Platform
Progressive Libertarianism is a political concept that encompasses a wide range of issues that other political ideologies do not cover and approaches them in a manner that is consistent with progressive “dictionary defined” ideology in a limited government manner. Below is a loose platform of the general ideas and goals of Progressive Libertarianism. Please note that this is ever changing, so check back often to see if something new has been added or updated.
We don’t expect everyone to fully agree with this platform, as its understandable that there is no, one size fits all ideology, however the platform as a whole is sufficient for starting us on the road to where we want to go. If you find what you feel is a fault with anything in this platform, please raise the subject and demonstrate your objections to a particular stance. We encourage everyone to be open-minded, critical, objective thinkers.
-Reduction of government spending, reducing program and agency funding across the board, focusing on efficiency. Begin paying down debt, with tax reductions across the board as annual budgets are decreased. A cessation of deficit spending and begin the practice of producing surpluses for rainy day funds for disaster relief and other unforeseen problems. The government should be producing a surplus every year and finding ways to reduce costs, though for the past 80 years, we have steadily gone deeper into debt.
-Tax Code Reform, with the income tax replaced by a consumption tax, excluding necessities such as food, utilities, and housing. Businesses would also be subject to a tax on all of their various consumptions as well.
-The abolishment of property taxes with the exception of a tax on transactions. Property passed on in a will would be excluded from this transaction tax. As long as the government collects rent in the form of taxes on property, we cannot truly be free property owners, the basis of liberty.
-Monetary Policy Reform, ending the creation of currency with no actual backing, otherwise known as fiat money, basically the creation of money out of thin air. Government debt and creation of currency with no backing causes the devaluation of our currency and inflation, which in turn slows the growth of the economy, causes job loss, and produces artificial bubbles in the economy. The federal reserve should be audited yearly and interest rates should be left solely to market forces. Our monetary system should be backed by precious metals with each one being independent of the other in basing its value. Alongside our monetary system should be other forms of currency chosen freely by individuals to allow free choice of currency unregulated by government. Fractional reserve lending should be made illegal, as it is a false representation of money.
-Market regulation reform to prevent companies from using dishonest business practices that lead to violent spikes in the market, also caused by loose credit policies of the federal reserve. This will allow the market to run much more efficiently with low regulation that ensures both producer and consumer rights and safety while making the market more transparent.
-End subsidization of businesses in all areas of the market. Government should not be giving money to businesses of any kind and should not support any individual business or group of businesses. Struggling sectors can be helped by decreasing taxes. Services that the government contracts out to the private sector would be excluded. The practice of using no-bid contracts should be ended.
-Focus more on economic relationships and less on political relationships with other countries, as this will help to promote more stability for ourselves by increasing our economy and decreasing foreign threats through friendly trade. Economic prosperity is a key prevention of hostility.
-Reduction of foreign military activities, keeping a relatively strong standing military, only intervening when necessary to protect U.S. interests, not to include U.S. business interests, with each incident being dealt with on a case by case basis. Bases around the world should be closed to eliminate unneeded operating costs and bring soldiers back home to their families where they can be far more productive. We cannot defend the world as just one nation, everyone else should pitch in to help as well. Military spending has to be reduced so that capital is freed up to help grow the economy.
-Emphasis on defensive weapon development in our defense budget, with a working missile shield covering our entire territory being first priority, and not deploy our shield technology in other territories outside of North America.
-Ensure complete and free care is given to our soldiers/veterans. If you fight for our country, you deserve to have free health care provided to you. Our current health care services for our military are sub-par and unacceptable.
-Support the rights of the individual to allow freedom of choice and allow people to be held more accountable to the consequences for their actions. Equal rights across the board for all citizens, with the understanding that equal rights and opportunity don’t guarantee equal success.
-Support the right of free persons to associate or not associate in labor unions, and that an employer has the right to recognize or refuse to recognize a union. We oppose government interference in bargaining, such as compulsory arbitration or imposing an obligation to bargain.
-Affirm the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
-Affirm separation of church and state so as to ensure that tax payer money is not used to fund any sort of religion and that no religion is placed above any other.
-Affirm that neither federal nor state government should be involved with marriage, however realizing this is unlikely to happen. Therefor we support same sex couples receiving the same privileges and protection that all heterosexual couples enjoy under federal power. It would be an injustice for the federal government to allow states the ability to openly discriminate in such a way. Repeal the Defense of Marriage act.
-Acknowledge that private property, even when open to the public, is subject only to the rules of the property owner. Government should not be allowed to regulate what legal activities a person does on private property.
-Repeal of the Patriot Act.
-Repeal of the Military Selective Service Act
-Repeal of affirmative action laws.
-Repeal of hate crime legislation, a crime is a crime no matter the reason for the crime.
