Transcript: Roundtable Discussion of Individual Liberty and Political Activism

Date of recording: May 22, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Speakers: Vinay Kolhatkar, Roger Bissell, and Marco den Ouden

 

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

 

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Good evening, everyone. We’re back on the Savvy Street Show, or at least I’m back, while my co-hosts held the fort, so to speak, so well that I wasn’t needed at all. I have my usual co-hosts, Roger Bissell, who is a happy musician and a stern philosopher, and Marco den Ouden, who is a jolly philosopher who runs the Jolly Libertarian blog. Welcome to the show, Roger and Marco.

 

Roger Bissell

Thank you.

 

Marco den Ouden

Glad to be here.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Political activism is any activity that may conceivably affect or have an effect on politics, however small, now or in the future

So, today’s topic is a discussion among the three of us. We’re going to do a roundtable of the mic. The topic is Individual Liberty and Political Activism. And before I jump into the first question, let me define political activism for you, which is any activity that may conceivably affect or have an effect on politics, however small, now or in the future.

With that definition in mind, let me jump to the first question. Probably the biggest defenders of individual liberty are objectivists and libertarians. But often they are involved in their own careers and in self-actualizing themselves. So, given their impact is so small, why should they care about politics? Should they even bother to vote? Let me turn to Roger first.

 

Roger Bissell

I like your definition and I think that it’s just like the issue of patriotism. There are many different ways to be patriotic and there are many different ways to support, to work on behalf of, individual liberty.

We often don’t even think about our liberty unless it’s in danger.

Why should you even care about it, though? Well, like many things, we often don’t even think about our liberty unless it’s in danger or we’re in fear of losing it. When all seems peaceful and calm, we don’t get the adrenaline going to want to go out and man the barricades or get somebody by the lapels and say, “What are you doing to my freedom?” I think we’re in a time right now here in America, and I think around the world, where to anybody who cares about the importance of liberty and freedom in your life, this is an “all hands on deck” kind of situation. Now, that doesn’t mean that everybody is going to respond. During our Revolutionary War, my understanding is only about 20% of the Colonists got involved on the side of independence, and 20% were Loyalists, and about half or so simply tried to hunker down and hope that they didn’t get called to go fight. So, a lot of people don’t understand that we’re in that kind of situation now, and they want to stay focused on their family and career, and they don’t realize the jeopardy that their values are in, or maybe they think that somebody else will take care of it. Like I said, though, not one size fits all. What you do can take many forms.

As for voting, really briefly: there are times when it makes absolutely no difference. Like, I live in a very red state. I used to live in a really blue, liberal, Democrat Party-leaning city, but now I’m out in the sticks, as they say, so it really doesn’t make any practical difference. It’s not like a battleground state. It’s not going to tip the scales, so I can still make my vote symbolic as an act of integrity or to register my principles in the overall vote totals, whether I vote for one of the two major party candidates that I think is much less bad than the other one, or by voting for a libertarian candidate or for an independent who has those values. So, I do think that if people think that this is a time of peril, then they should consider what they might do to help out.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. Marco?

 

Marco den Ouden

Well, I’m going to start with your second question first. Why should we care about politics or voting in particular at all? There’s an interesting group that was formed many years ago called the Voluntaryists. George H. Smith was one of the founders, along with Wendy McElroy and Carl Watner, and their whole philosophy was that we shouldn’t vote at all, we shouldn’t get involved in politics—that we should philosophize. But getting involved in actual politics, voting, they considered encouraging the statists. But we have to remember that they also were anarchists. So, they believed that the state in and of itself was evil, that government was evil. And so, with that position, not voting makes good sense as a political philosophy. And I’m somewhat sympathetic to their views. But I have actually voted in every election since I can remember when. But the question is, the first question, if you’re involved in a career, should you become politically active? And to me, that’s a very personal question, and it depends on the individual’s temperament and his desires and ambitions and his priorities.

