Tom Kawczynski - Off the Record

At this time of the year, in celebration of the Halloween theme, we could talk about handing out treats for free, but I think that topic has been covered enough.  Instead, let's focus on some tricks and scare tactics.

I'm tired of people using fear as a motivator.  I feel like half our political debate, if not more, is motivated solely by the fear of what will happen if something isn't prevented.  As a libertarian minded person, I know this feeling all too well, but I'd expect more from people out there who are supposed to be our leaders and policy makers.

So here's my Halloween wish:  say what you support and why you support it.  For instance, were I running for an office, you would hear a constant drumbeat about the importance of liberty, the dangers of giving government the authority to make decisions over your life, and a discussion of policies from that philosophical grounding.  I would not be spending my time hammering the fear card because all that does is make governing impossible.  Win on ideas and people will follow.

I will, however, be sure to describe why the system makes people that way.  It's a shame.

Anyway, I want to wish all my readers a happy and safe holiday.

Although I've had several blogs through the course of the last few years, this one has certainly been the least personal of any that I have written.  As I have become more involved in public life, I have come to believe that is a necessity; that I limit what I share lest that be used in an unfair way against me.  That said, I want to take one post here to talk about my feelings.

I am someone who works very hard to find a way to a better future that is sometimes difficult to see.  When you advocate for liberty, sometimes, it is hard to grasp what it is you are actually asking.  The best metaphor I can think of is that liberty is like air, no one seems to think about that much until it thins, until breathing becomes difficult, or until it is gone and you can only choke when you try to inhale.

Sometimes, I feel like I am selling hot air.  There are times when my words are difficult to share because I'm really trying to promote an idea.  Where others promise tangible rewards, I only am able to offer this idea of freedom.  I think it more precious than anything that any program could possibly offer, but not everyone sees it that way.  Not everyone sees that as the price you pay when you let someone else make a decision.  And honestly, it isn't always so black and white in this world.

For all that, I know to my core that this is right.  I imagine what the future will be, and what will be the foundation of who we are as people.  I think of myself.  I want a world, terrible as it can sometimes be, where I have the chance to determine my own destiny, explore my own ideas, express my own personality, and shape a life for my family based upon the strength of my will, reason of my ideas, emotion of my heart, and imagination of my soul.  I am willing to give up easy for good.  Even if you could have everything paid for and we wouldn't go bankrupt, it wouldn't matter, because it didn't have a price.  We invested nothing.

So, the future.  My values never change; I just become stronger and clearer in my expression and expectation.  Perhaps I become more radical, because I feel principle matters more than pragmatism.  You can compromise on policy, but not on belief.  That is where people lose themselves.

I have a few projects.  I will continue working to build a media that exposes corruption.  People deserve to know what happens in their country, what the relationships are between candidates, campaign finance, contractors, and parties.  No turning a blind eye, and no accepting what should not happen.

It's a new world, but to find independence, one must be willing to independent, and to walk the long road with their head held high even when the end is clearly nowhere in sight.

I am often amused by irony.  For as much as people who are on the political right like to complain about learned helplessness and dependency on systems as things that people should overcome, their attitude when it comes to facing the truth about political parties can be downright sheepish.

It is one thing for a person to stand loyally by a party that they feel accurately represents the vast majority of their views.  I get that.  But, to argue that one needs to remain with a party because the primary motivation is fear of what might succeed should the inadequate party fail in its efforts strikes me as a sorry way to be involved in politics.  I know I am not the only one who finds the idea of defensive voting loathsome.

We live in a republic where we can vote.  We, through no force greater than ourselves, have the ability to remove and replace any official we choose through voting.  We choose who is and is not viable.  We can ignore the media, and we can ignore the parties.  We can remember that America was not built by people who said what was sensible, but rather by people who said what was just.

If your goal is to slow the expansion of government, then that is all you can hope to succeed in achieving.  But if your goal is to create something different, then you must realize that you will have to think and act differently.  You need to aspire to more and ask yourself, what do you want?

I ask myself these questions too.  I am willing to lose for what is right rather than win for what is wrong.  But, I will not be silent, and I think neither should any of you.

With good reason, libertarianism is seen as a philosophy that centers around individual liberty as the only ethical foundation upon which a society may be built.  The central premise is that unless you have individual choice governing the relationships between people and whatever institutions or arrangements they create, a coercive act such as the use of force must be inserted to compel the acceptance of any unwilling party.  More simply, either force or the threat of force is used to create any other society.

Thanks to this philosophy, doctrinaire libertarians always revert back to individual liberty as the highest aspiration in their political goals and philosophies.  Many believe that if people simply recognized that they have their liberty as a natural right, respecting it both for themselves and others, then we would have a more just society.  I agree with this premise, though I think it unlikely to happen or to be as complete as they think in the absence of one key factor:  prevention of the centralization of power.