-Have social security and medicare become optional programs, with a plan to stabilize the program in order to make it viable. What you pay in is what you get out of it.
-Work to enact legislation that will reduce the overhead of medical companies in order to ensure lower health care costs. Medical patent regulations must be reformed to disallow the re-patenting of drugs that have only been slightly altered, and to decrease the length of the patents. Tort reform is a must in order to decrease the costs of health care as well. Consumers should be able to purchase insurance coverage through any means they deem practical, and should not be required to purchase health insurance. We should be looking for ways to rework our laws and regulations to help the companies cut down on costs before a government program is considered.
-The FDA should be more of a consumer awareness agency and less of a regulatory agency, increasing its effectiveness, however not expanding its power, in order to keep businesses in check to ensure that consumers are receiving quality, adequate information about their products and services. This would mean that instead of restricting the market by barring entry of certain products, the FDA would only have the power to ensure that companies give consumers full information about their product, services, and business practices, and also assist consumers with consumer legal action. It would also have the power to fine companies for not providing adequate information to their consumers.
-Reform of licensing regulations, removing unnecessary licensing requirements, making the licensing optional as a service to the public.
-Abolishment of payroll taxes.
-Secure our borders by increasing our presence with more border patrol agents and national guard units. An expensive fence does not deter people, roving guard and patrol units do. Every day we deport thousands of criminals, just to have them sneak back in and commit more crimes.
-As a proposal to solving the current illegal immigration problems, we advocate these steps in this exact order, securing of the border, deportation of violent criminals and repeat theft offenders, and move to make all illegal immigrants citizens and have them pay fines for breaking immigration laws and prosecuted for committing identity theft. Mass deportation is simply not possible, but once the borders are secured and the illegal immigration problem is solved, we can move on to meaningful immigration reform.
-Put more focus in our backyard as the unrest in Mexico grows and South American countries fall on even harder times, causing problems for the US. The fate of the Americas is the responsibility of the US, our neighbors must be extended a helping hand. With this there is a need for foreign aid reduction and reform, which ensures that our foreign aid is used in a targeted method and ensures our tax dollars are put to effective use. A better form of foreign aid would be for the governments to foster a good environment for private investors by lowering and removing barriers to their respective markets.
-Reform election laws to allow all parties and candidates an equal chance at getting on ballots. Currently most third party and independent candidates must collect twice, and sometimes as much as four times as more signatures than Democrats or Republicans in order to be on a ballot.
-The removal of public campaign financing. If someone is running for an office any kind, they should raise all of their campaign money themselves. Tax payer money should not be used to fund any sort of political activity.
-Term limits for every elected position within government, with term limits for Supreme Court judges as well.
-Education reform with more emphasis on private schooling and modernization of the current schooling system to ensure those who do not have the ability to attend a private school will still have the opportunity to receive a quality education. State-wide universal school vouchers are currently the best solution in moving towards a better education system that will promote competition, increasing the quality of education and give parents more choice in their children’s education. Complete reform or abolishment of the Department of Education must happen in order to decrease the power of what is widely viewed as an unconstitutional program, leaving it only with the power to set minimum curriculum requirements for states in reading/writing, math, and science.
-Hemp legalization to allow hemp products to challenge traditional paper, rubber, nylon, and various other products in the market, providing better quality products all around. Many people mistakenly believe that hemp is a drug, when in fact it is not and was once encouraged by the government to be grown to help supply our military with uniforms and the navy with sails and ropes. The North American Industrial Hemp Council provides some great information pertaining to hemp and its numerous uses http://www.naihc.org/hemp_information/hemp_facts.html
-Drug law reform, making all drugs equally regulated requiring businesses to be licensed to sell them. This would bring them out into the open for education which will help people to make an informed choice should they decide to use a drug. By legalizing and regulating drugs, we deprive illegal drug operations such as street dealers, the drug cartels in Mexico, South America, and the Middle East of their funding, save the lives of our law enforcement officials, lower the cost of law enforcement, increase the efficiency of law enforcement, decrease prison populations and costs, and provide a new booming economic sector that will produce much needed extra tax income, new jobs, increased drug awareness, and help prevent drug addiction and death. This would also do a lot to stabilize Mexico and other countries in which drug cartels operate, and decrease illegal immigration and crime as people are no longer chased from their communities due to violence and bloodshed.
-Prison reform is a must if we are to clean up our justice system. Prison should be a place where a criminal contemplates their crime and pays for it by never wanting to return. Systems should be put in place to have inmates help pay for the costs of their time spent in prison to lower the burden on tax payers. The only luxuries afforded to an inmate should be three cheap square meals a day, books, pencils, and paper. All other contraband should be checked for often and always confiscated. Education programs can be offered that an inmate could repay the costs of after being released from prison. For those that don’t repay their debts, wage garnishment could be an option for reclaiming lost money. Guards caught assisting inmates acquire contraband should be fired. Prison officials that put inmates in harmful or unsanitary conditions should be reprimanded, with the possibility of being fired as well.