The only time I ever ran for election was 1984, and I had gotten involved with local libertarians. We had started a group called the Libertarian Foundation, which was just basically philosophical. But one of my cohorts and I decided to found the first Libertarian Party Riding Association in Vancouver at the time. And that election came shortly after that so, of course, we thought, well, we’re going to run, of course, because we just organized this riding association, and so we got a slate of candidates together. We didn’t fill a lot of ridings. It was the first and only election that I’ve ever run in. At the time, I was 33 years old, and I was gung-ho and very active. I was active in the Libertarian Foundation, which was the educational group. And I got actively involved with the Riding Association and with politics as well. But to me, to a certain extent, it’s a younger man’s game, and I don’t feel the same now.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you, Marco. We’ve got a lot to cover, so I’ll keep moving this a little quick. I want to start with just a quote, I’m not sure who to attribute it to, but it says, “You may not take any interest in politics, but politics takes an interest in you.” [Pericles: see https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pericles-Athenian-statesman/Restoring-Athenss-preeminence]. I will only say I’m not for not voting. I mean, in Australia, voting is compulsory, but even if it wasn’t and if you didn’t bother to vote and everyone took that advice seriously, all that would happen is the most draconian party would get a few thousand people to vote, and they will be in power and they will get all the seats in Parliament, and then things just get harder still.

Novak Djokovic was ousted out of Australia. And that wasn’t a political statement per se, but it became a political statement.

I do want to put one other thing out there. You know, remember Novak Djokovic was ousted out of Australia. And that wasn’t a political statement per se, but it became a political statement because his only stance was, “I don’t want to take the vaccine for my body and I’m the sovereign over my body.” That’s all he was saying. He uttered not a single word about politics. He was thrown out of Australia, even though he was playing singles on a tennis court, so the opponent was more than 10, 15 meters away, which was way more than the social distancing norm. So, we have these inadvertent effects which we’ve got to keep abreast of and be aware of. Say, [a hypothetical] nurse who is sacked from the hospital—if she decides to sue her employer, and that can then become a class action or a precedent case because she didn’t take the vaccine and you’re going against the employer. Lots of police officers and firemen who lost their jobs are watching. It becomes a huge political statement. So, I think we should remain alert. You have the stage now, Marco.

 

Marco den Ouden

Okay, well, we’ll go on to the next question, and that is what can people do other than be directly involved in political campaigns? And Vinay, we’re going to start with you on that one.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, because we’re defining it as an effect on politics, both short term and long term, there is a plethora of activities. I mean, culture is kind of the barometer of politics, so culture downstream affects politics, and what affects culture therefore affects politics. You could be a teacher in a school, teaching economics, or in university, any of the humanities. You could be in the media. You could be in art and do certain kinds of art. Van Morrison did a song against the lockdown in the late stages of the lockdown. You could make statements the way Novak Djokovic or the hypothetical nurse I said did. You could do petitions. I mean, in our state, New South Wales, you need 10,000 signatures to a petition and then it has to be heard in Parliament. And, you know, various states would have different rules, but in most places, I believe in Canada and the US, it will be the same. You can do little things at your school, like you may be against the woke syllabus and protest just at the parents’ PAC meeting. You could homeschool your children. I mean, there are so many things you could do in politics.

 

Marco den Ouden

Roger, you’re next. What’s your take on this?

 

Roger Bissell

Ayn Rand said the battle for freedom or liberty is primarily a philosophical war.

Yes. Well, I like what Vinay said, and I’m going to probably parallel him a little bit. But first I want to point out that Ayn Rand said the battle for freedom or liberty is primarily a philosophical war. It’s not a political one and we should fight it with good arguments. She used the phrase intellectual nuclear weapons and not Republican pea shooters, by which she meant slogans and her pet…her favorite word was “bromides.” (I never knew what a bromide was. I thought it was medicine of some kind until I heard her use it that way.) So, anyway, when you speak out or write, consider doing that whenever or wherever you can, but do it as much as you can on the idea or the principle involved in a campaign or a referendum. Above all, try to say it in your own words. There’s nothing worse than an email or letter to the editor that sounds like you just cut and pasted something out of one of Rand’s essays or somebody else’s. And my other important point is don’t just get stuck in the factual points or the practical points, which are very important, but also the moral or the philosophical principle that’s involved, the principle of individual rights. I mean, that’s what we’re talking about, individual liberty. It’s the right to liberty and the right to life and the right to property and pursuit of happiness.

Now, if you’re not inclined or gifted to write or speak, you can help out behind the scenes. You can volunteer to help those who are running for office or heading up a group. You can send them money. And here’s another way. Vinay said there’s just such a plethora, that’s a great word too. There’s such a multitude of ways that you can have an effect. And one of them is just live your principles. Set a good example for your friends. Keep your integrity on the issues and don’t sell out. Do this for your friends and family members, especially your children. Children are watching and they have great hypocrisy detectors. So don’t give them any occasion to hear you saying one thing and doing another. And I think that goes in general: make sure your friends . . . everybody, sees you being consistent. I think being consistent, when we’re talking about principles, that’s the key right there.

