tom Stevens of the Queens County Libertarian Party in New York, the Stonewall Libertarians have rapidly become one of the most active grassroots organizations in the movement.

We owe them a thanks for outreach and registrations. At the very least, queer members of the Pima LP ought to visit their website and consider joining up!

As though low registrations and difficulty recruiting high-quality, credible candidates weren't enough of a challenge for minor parties, Arizona's Open Primary law made it easy for our ballot line to be hijacked by candidates with anti-liberal agendas, such as Flagstaff's Andy Fernandez, who sought to advocate, among other things, socialized medicine as an independent candidate for US Congress, using the Arizona Libertarian Party's ballot line.

Fortunately, Fernandez was narrowly defeated in the primary. That wasn't the case for Phoenix-area scamster Yuri Downing, who, with three of his frat buddies, ran as a Libertarian in 2002 to collect "Clean Elections" money to throw parties.

A long-awaited ruling in Federal district court last Thursday will put an end to the practice. Although, according to the Tucson Citizen, the effect on the other political parties' primaries is not yet clear, independent voters will no longer be able to vote in the Libertarians' primary.

Over on my personal AZ politics 'blog, Goldwater State, I comment a bit on the TUSD sickout, and offer a recipe for reform.