-Place more emphasis on charity support to help decrease government funded programs by having a national non-discriminatory database of charities that people can donate to. Charities especially thrive when people are in a consumption tax system rather than an income tax system as people have a vast amount of more control over their money.
-Advocate for welfare-to-work programs that ensures that the people being granted money and services are working to help the system support itself, also expanding programs to help with daycare for children.
-Abolishment of the death penalty in order to ensure no innocent prisoners are put to death. This would also save money in the end, as it currently costs as much as three times more to go through the entire process of putting someone to death. The ultimate punishment someone can receive is not a release from their sentence by death, but to spend the rest of their lives staring at a wall without interaction with anyone else besides the guard that brings them their meals. An innocent person can be let out of jail, they can’t be brought back to life.
-Government energy efficiency and pollution reduction is not only preferable, but demanded, and rightly so. Anywhere within government where there is room to improve energy efficiency, cut down on pollution, and enact recycling programs, reasonable measures should be taken to ensure that this is done. In various areas, this may cost more at first, but over time it will decrease the costs of government and drastically reduce the amount of pollution introduced to the environment through government actions. The government cannot force these practices on others, but can be a leading example of efficiency.
-We as individuals support clean energy such as reliable and safe nuclear power, which in turn can then be used to charge electric fuel cell vehicles. We also support wind, wave, solar, and geothermal energy, however realizing that some of these technologies will not be viable for several decades on a large scale and others are still a ways off. Until we can fully move into “green” energy though, oil and gas reserves here at home must be tapped to decrease our dependence on foreign energy sources.
Thank you for your efforts. I have considered myself a Libertarian since the early 1970’s but usually voted for the Republican candidates. Unfortunately, in general, they have not performed well. I think the Progressive Libertarian party can flourish if it supports the issues listed above but we have to be careful how we state some of our positions. I read on one PLP site that all children under the age of 18 should be temporarily sterilized. This statement could cause the lose of a significant portion of your interested voters. At a minimum, it is not practical and probably not safe.
Hi, always good to hear from fellow Liberty loving people. Thanks for taking an interest in Progressive Libertarianism, though I believe you are a little mistaken about what it is. Progressive Libertarianism is not affiliated with any party and is a concept embraced by people of all political affiliations, whether it be independent or with a party.
Children being sterilized by the government is a gross infringement of civil and human rights and is not something someone from our wings would ever give thought to.
“Have social security and medicare become optional programs, with a plan to stabilize the program in order to make it viable.”
how does this work? We recently saw how private retirement funds, investments and working till later in lfe can go. Do all the right “choice” activities and you can just as easily end up on the street. We are then back to choosing between the elderly being on the street and without health care. Did I misunderstand?
I do agree with most positions here and I also understand we will never agree on every point but this is definately a major one.
Thanks
Its all about choice, and people shouldn’t be forced to pay into these programs if they aren’t interested in participating in them. Some people would prefer to control their own retirement funds, others would rather stick with the government run system. Either way is fine, we just need to get the program straightened out. If you pay into social security, you get back what you put in. There is no risk here, therefor there is no reward as well.
Medicare would also become an optional program, and people could decide for themselves if they want to pay money into medicare as a form of insurance for themselves. Or, you could opt out of the program and not have to pay into it, but also would not receive service from the program down the road.
It would be rare to find many people that fully agree on every point here, but it isn’t uncommon for many to agree with a majority of the positions or at least the reasoning behind the positions.
I understand the concept and in most cases agree. Also there is almost nothing in this world that we can all agree on so I am not looking for a perfect fit. I agree with almost everything I see here.
But this particular issue has come up before. I don’t see the answer as to what do we do with people that put there money into the market and it goes south as we have recently seen. Do we let them die? I am sorry if this seems confontaitional but I am hoping by putting it bluntly I can get an idea as to what replaces atleast minimal safety nets. I am not srguing the point but I have seen this idea on SS and medicare brought up before but I have never seen an answer to the problem of what we do with our elderly.
I also understand I may not find the answer here but I thought I’d ask. My support for this political change and for a form of progressive libertarianism will not be lost if I can’t get an answer here. As I said I have seen this point before but never the solution to what we do exactly if the market fails us and we have the elderly on the street. Yes we need to get the program straightened out. Keeping the politicians from dipping into it would be a great start.
Thanks, Jim
All I can say is that when you manage your own retirement, you accept the risk that comes with investing in the stock market. Not everyone that manages their own retirement funds will invest them in the stock market either. The blunt answer is, there is no safety net, since they chose not to pay into the safety net.