 

Marco den Ouden

Thank you, Roger. I’ll want to finish up with largely agreeing with you on your point that the issue is largely philosophical. I became a libertarian, or objectivist actually, in 1969 when I read my first book by Ayn Rand, which was Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal. I didn’t start with her fiction, I started with her nonfiction, and it hooked me right off. That was the first book I ever read that I found myself agreeing with everything I read. A few books later, I came across For the New Intellectual, and one of the things she says in there is that “the new intellectuals must fight for capitalism, not as a practical issue, not as an economic issue, but with the most righteous pride as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves and nothing less will save it.” I was subscribing to her newsletter [The Ayn Rand Letter] at the time, and in the newsletter she directly answered a question about what can you as an individual do. She suggested a variety of things, but number one, I think one of the top ones, was writing letters to the editor. So, I got gung-ho and I started writing letters to the editor, almost one or two letters a week. And Roger says, no, don’t cut and paste slogans. But Objectivism has a language of its own, it has a vocabulary of its own, and I wrote one long letter denouncing proposed changes to Canada’s Anti-Trust Act, and so I talked about coercive monopolies versus market monopolies, which is a very Randian concept. And as a result of using those buzzwords, I got a phone call out of the blue from an objectivist, and he invited me to join other objectivists to go and listen to Nathaniel Branden’s vinyl recordings of The Basic Principles of Objectivism. So, that’s how I got really involved in that. Using buzzwords does have its benefits. I think that the intellectual battle is probably more important, to me it is anyways, more important than the political battle.

 

Roger Bissell

So, it had a happy ending then. [Marco: It had a very happy ending.] Right. When I was a freshman in college, I had just come through reading a lot of that stuff, and the first letter to the editor I ever wrote, and this is the reason why I say try not to sound like you’re channeling Ayn Rand, the first phrase in my letter was, “With an ignorance akin to that of prehistoric savagery” [Vinay: Yes. Marco: Hahaha!] I mean, it doesn’t get much more [Vinay: Randian than that.] Randian, absolutely.

Okay. Next question. Is it better to support or run as a candidate for the Libertarian Party or to join one of the mainstream parties and support them or run for them? You may actually get elected running for another party. I mean, that’s always a possibility. So, Marco, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this first.

 

Marco den Ouden

Rand Paul and Ron Paul probably have had more influence than the actual people running for the Libertarian Party.

Well, you know, I’m of two minds on that. My primary political activism in the days that I was politically active was with the Libertarian Party. I’ve never been actively involved with another party. But when you look at the big picture, you see people like Ron Paul and Rand Paul very active with the Republican Party and having a tremendous influence as role models and as an example of what you can do within a mainstream party. So, I think that Rand Paul and Ron Paul probably have had more influence than the actual people running for the Libertarian Party. Nobody remembers them, but everybody remembers Ron Paul. So, I think there is a certain advantage to running for an established party if you can do that effectively like Ron Paul did. But then again, activism within the Libertarian Party itself helps promote the philosophy and it has its benefits as well. But if you have the capability of running within an established party and still being able to maintain your principles, I think that’s a good way to go.

 

Roger Bissell

Vinay.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

This answer really depends on the state of politics in your country. Two issues. One, what’s the state now or at the time you are trying to say, “OK, should I become active?” And secondly, which country you’re in. I don’t know a lot about Canada, but Australia and New Zealand follow the Westminster style of democracy. And one of the things we have in New Zealand now there is a party called ACT, which is kind of libertarian or at least classically liberal, and they are now in coalition with two mainstream parties, and the way it’s going to work is they are going to get a deputy prime minister in the second half of the term of the existing prime minister. So, they’ve had a considerable influence. And here in Australia, one or two minor parties have had a lot of influence; the ability to influence government is a lot more than say the Libertarian Party (LP) in America which has hardly ever moved off their zero to 1% vote from 1972. Maybe Gary Johnson and Bill Weld got a little bit more, but they [the LP] don’t get any electoral college votes. The system is geared against the Libertarian Party or any other minor party.