The old saw is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  In this imperfect world where we don't have people acting simply for the interests of each individual, ranging from the petty tyrants who seek control through force, or the most kind hearted idealists, seeking to create their vision of utopia, they all share the need to create institutions that can impose their will on others to succeed.  To the extent they have greater legal, financial, moral, or any other authority, especially with respect to the other edifices in a given society, they can achieve this end.

This leads me to my next thought in applying libertarian ideals in a pragmatic way.  While recognizing that individual liberty should be protected to the utmost possibility, said pragmatist can see that without the prevention of centralization of power that the thought of liberty is likely to be subsumed to the power of another agenda.  From this assertion, I begin to draw the conclusion that those who would defend liberty will recognize there are times when that absolute must be compromised in order to prevent such a nexus of power from coming into being.

The founders understood this clearly which is why there are so many levels of division in the American government, between state and federal, between chambers, and between competing interests.  Pluralism is healthy, so long as it is sincere, and no interest (or collection of interests) can gain monopolistic control over the agenda.  This means standing opposed to any state that rules by fiat, against corporations that would use the state to simply advance only their agenda, against labor if it would reappropriate assets, and against anyone seeking compulsion through force without compromise.  It does not mean that any of these interests, inherently, are bad.  But, it means that if the balance between them ever falters, then that is when the subtle slide into authoritarianism begins.

I do not like class arguments as I find them inherently limiting, but people accept these identities and thus validate them.  It makes them relevant for this illustration of how a nation can quickly become authoritarian.  Let me draw up two examples, using government, workers, and business as our actors.  In each case, government serves only to advance the interest of the strongest entity, which ends up being true for financial and political reasons in fact.  If you have a strong relationship between government and workers, you end up with a state where they begin to determine the nature of business, vote for reappropriation of assets, and use the laws to take money from others.  If you have a strong relationship between government and business, tax money is reappropriated in terms of contracts, where government begins to serve as the force for the business interest with little care for either the labor force or end users.    An interesting thing happens when both have a strong relationship with government; when the government is large, what happens is the bureaucracy tries to satisfy the interest of both.   Only when the strong relationship is between labor and industry, in the presence of constrained government, is there balance achieved whereby these extremes can be avoided.

It is why I find myself supporting many arrangements that might limit liberty in an absolute sense, but that I believe bring necessary and appropriate balance.  I would not want any group to dictate our future, so I support both sides and the negotiation between them.  Labor, through unions and other assemblies, serves a good purpose in being a negotiator for the interests of the works against the profit motive of the corporation.  Industry, through taking labor and fashioning it into something productive, should be encouraged to innovate and to compete, but not be able to simply monopolize and dictate.  Government, ideally, should just be there to make sure no one dominates anyone unfairly in the society, as defender of liberty, but also wary of the corruption that come from any single body, group, or entity becoming larger enough to coerce the state into growing into something more.

This was the failing of the past, and it is the fight for the future.  Liberty requires us to recognize those entities that have an interest in using the state to force policy on us, and to make sure they are not only removed, but also that their counterpoint is found and set into balance.  Otherwise, a battle might be won but the war will be lost.  Centralization of power is the greatest single threat to human liberty, and with the advent of new technology, the possibility actually exists to have a state that can dictate more aspects of our lives than ever before.  That is what must be prevented.

I think my days of being a Republican are coming to an end.  There are a few reasons for this, but an analogy first:  Sometimes, you find yourself liking a team where maybe the franchise isn't your favorite, but there are some players you admire.  At this point, that is a fair description of how I feel about the Republicans, where I have many friends, but I am coming to see that the party itself is as much the issue as anything.

The system is broken.  We live in a nation where people care as much about who is saying something as what is being said.  Politicians are separated by the people they are supposed to represent behind layers of bureaucrats, lobbyists, functionaries, aides, and donors.  Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, this is equally true and to my mind of thinking, it is equally wrong.

People join parties because they expect a certain set of policy views to be adopted upon successful election.  Leaving aside for the moment whether or not I think blanket platforms are a good idea, the one thing I have certainly observed is that people are not getting what they voted for from either side.

On the Republican side, the national committees for both the House and Senate, recognizing that people are unhappy with a Democratic government controlling all branches of the government, know basically any Republican can win and they are choosing the most inoffensive, unencumbered by ideas, system hacks that they can find.  With contempt for the grassroots that is fueling this possibility, the Beltway insiders rely upon fear for the other party to drive desperate voters to more of the same.

