Libertarianism in Colorado: News Miner 31
With additional notes on "messed up" schools and gay marriage.
Libertarianism in Colorado
City Cast Denver invited me on to discuss the Libertarian Party (alternate link) and movement in Colorado. We discussed some of the ideas of libertarianism, the evils of drug prohibition, the inherent limits of minor-party politics given current election rules, Jared Polis as libertarian-leaning, and other topics.
The released cut is less than half as long as the original discussion. Here are some of the things that were cut:
Libertarians tend to make a lot of the idea of consent and want to base society generally on voluntary, consensual relationships, not coercion.
Libertarians have been at the forefront of advocating gay rights and equality in marriage.
In response to the question about roads and related matters, I imagined a society in which government ran all the grocery stores. Would we then be talking about how we’d all starve to death if we eliminated “public” grocery stores?
David Nolan, a founder of the Libertarian Party, was a Barry Goldwater activist in the 1960s and helped found the Libertarian Party in Colorado in 1971 largely in reaction to Richard Nixon’s imposition of wage and price controls and final repudiation of the gold standard.
Libertarians generally think it’s a bad idea to put all the guns in the hands of agents of the state. Some people on the left agree.
Approval voting (letting voters vote for as many candidates as they want in a race) would solve the “spoiler” problem and help give some minor-party and unaffiliated candidates more traction.
Two candidates who ran as Libertarians this year aren’t really libertarians as I understand the term. Richard Ward calls himself a “libertarian socialist” (whatever that means), while Brian Peotter is more of a religious conservative.
I have argued that, at this point, liberty activists should consider joining the Democratic Party. If Libertarians really want to make a go of it as a party, they should spend their efforts on voting reforms, mainly implementing approval voting.
Certain topics I’d hoped to get into but didn’t have the time.
I usually don’t self-identify as a libertarian any more, for two main reasons. There’s not a central unifying philosophy behind libertarianism, which many libertarians see as a feature rather than a bug. That helps explain why we see such radically diverse strains of libertarianism. Also, given the craziness of many self-identified libertarians, there’s a lot of baggage with that term that I do not wish to carry. All that said, it’s hard to come up with a simple, well-known alternative term that describes my politics. So it’s a bit hard to escape the libertarian label given I’m generally pro-free-market and also “socially liberal.”
I’d wanted to discuss Rick Stanley’s disastrous Libertarian run for U.S. Senate in 2002 but never got to it. I still have a bunch of old articles pertaining to that that I want to get back online sometime. I’ll probably write something more about that soon.
I’ll note here that, the day before we recorded the podcast (which was November 30), I called one of my friends who was long active in the Libertarian Party. He was a little irked that City Cast invited me on to discuss the Libertarian Party, given I left the party and have written some pretty intense criticisms of it. But I thought it was better for them to get a knowledgeable outsider than a cheerleader.
Regarding Polis, I hope people check out my paper, “The Tax and Regulate Reality Behind Governor Polis’s Libertarian Image.”
It is worth noticing that, in many respects, the modern Libertarian Party has become an alt-right troll farm. See Andy Craig’s article, “How the Libertarian Party Became the Reactionary Arm of Trump and Trumpism.”
Below is a photo of Sheriff Bill Masters back when he was a Libertarian. He’s now a Democrat. I recorded a podcast episode with Masters earlier this year.
Public School “System Is Totally Messed Up”
That’s the opinion of Van Schoales, senior policy director at the Keystone Policy Center, as quoted by Erica Breunlin.
However, as a Keystone report notes, charter schools did a little less-badly than other public schools by some measures. The report notes:
37 percent of charter students met or exceeded grade level expectations in English Language Arts compared to 31 percent of third- through eighth-graders in district-run schools.
31 percent of students met or exceeded grade level expectations in math, compared to 27 percent in district-managed schools. . . .
Charter high schools performed less well, according to SAT data, running even with or lagging behind district-run schools on status measures in both ELA and math.
46 percent of charter 11th-graders met or exceeded academic grade level expectations on the SAT English Language Arts test, while 50 percent of students in district-run schools met or exceeded grade level expectations. In math, just a third of 11th grade students in both charter and district-managed schools met or exceeded grade level expectations. . . .
Charter schools tended to earn higher ratings on the state accountability system in 2022, they saw larger proportions of students meeting or exceeding grade-level expectations, and higher academic growth, particularly for low-income students, when compared to district-managed schools.
Why this is the case merits closer examination, but flexibility and nimbleness likely played a significant role, allowing charters to pivot more quickly.
While this report looks at statewide trends, there is wide variation in charter performance across the state, as well as in the demographics of students served. For example, less than 40% of charter high school students in Aurora are at or above benchmarks in literacy compared to over 80% in Jefferson County.
These are interesting findings, but I’m not seeing any effort here to try to account for the possible effect of charter schools attracting more-active parents. The counterfactual is this: If all the charter-school students instead had attended the regular district schools, would their performance still have been comparably higher? That’s hard to know.
The broader point remains: With important exceptions, Colorado schools overall are doing a horrible job.
Respect for Marriage Act
Not surprisingly, Jeff Hunt and the Centennial Institute oppose the Respect for Marriage Act, on grounds that it allegedly threatens religious liberty. The Heritage Foundation insists that the “proper understanding of marriage” precludes gay marriage; I find the organization’s claims that the Act threatens religious liberty unconvincing.
Meanwhile, in a response to a Tweet that Hunt then deleted, Jared Polis wrote:
It’s a good idea to ensure faiths that sanction same sex and interracial marriage have their religious freedom protected too. No faith is forced to perform an interracial or same-sex marriage, but many faiths allow both, and some couples also opt for civil marriage. Love is love.
The Cato Institute’s Walter Olson shares Polis’s view. He writes:
[The Act] forbid[s] states from denying full faith and credit for purposes of state action to marriages lawfully contracted in other states on the basis of individuals’ sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin. It advances an obviously legitimate interest—shoring up the reasonable reliance interests of families that cross state lines—and does so in a way that is in accord with the Constitution, a question Congress should ask itself with every enactment. . . . The bill is also carefully drawn to attend to conscience and religious liberty concerns.