In America, I would say, because it’s not easy to be nominated for a relatively safe seat in a red state or that sort of thing, if you do have a chance to join a somewhat corrupted party, like the Republican party, but if you’re going to have a lot of impact, move that party in one direction, [do it]. Which is what AOC and Bernie Sanders have done. They are openly socialist and Marxist and there are many more now in the Democratic Party [like them], and they’ve just pulled JFK’s Democratic party of civil rights and free speech towards the extreme left, and candidates like Rand Paul can do that to the Republicans [push them right]. So, it depends on your circumstances. If you’ve got a chance to join a major party, I’d say you should if at a high level and be a candidate in a winnable seat rather than just be a volunteer for someone like Ayn Rand was for Wendell Willkie and then he massively disappointed her.

 

Roger Bissell

Yes, I think the point about context and the situation is very important. In the early 1970s, I helped form the Tennessee Libertarian Party, and we decided it was important to run people for the United States Congress if at all possible, so I decided I would be a candidate in 1976. Now, the ballot laws are rather restrictive in Tennessee, so it would have been impossible for us to get the manpower to actually qualify the party for the ballot. If we were going to run, we would have had to run as independents. All right, so that’s what I did. Now, I actually got asked to consider entering the Republican Party primary for this election.

A little sidebar: at the time, 1976 in the spring, I was attending Leonard Peikoff’s history of philosophy lectures at Vanderbilt University, and one of the other people attending the lectures with me was a fellow who now is a big defender of the Second Amendment and about gun laws and all those kinds of statistics. His name is John Lott Jr., and I hope we can snag him for a podcast sometime soon because he’s really smart. Well, he said, Roger, I’d really like you to consider running as a Republican.

I decided not to because I thought there might be a lot of pressure on me to water down my position. And I just wanted to lay it out there. I said, get rid of Social Security, cut taxes 90% and then cut them again, that was what I wanted to say. So, they put me on the ballot, but because I was an independent, they put me four or five slots to the right of the Democratic candidate, and there wasn’t a Republican candidate, so I think many voters overlooked me. I got about 10,000 votes, and the Democrat got 110,000 votes. So, I only got about 8%. If I’d run as a Republican, I might’ve gotten more like 30 or 40%, but been kind of enmired in this political party that would be pressuring me to think like the Chamber of Commerce or something, and I didn’t quite want to do that. I did run another race, but it was a nonpartisan race, so I want to talk about that in a little while. So, that’s all I really have to say about the Libertarian Party or mainstream parties.

 

Marco den Ouden

Thank you, Roger. I think we’re going to move on to our next question then. And there are actually two questions, but I’ll read them both and you can answer them both. First, what made you run for public office in the first place? And secondly, would you run again? Vinay, you just came out of a political race, so you’re a good person to start with.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, firstly, I was asked to consider running. There was a by-election. The ex-prime minister of Australia [who was also an MP (member of parliament)] had resigned and created a vacancy. So, there’s this federal by-election, but there isn’t a broader election. I was going to get decently funded. I didn’t have to risk money. I was going get more volunteers than would be possible in a federal election because whichever volunteers were available were going to concentrate only on one campaign. And most importantly, everywhere there are factions and the people within this Libertarian Party of Australia, the faction that was backing me, was a faction that I like a lot because they are not what I call “bicycle-helmet libertarians,” which means they’re not fighting on trivial issues like there shouldn’t be a law to wear bicycle helmets even though we’ll wear them and we’ll ask our children to wear them anyway, because it makes sense. It was going to be fought, and that’s the way I wanted to fight, on very big issues, what woke-Marxism philosophy is doing to us, what the (I called it) scam of climate change is doing to us, and sound money, free markets, capitalism, which the other so-called far-right campaigners didn’t do, and it was an experiment. And I was the guinea pig, and I was happy to be the guinea pig. “If we ran this drastic campaign, what could we win?” And the answer was 6% in that electorate. But in certain parts, I did get up to 14%. And I think in some electorates, it would be double digits, but it’s not going to win you a seat. Would I run again? It’s a question for tomorrow. I mean, it depends on the circumstances of the case. I would not run again in an utterly unwinnable seat because we’ve done the experiment now in the lower house, but certain upper house seats are winnable, and I might consider those.

 

Marco den Ouden

Okay, thank you for that. Roger, what’s your take?

 

Roger Bissell

Well, as I mentioned, in my congressional race in 1976, the point of that campaign was mainly to get libertarian ideas out to the public—free market, civil liberties, etc. It was primarily educational. And we thought that the best way to spread the ideas for liberty and to help build the party and have a snowball effect was to run some races and get the word out there publicly. I don’t know how many local folks were educated by the 15-minute “free” time slot that they gave me on the public TV station there. but it was interesting and fun, taping that speech. That was almost 50 years ago, and I don’t look like I’m 25 anymore. So, I’ve considered running again occasionally, but my music career is still happening, my writing and editing sideline is still happening, and I’m really busy enjoying myself. Plus—I’m really just too old, so I’m having to hand it over to the younger generation and give them some encouragement from the sidelines.