Even Democrats must be disappointed.  Obama was elected with the promise of many things, of being a transformational candidate, but what is the reality:  He is someone who has supported massive federal spending, much of it going to huge corporations, and looks clueless in handling a major war abroad that continues to spiral out of control.  This may sound like heresy to some, but how different is that really than what the much reviled "Dubya" was doing?

To my eyes, not much.  The reason for this is that money and the entrenched interests that can afford to populate K Street run this nation with little regard for the people who elect officials, because they know they can.  They know that Democrats will vote out of fear of Republicans, and vice-versa, but they get what they want, running off with the bank while we tear ourselves apart as a nation over social issues.

If we are to survive, I believe this must change.  I know that neither party has the heart to do, but I hope that we find a way as people to make something better, and to fix this system.  I do not believe the people involved are all bad (though there are some), but rather that it is a self-perpetuating parasite that needs to be demolished.

In the weeks ahead, I will share some of my ideas about how this could happen.

Crime and punishment is the theme of this blog entry.  It isn't something that I usually write about, but I find that working for the Courts and having daily exposure to these issues heavily impacts my opinion.

I've learned people are surprisingly vengeful.  The thought exists and persists that criminals cannot change, and should continue to be viewed suspiciously.  I agree that when people commit a violation of the laws that they should serve whatever appointed sentence is issued, but I also think that having done their time, that is where it should end.  It doesn't, and we consign people to a perpetual underclass based on what could be a mistake.

I believe different offenses have different values.  There is a substantially different character behind someone busted for smoking some weed and someone guilty of a violent crime.  We have a culture that can't decide if we're punishing or rehabilitiating so we do a little of both and none of either.  I think that jail is appropriate for people who have shown themselves unable to peacefully co-exist in our society.  For most other offenses, I think we're better served seeking restorative justice or leaving things well enough alone.

There are many instances where I think the state has offenses because it is not able to tax or keep a monopoly on a financial relationship, and I think of these as immaterial.  Theft is one thing, but when your only offense is to provide a financial challenge, that isn't an offense.  It's an over-reaching state.  I feel that way about most drug crimes also.  So long as what you are doing is not hurting anyone else, why should taxpayers pay tens of thousands of dollars per year just to tell you what you can and cannot use.  With hard drugs, I can understand the argument, but with marijuana it just becomes insane and wasteful.

I believe in restorative justice.  If you send people to an environment that is full of criminals, you invariably get the worst of the lot as the exemplars.  Instead of paying to have people sit in a room, have them pay for their actions against society by cleaning a road, helping some students, or making a positive difference that benefits the community instead of having a cost.  We all benefit from that.

But people believe criminals are guilty and should be punished, until they become one themselves.  But no one listens, because they deserve what they get, right?

People deserve the opportunity to restore their lives, to live as they choose so long as they don't hinder others, and though it may be unpopular to say this, I include those who were convicted and who have made mistakes as having the same chance to create a better tomorrow for themselves, save for those who have clearly demonstrated they are unable to do so without resorting to violence and the endangerment of others.

Whether it is the media who constantly drums up support for their anointed favorites, or the parties themselves, demonizing those who don't fit both within their ranks and without, I find myself wondering where the arguments I want to hear will emerge.  Is there anyone willing to donate for sanity?

The internet is a game changer.  The potential exists for any citizen, armed only with knowledge, desire, and effort, to make a difference.  While most of the internet is virtual graffiti, the entertaining and only sometimes appropriate ramblings of those who want to make a point to no one in particular (and I cherish this!), there are a few places where people can actually learn something.  We find facts, reason, and evidence about what is happening, about what isn't reported, and the chance for we citizens to learn about our republic.  We need more of these sources, and I salute the people I know who work hard to make that happen.

I believe these resources to be most vital, and my own efforts run in a similar vein.  I'm excited to be working with people who share a vision based upon ideas instead of insults, and facts instead of empty rhetoric.  It is the first and necessary step in building a strong and united voice for the liberty movement.  We do not represent any one view, but rather a different way of looking at things, one that people don't hear in the mainstream press or television outlets.

People only can make good decisions with good information.  Making sure you share the things you learn with others, using your own critical judgment as a guide to what is and is not true, is the most important thing each individual can do to make a difference.  Take a few minutes, argue if necessary, and share what you know.  It matters more than you can imagine.

Politics is full of what you might call "Gotcha!" situations.  The premise is simple:  you find someone who holds a certain principled belief, and then you present them with a situation that challenges that belief, no matter how improbable it might be, in an effort to make that way of thinking look foolish.  An example commonly used, for instance, is when people ask people who are opposed to abortion what should be permissible in the case of rape.  It is a fair and hard question, but in most political situations, the people asking these things care less for the answer than in trying to score points for their view by picking the worst case scenario of the opposite view.

