Hey Chicken,
I was just thinking some more about our brief conversation this afternoon. Regarding my taking issue with government forcing people to fund candidates for office (aka "public financing"), you said you believe in libertarian ideas, but you think it's hopeless and that we're stuck with the society we have now. I can accept you taking the taxpayers' money for your campaign as a tactical move, while realizing the money shouldn't be offered in the first place, although it's not what I would do. I can respect your frank admission that you don't have any good solutions for how to move us from here to there. But what I can't accept is an unwillingness to even *try*. Even if you think it's hopeless to achieve a truly libertarian society, surely you don't believe it's hopeless to even move in the *direction* of more freedom (i.e. reduce taxes, increase civil liberties, etc.)?
I mean you appear to believe that the cause of making SF a more art-friendly city is not hopeless, since making that happen seems to be the central theme of your campaign. If we can make the city more *art-friendly*, why can't we make it more *freedom-friendly*? It's hard for me to come up with a good Libertarian rationale for supporting a candidate who thinks it's impossible to implement any of the libertarian agenda (and therefore presumably isn't going to make an effort to implement it), even if that person is in full philosophical agreement with us on the desirability of the agenda.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not stating as fact that you aren't going to make any effort to implement libertarian ideas. I'm strongly hoping you'll tell me otherwise. Hell, I'm even open to a candidate who says he can't win and thus won't lift a finger for freedom if elected, so long as he commits to speaking out strongly for freedom on the campaign trail the way you did when you told people what's wrong with "universal" health care during your debate with Josh Wolf. On the other hand, the Guardian quotes you as saying that if elected you would hire people like Quintin Mecke and Ahimsa Sumchai -- both of whom I'm pretty sure support government-run health care and lots of other anti-freedom policies -- to run the city. That probably got you their third-place endorsement -- congratulations, I guess. It's the most consideration a libertarian candidate is likely to get from that paper any time soon, and I can't help but be amused at what looks like a shallow attempt by Tim Redmond & company to curry favor with your somewhat apolitical constituency. But if they endorsed you because they correctly deduced that in practice your candidacy is going to be more of a force for leftism than for libertarianism, then the joke is on *us* if *we* support you.
What can you sincerely tell us to assuage these concerns? I'll let folks know what you say in response.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Vice Chair, Libertarian Party of San Francisco