About seven years later (1983), I ran in a race for the Metropolitan Nashville school board. It was a set of nine appointed positions, but then they decided to make them elective. I honestly thought I had a chance to win a seat. Why not have one person for lower taxes and lower spending out of the nine? Well, that isn’t the way everybody else saw it. The teachers union and the PTA both threw a lot of money behind two lawyers, and the local conservatives backed another well-known guy, so I came in fourth in a field of 13, and that was disappointing. I thought I’d do better, but that was the way it came out. So, no, I would not run for school board again. Back then, I was a young parent with a personal investment in the only education we could afford at the time for our children. But now, as I said, I’ve handed off that job to my children, at least one of whom is a staunch libertarian, and he and his wife are homeschooling their children, and I’m very pleased that they are able to do that and willing to do that and realize the importance of it.

 

Marco den Ouden

Thank you, Roger. I went over what prompted me to get involved, and that was that I helped start the Libertarian Party in British Columbia. It had not been a presence in British Columbia at all at the time, and a friend of mine and I started the party there, and the election happened not too long after that. So naturally, we were all gung-ho, and I actually ran against the sitting prime minister. I only got 79 votes, nothing close to your 10,000, Roger, but it was an experience to get to run as a candidate. You have to collect I think 25 or 50 signatures from people in the riding that approve of you running, and so I had to go door to door and collect all those signatures. And all those people were quite happy, they didn’t care what their political persuasion was, they would sign because they think if you want to run for office, you should be allowed to run for office. I had support from everybody that I talked to . . . to sign my nomination papers, so that wasn’t a problem. My campaign was very low key. I’m not a door knocker. I’m a bit of a loner. I’m not really all that gregarious, although I sound gregarious here talking to you guys. I like to be on my own. I like to read and write, and I’m not particularly a social person, so I don’t hang around with groups.

My most active social life was actually from when I started getting involved with the active libertarian group in 1979 through to about the year 2000, and during that time, I was active in the libertarian group in Vancouver. I was the executive of the group for years. We organized supper clubs. Walter Block was actually a speaker at our supper club many times. We had a roast for him, which was great fun one time. And in 1996, we organized the annual conference for the International Society for Individual Liberty. And that was held at Whistler and we had a huge collection of guests. George H. Smith, whom I mentioned, was a speaker. Barbara Branden was a speaker. I think John Hospers was also a speaker at that conference. We had tremendous support and speakers from all over the world. I met a lot of libertarians, and I got a lot of books signed. So that was great fun. And for that, I got to do a radio show. I was on one or two radio shows promoting the conference. I got to talk to a lot of people like Pierre Lemieux, who also is a prominent libertarian from Quebec, who now lives in Maine or Massachusetts. He was there.

But a few years after that, I had some disenchantment, and in 2000, I decided to focus on family life and my personal life and got out of political activism completely and didn’t get back into it again until 2015 when I started my blog, The Jolly Libertarian. And that was as a result of getting active on Facebook with libertarian groups, and I found out about various meetings that were happening around Vancouver, and I got involved with them again. And I met so many angry libertarians that I thought that I’d start The Jolly Libertarian.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

That’s wonderful. And that indeed brings us to our next question, which is about indirect action. Indirect activism is a very wide field. And let me ask Roger first. Have you been part of or founded or had a prominent role in an advocacy or a citizens group, and would you do that again, Roger?

 

Roger Bissell

Well, yes, several times, actually. When we first formed the Tennessee Libertarian Party (1973), a couple of friends and I also formed a non-partisan group called the Committee for Individual Liberty, and we thought that it would be a good thing to poll the members of the state legislature about where they were on particular issues, and then if they would endorse or reject something like the basic libertarian idea that you should not use force or fraud in order to promote your political ideas. It was so funny because when it came to the general principle, they were all, yes, that sounds good. But when it came to issue after issue…well, yes, no, yes, no, they were all over the place.