Knowing that, the question itself is an interesting one and is an example of a moral dilemma.  The most interesting questions are often the most controversial as we find ourselves judging a situation where two (or more) deeply held beliefs come into conflict with one another.  We have the life of an innocent victim that has come into being through the perpetration of a heinous crime.  We have the liberty of a woman who did absolutely nothing wrong and her own free will to consider.  We have a quandry, and these questions are the ones where we will always fight and have no clear answer as individuals.  Yet, they demand consideration.

I started thinking about this the other day when I was posed a similar question, and I want to offer my own framework for how I consider these dilemmas, in which I've discovered my three core personal values for how we should regard one another:  life, liberty, and property.  They are certainly not unique, but I don't know how often we really think about their consequences, so I am showing why these matter, in that order, in helping us answer hard questions in our own lives.

1. Life - Without life, nothing else is possible, and to be able to exist is the most basic and fundamental right I can imagine.  It is that which we should defend most dearly, in all situations.
2. Liberty - Liberty is truly nothing more than the freedom of thought, and the freedom of action to pursue the logical consequences of that thought.  So long as this does not impinge upon the life or the rights of others to their own liberties, I believe this must be our second value.
3. Property - Property means that if you apply your thoughts and effort toward a process or a material, that you can gain possession and have recognition of something as being uniquely your own.  Whether the property is intellectual, such as an idea, material, such as land, the basic principle remains that you should have ownership of that which results from your labor and innovation.

I take a minimalist view of government, in that I believe it is the responsibility of people to create opportunities for themselves, and that it is our shared goal to ensure that government, the state, or any other action does not prevent us from having the freedom to be, to think, or create.  That might make it overly simple, but my argument is that without these, we have nothing.

With them, we have a chance to live with one another, and to answer our challenging questions.  To those who would think otherwise, my question to you, is upon what basis do you construct your own beliefs, in fairness to others, and giving them the same privileges you would probably reserve for your own thoughts.

Looking at our difficult scenario from above, you should already know my answer from the comments above.  Although I hold the rights of any person dear and find it abhorrent that their liberties were violated, to punish the life of someone who was not directly responsible for the action strikes me as unjust.  I freely admit that I value life , though uniquely so, above freedom of thought and action, so I will argue passionately for the unborn, though I believe there are two victims here.

There are so many ironies in politics.  To explain them all would be the sum of human history, and the parts that aren't recorded to boot.

Today, I find myself thinking about the disconnect that is observed between what people say they want and how they behave.  I'm thinking of party affiliations and voting habits, and how people claim to want choices and to be open-minded, but how they reliably pull one lever or the other without really knowing the choice before them.

It has left me with a question that I continue to ponder.  I wonder who would support who.  More specifically, I wonder if members of a particular party are more or less likely to consider voting across party lines for a member of the other major party?  For an independent?  For a third party candidate?

I know there isn't one straight answer to this but here is what I suspect to be true.  I believe that Democrats are most likely to remain true to their party and vote straight Democratic, will almost never vote for a Republican, and rarely vote for Independents.  I believe Republicans are slightly more likely to vote a Democrat, more likely than that to stay home, and sometimes vote for Independents.  Lastly, I believe Independents are what they say they are, and vote differently each election.

I don't know if I'm correct, but I wonder.  I often think of ways to make elections about ideas rather than parties because where an idea originates means far less to me than the thought itself.  Having the right party is just like having a car to get you there.

Would it be impolitic to admit that parties irritate me sometimes?

I work actively within the Republican Party to get things done, but I will confess that there are many times when this is hard because I find myself in alliance with people who do not share my beliefs.  A certain level of maturity helps me to see that this is an inherent part of the process, no matter where I locate myself politically, but I find that I am not necessarily the best guy at working within boundaries that I set for myself.

I'm a Republican with a little "r" because even though I support a platform of limited government, the party too often ignores this once elected.  I'm a libertarian with a little "l" because I believe in the ideas that people should be free with their lifestyles and their finances, but that we don't need a million smaller parties.  Frankly, we don't need any parties.

What we need are principled people speaking about issues from a personal understanding based upon a coherent worldview.  I understand why it is popular for the political classes to break down each issue, picking whatever side might be most convenient at a moment, but thid is why our government is so confused and a big reason why our nation finds itself deep in debt.  I respect people who have beliefs that make sense to me, because whether I support them or not, I know where they stand.

I work to be that person myself, to make my party behave that way, and convince others why this is the right way.  It isn't always easy, but I have found myself as a remarkable animal:  a politician with a clean conscience.