If helping people out that have miss-managed their retirement funds is something that you are deeply concerned about, then I would have to suggest that you find a charity that helps people like this out and donate to it, getting your friends to donate as well. If no such charity exists, you should start one yourself, or find someone willing to start one up if you don’t have the time or ability to do it yourself.
Most of the positions sound good but it is clear that the author(s) lack detailed knowledge of the Constitution and Organic Law. Opinions of what to do to fix the situation are exactly what got us into the mess we are in now. People need to step up to a clear understanding of how the law works, what changes to the Law throughout history were failures and why, and what aspects of the Constitution were destined to fail from the beginning. Once we collectively understand these detailed failures in the law then we can formulate proper corrections to solidify freedom and restrain government to its proper role.
The issues stated here are just issues not actual Law. If you base a movement on what should be, based on individual issues, and not law then you are just going to end up with a newly elected body that legislating opinions instead of representing (to re-present).
We need to first target the 14th amendment of the US constitution to get the ax. If you don’t know what the 14th amendment does right off the top of your head then I have proven my point. We who are aware are trying get everyone to ‘wake up’ as an educated man who has sought the truth of how the government tyranny decended upon us, I find that most who are trying to wake people up have not awoken themselves yet because they have not studied the details of Organic Law, Contract Law, and Constitutional Law and targeted the items that need to fixed.
For instance:
The 14th Amendment makes every human being a corporate commercial entity with the registry of their ‘birth’ and subjects them to government regulation. The US constitution did not give the government any authority to proactively regulate people it only gave the Government the power to regulate commerce. We the people mandated that government would be servants to the people and the only way the government could carry out justice against a human being was when there is an accuser who is accepting personal liability for the accusation. This means that government can ONLY respond to disputes when called into service and given authority by an accuser who becomes liable for the accusation. The 14th amendment took all that away by making us commercial entities subject to the jurisdiction of government regulation.
Do any of those with opinions about what we should do fix things actually know how the 14th amendment was ratified? The answer is that it was ratified unlawfully literally at the end of the barrel of a gun (or the end of a hang mans noose if you really know the details). Does anyone know the case law that was established around the 14th amendment in the 1870s-1890s and all the way up to the present in regards to corporations? It gave corporations rights! I could go on and on about this but my goal here is to give you enough info for you to realize THAT FIXING THINGS IS NOT ABOUT YOUR OPINION! It is about fixing the LAW! Humble yourself before the collectively body of facts that we call history. Go through the painstaking efforts to learn the details so that you can truly ‘wake up’ and let go of your ego. Your ego is what gets in the way of truly fixing things because you are willing to put up your opinion as the answer to ‘fix’ this nightmare. The definition of Enlightment is the letting go of self (aka ego). If you give in to the search for truth then you will begin to realize how little you actually know and then you can really begin to dig into the massive body of facts that exists in our modern world. Only after you have gained a clear picture of the terrible mistakes this country as made over its journey through diligent study can you then bring REAL SOLUTIONS that will result in changes to the LAW that clear to the people and binding to the government.
So while agree with most of the positions laid out I can also see the weakness in the words that are rooted in a well intentioned individual who did not root themselves in law and history. I do not mean to be negative here my intent is to inspire the efforts needed to bind the tyrants with law. Without the detailed knowledge of our history and law the tyrants will be able to decieve you into enslaving yourself to their will and tyranny. This is evident because the whole entire nightmare underway is totally by consent and most do not even realize this because they don’t beat them at their own game. The patriots I know have gone to these depths and now they win EVERY court case ever brought against them ALWAYS without exception. That is because their is institutionalized criminal activitybut you must know how to present this in a court of law. Let go of your ego. Study. Only then can You bring real solutions to this fight!
Really misleading to relate this philosophy to libertarianism. this is just a hodgepodge of policies whoever wrote this is interested in.
non libertarian policies:
-keeping social security/medicare
-reducing but not ending foreign aid
-FDA
-hard / soft drugs
-etc etc etc
Social Security and Medicare are fine as optional programs if the only people that pay for the them are the people that use them.
Foreign aid to impoverished countries in a controlled manner in small amounts is not a hardline Libertarian policy, however it is good policy when we need to help out a friend, especially a neighbor.
The FDA is non-intrusive when it is made into a consumer awareness agency and less of a regulatory agency. The FDA would only have the power to require companies give full notice to potential customers information about their products.
The hard drug / soft drug policy has been changed.
B-
While I agree that law and history are essential to avoiding the mistakes of the past, your arrogance is as dangerous as ignorance. You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar or an expert on the 14th amendment to have a voice about your government….Or did you forget to read that part of law and history?