The really big experience of my life was 1979. I formed a local citizens group called the Nashville Tax Alternatives Committee. At that time, the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation, both on opposite sides of the country, had put out some really good booklets for helping activists to get involved in local issues, and there were things like not only just the tax issues and spending issues, but also swapping out city departments for private services, like Scottsdale, Arizona had a private fire department, that whole idea. We were facing a massive increase in property taxes and in local spending in 1979, so I decided to take these booklets, and dive in and do some research. We did stop the property tax increase and a local sales tax increase several years later. But then they decided that we needed to have an auto emissions inspection program that was mandated, and we tried really hard to stop it, but it passed and it only finally ended about a year or two ago. So, we don’t have to go in every year to have them stick some tubes up our tailpipes to see if our cars are clean. We also helped lead a campaign to amend the Nashville Metropolitan Charter to open up alternative kinds of public services like jitneys and shared rides instead of taxi cabs and, of course, that failed because the taxicab monopoly said: “No way.” I appeared many times on talk shows and on the news on local TV and radio, and I think that did some good and drew some people into fighting against these government programs, but I wouldn’t do that again now, either, for the same reasons as running for office.

If I could just toss in one other idea: since I’m a professional musician and have done a lot of recordings, one of the things that I’m constantly reminded of is how little they understand about economics and the free market. I had read Von Mises and Rothbard. I had read Ayn Rand about what happens if you artificially try to set your prices too high. The instrument I play is a marginal instrument. If you’re playing piano or drums, okay, you’ve got a job. If you play trombone [like I do], not so much. And if the scale is reasonably priced, well, okay, fine, they’ll hire some trombone players. If the scale’s too high, oh, well, you’re one of the first ones they cut out of the budget. I made a position paper and I tried to persuade my fellow members of the Recording Musicians Association that it was really stupid to keep trying to kick the scale up every year, and they just looked at me and said, thanks for your thoughts…next! So that was that.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

What about you, Marco? Any role in a citizens group [in the past], or do you plan any?

 

Marco den Ouden

Well, it’s very interesting that you should ask, because back in 1979 when two guys came from Toronto and started the Libertarian Foundation, I got active with them, and they developed a little offshoot which was a tax-revolt group. And they had a very interesting name, Human Action to Limit Taxes. And the acronym was HALT. Our logo was a stop sign with the word “halt” on it, and “human action” to limit taxes, of course, based on the title of Ludwig von Mises’s major book. And we had tremendous success. I was the managing editor of their newsletter for a couple of years. It only lasted for two years, and that was for an interesting reason, because all the major principals of that group and of the Libertarian Foundation got persuaded by one of our members that Vancouver would be a prime target in a nuclear holocaust, and that one was imminent, and we’d better move to Australia. So, they all moved en masse to Australia. I couldn’t afford to move to Australia. I wanted to stay in Vancouver. I was married. I couldn’t see moving to Australia at the time at all, so I stayed back here.

They like to build monuments to themselves. And so, HALT decided to take a campaign against building the City Hall.

But in ’79, when we formed the HALT Group, we had one major success. It was not just in British Columbia, we spread it across Canada, and we had a very active branch in Calgary, in Alberta. The local government there wanted to build a brand new City Hall, a very expensive City Hall, because they like to build monuments to themselves. And so, HALT decided to take a campaign against building the City Hall, and they organized a plebiscite. They had all these powerful politicians who wanted their monument against them, but HALT won, and the City Hall was defeated. And, boy, were they mad! They were madder than spiders, I’ll tell you! They just didn’t like that at all. But that was a major victory for us, and that was really exciting. And we campaigned against the light rapid transit here in Vancouver that they were developing. We were opposed to that. Any major government project, we campaigned against. But our big and probably only victory was stopping the City Hall from being built in Calgary.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

That is a great victory. My only indirect activism—and I would classify it [indirect] as either intellectual activity or grassroots activity—I haven’t done a lot of grassroots activity—if you want to call it grassroots, I was involved in the Libertarian Party some years ago and I contributed in some way, shape, or form. I was also employed for a few months with the federal senator of that minor party. But I also gave evidence in the federal court in a case that came my way in my career, which is a competition regulation case. But on the intellectual activity side, The Savvy Street started in November 2014, the inception started in around May, June, it’s now 2024, so, it’s now almost 10 years of intellectual activity, primarily through Savvy Street. There are a few other things I’m doing. I’ve been very little on the grassroot side, but I wouldn’t rule that out if there was a fundamental issue where I thought I could have an impact, getting people together for a petition or whatever it is, to do it. But the intellectual activity is going to be far reaching and that’s sort of my current focus.

