Letters to the editor – in the old-fashioned, inefficient, uneconomical,
slow and boring government way. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, file)
Two libertarians, one with the idea and one with the response, have teamed up to create the Letters-To-the-Editor or LTE Project, a website where anyone can post "interesting letters to the editor" that cry out for a reasoned libertarian response.
To make the website work, both readers and writers are needed.
So, are you a reader?
Specifically, are you a libertarian reader who has surfed to a letters-to-the-editor page of one of the nation's online newspapers and read an opinion that extols the virtues of some collectivist-statist-socialist agenda that makes you want to mash your mouse against your flatscreen?
Or maybe you've read a rational letter only to see it trashed by the BigGov anti-freedom groupthink minions who wouldn't recognize reality if it bit them in the brain?
And you just don't have the time or the flair to write a pithy riposte.
So maybe you're a writer?
Specifically, are you a libertarian with the chops and the writing chutzpah and a hunger for activism that has asked the question, "What can I do?"
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Self-described libertarian anarchist Kent McManigal, the Albuquerque Libertarian Examiner, a frequent contributor to The Libertarian Enterprise, and a former presidential candidate, asked the "What can I do?" question back in October.
His question wasn't rhetorical.
"There are a lot of times that a letter to the editor will be published," McManigal wrote, "and the statists immediately descend in droves to ridicule the sensible voice under a flood of insults and "Arguments from Apocalypse."
Maybe other letter writers will rally in defense of the "reasonable voice" but as often as not the writer will be intimidated into silence by an onslaught of politically "progressive" naysayers.
"That shouldn't be allowed to happen", McManigal vowed.
His idea was a website where anyone could submit letters or responses to letters on the internet that were written by apologists for coercive government, and any libertarian could then go to that website and read the letters and respond to them from the freedom perspective.
Or, conversely, libertarian letters in need of support could be posted and likeminded people could come to their rescue.
Tom Knapp launches the
LTE Project – "interested
libertarians can respond -
by pillorying a bad idea,
piling on with a good one,
whatever." (photo by
Daniel Millay/courtesy of
Thomas L. Knapp)
Up stepped Thomas L. Knapp, a serial activist best known for his website Rational Review, for his Freedom News Daily "summary of news of interest to freedom lovers" published on the ISIL website, and for the recently established Libertarian Press Club.
Knapp created the LTE Project web page and posted a sampling of letters in need of response.
One writer, for example, claims that the reason America's healthcare is more expensive than socialist countries is because "those other ’socialist’ countries don’t have for-profit systems.”
Do profits make healthcare more expensive, libertarians, or is it government intrusion into the once-free marketplace that up the ante?
Is Obama's decision to try Khalid Shakh Mohammed in a court of law "a slap in the face to every American and especially the families of the victims of 911” or, as another letter writer said, "America’s beliefs in freedom, fairness and justice require us to fully embrace the harsh inconvenience of the rule of law.”
Which is the libertarian here; which view needs repudiation and which needs support?
The battle cry for libertarian letter writers might be: "Let no anti-freedom idea go unchallenged - Let no libertarian principle go unsupported!"
Libertarian contributors wanted! Have article ideas? Photos? News tips? News releases?
Join the team here!
Comments
FWIW
For the most part, all debates are ultimately reducible to but two primary identifiers.
Physics--relative to energy, matter, motion and force and the very basis from which logic is derived, and
Philosophy--vaguely defined in one manner as the rational investigation of the truth of being, knowledge and conduct…that is to say most relative to certain aspects of human thought and behavior.
While all activity is, of course, governed by the so-called ‘laws’ of physics, the majority of debates are most closely associated with aspects of philosophy.
In a Nation founded on the basis of the philosophical notion of individual ‘rights’--without regard to the topic or subject of the debate itself, the idea of 'rights' is most always to be found as part of the core issue.
The simple fact of the matter is, few people can successfully provide a satisfactory definition for the word ‘rights’ itself, thus most debates about 'rights', are essentially arguments between two fools.
Adding one more layer here under the heading of FWIW, America’s most unique form of government embodied as that of a Constitutional Republic has been morphed to such an extent that one is now hard-pressed to determine what part of the limitations imposed under the terms and agreements specified in legally binding contracts called ‘Constitutions’,--that is, compacts between Govern-ment and the governed are still recognizable at all.
Beyond the customary means of rule by all ‘governments’--that is coercion, threats and use of physical force--the primary source by which our governments continue to empower themselves is confiscatory taxation.
Until the taxation structure is revised, the people can expect only more subjugation and further destruction of the Republic.
Argue as one might from a 'libertarian' position with the statists in or out of gov't, the fact is such that if one does not have control over the fruits of one's own labor, one has no actual 'rights'.
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