 

Roger Bissell

This issue is an important one. It has to do with being provocative versus being subtle. Should libertarians or people who campaign for individual rights and liberty be “flashers” and be deliberately provocative by highlighting issues that might outrage or offend some people in order to get more attention for their ideas? Or on the other side, should libertarians water down their principles to soften the edges a little bit, to make them more palatable and to get more votes? Marco, let’s hear from you first.

 

Marco den Ouden

Well, I’m of two minds on that. There seem to be a lot of people who are in the libertarian movement who are purists. And when Gary Johnson and Bill Weld won the ticket in 2016, they were moderates. They leaned libertarian, but they weren’t hardcore. And that seemed to tick off a lot of the more fundamentalist, I guess you’d call them, libertarians within the party. And even though that ticket got the most votes ever for the Libertarian Party in its history, and three-and-a half percent of the vote, disenchantment with the watered-down policies that they had, led to the paleo-libertarians actually taking over the party.

I think single-issue politics is very powerful, and you can be a flasher with single-issue politics like Mark Emery was with legalized marijuana.

On the flasher issue, on taking strong stands, in my early days, I loved the idea of being provocative. I thought we should be really hardcore. we were talking about what can you do as a citizen group or other things. One of our speakers at the ISIL conference that we had at Whistler was Mark Emery. He’s a Vancouver guy and he has long been a marijuana activist, just a single-issue-promoting [activist], just like our tax group, HALT, was a single issue promoting lower taxes. And we were really hardcore. We actually proposed abolishing taxes altogether. We were very fundamentalist with HALT. But Mark Emery has long been a proponent of legalizing marijuana. He started his cannabis store in Vancouver, and we actually had a meeting there of our libertarian supper club. Mark passed out around a big fatty, and I remember my very conservative lawyer who’s a libertarian, he just passed it by and said, no, I’m not gonna smoke that, but everybody else took a puff.

But you know, I think single-issue politics is very powerful, and you can be a flasher with single-issue politics like Mark Emery was with legalized marijuana. That was his one and only thing. He had been involved in other things before that. He actually got extradited to the United States to serve a five-year prison sentence and then came back again. But while he was serving his prison sentence, he so influenced the prosecuting attorney that prosecuted him in Seattle, that that attorney became an advocate for legalizing marijuana. That’s powerful. And Washington State was one of the very first states to legalize marijuana in the United States. I think Colorado was another. So, Mark had had a tremendous influence with that single issue. For him being a flasher on a controversial issue like that really worked well for him. I’m not sure how it works in general for a whole party, but for single issues it works.

 

Roger Bissell

Vinay?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

I’m completely against flashing for the sake of flashing. I mean, in the previous version of the Libertarian Party in Australia, there was a lot of focus on classically libertarian issues like motorcyclists shouldn’t have to wear helmets, or there was even a side party formed called Smokers’ Party or Smokers’ Rights. I argued with the then Senator, and I said the smokers don’t have any rights. Yes, some people may not like the fact that the government has introduced a law that you cannot smoke indoors, but the rights belong to the pub owner or the establishment owner. The smoker doesn’t have a right to go and light up anywhere. And to me, we are in this situation that Roger mentioned where climate, zero deficits—these are big libertarian issues—a lack of sound money, they are threatening to destroy civilization. And I don’t want to run a campaign based on not having to wear bicycle helmets or being able to smoke [indoors]. It’s just so trivial, even if it does catch attention.

I don’t want to run a campaign based on not having to wear bicycle helmets or being able to smoke [indoors]. It’s just so trivial, even if it does catch attention.

Now, in terms of watering down, what I’m prepared to do, and I’d be happy for the Libertarian Party in America or here to do, is to just focus on the big issues as a platform and not talk about every little issue. I mean, it will be there in your policy directives on your website, but in terms of the media and the slogans, there [should be] just two or three big issues that you’re throwing out there. Responsible fiscally: you say, “Republicans are not, Democrats are not,” and boom! Talk about a few side issues, but not talk about every little thing, not talk about anarchy, not talk about Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable; that’s where I would go.

 

Roger Bissell

Watering down your ideas to me is basically dishonest.

I think it’s most important to me to be clearly understood. And so, I’ve got my feet firmly planted in the middle of the road. I think that if you’re needlessly abrasive or lurid, like—well, one of the examples I’m thinking of is the young lady who ran for mayor of New York City, and she rode on a horse totally naked [flasher]. Or she might have worn a nude-colored body stocking, I’m not sure, but Lady Godiva was the idea. It just makes you appear like an oddball or an attention seeker. And part of the idea is to seek attention, but you need to also appear serious. And, on the other hand, watering down your ideas to me is basically dishonest. If you get votes by fraud, that’s…fraudulent. But in 1980, this was not something that shook up the public, but it shook up the party. Ed Clark was our presidential candidate, and he got on national television, I think it was ABC TV, and he said that libertarians are—wait for it—he said, we are “low-tax liberals.” Man. [Vinay: classical liberals.] He didn’t say classical liberals. He said, “low-tax liberals.” In other words, “liberals,” yeah, they’re for civil liberties and smoking pot and for legalizing this and that, and “low tax” means you’re greedy and stingy and you don’t want to help in the public interest. So, it tried to make us sound good, but it made us sound like something strange.

There are effective techniques and there was a guy back around 1980—he used to go by the name Michael Cloud Emerling, but he dropped his last name and went by Michael Cloud—he wrote a book named Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion: Discover the Keys to Opening Peoples’ Hearts and Minds to Liberty, and in it he talked about the macho-libertarian flash. [Cloud has a follow-up book entitled Unlocking More Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion.]

He also talked about something I like a lot called “cross-dressing.” And he didn’t mean to go out and wear women’s clothes. What he meant was to try to get one side to buy into your criticism of the other side and then show how that criticism also applies to their views. I spoke to a Unitarian church congregation once and I gave a speech called “The Moral Majority versus God.” And they said, boy, this sounds great. He’s going to come out against Jerry Falwell and all the right-wing evangelical preachers, and I proved to them that not only the conservatives, but they, the liberals, were trying to control the government so they could legislate their morality on other people. And it was really quiet, you could hear a pin drop and then the buzz, buzz, buzz, it sounded like I kicked a hornet’s nest. But it worked pretty well. Another technique is where you unpack package deals, and Walter Block does this quite well. He’s an anarcho-capitalist (and I’m not, just for the record), but Walter pointed out that anarchism is commonly understood to mean disorder and chaos and violence. And he showed that governments are quite good at promoting anarchy in this sense, when they fail at their function of defending individual rights. So, the idea is there are plenty of techniques that you can use and get really good leverage if you’re in a debate in a political campaign or if you’re on a radio talk show and they’re trying to stick you with one of these gotcha questions. And if you learn this stuff, then you’ll feel like you have superpowers. You’ll feel much more confident to handle it.

I see by the clock on my computer screen, that we’re just about at the end of our conversation for this evening. And I wanted to ask both of you if there’s any last comment you’d like to make. Marco, go ahead.

 

Marco den Ouden

Well, you mentioned a book about the art of libertarian political persuasion, and I read another book a few years ago, If You Can Keep It by Robin Koerner, and I reviewed it here. He spoke to a Libertarian Party convention around 2016, and he talked about paradigms. If you understand how the other party (your opponent) thinks, you can better leverage your own ideas by taking his point of view but twisting it around to support your point of view. So, it was very interesting. I think there’s a variety of things written on political persuasion. George H. Smith had an excellent article at Libertarianism.org called “How to Argue for Libertarianism.” There are a lot of great ways of leveraging our philosophy and getting our opponents to agree with it.

 

Roger Bissell

Great. Vinay?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

One comment, which is that in Australia there is a “Legalize Marijuana” party, by the way. There are so many one-issue parties, it’s not funny. And back in 2013, the federal Senate ballot paper had over 100 parties across, because it was easier to get into the upper house than the lower house.

One other comment is that objectivists don’t have a standing as yet in this universe. They’re too much of a minority to even effectively form a political party. The attempt has been made, and despite the books that Marco refers to and all the techniques and everything, libertarians, too, everywhere, with the exception of Javier Milei in Argentina, have not managed to get a substantive vote. It’s like 1% in American presidential elections, here and there 5% and 6%. So, it hasn’t worked, and so we do have to work on the long-term and intellectual activism and seize the opportunity for the odd grassroots that really hits people. The pandemic, for instance, has converted some American liberal Democratic voters onto the other side. That’s it for me.

 

Roger Bissell

Okay, great. I want to thank both of you, Vinay Kolhatkar and Marco den Ouden, for helping put together this discussion, and you had a lot of interesting thoughts to share. I was glad to hear them. I’m Roger Bissell, and we will close with the words of the immortal Edward R. Murrow: We wish you all a good night and good luck. Stay free.