Ah; Liberty is a cruel mistress... or, at least the Libertarian Party is. More like, a cruel hermaphrodite humanist, feminist mistress. And that's the basis of my love/hate relationship with the Party. Do I think the LP is a cute li'l marginal party doomed to only occasionally rise to prominence by splitting the votes of the other two Major Parties? Sure I do! Even they do!

Could they be more? I feel they could — but they're not going to change their platform enough to capture a wider base. And as the Aging Hippies die off, their base is doomed to shrink, unless they can come up with a new source of atheistic humanists opposed to tyranny (it's too bad they oppose tyranny, or they'd have no shortage of atheistic humanists to sign up).

And so: from the Libertarian Platform... you can see right away that — much like come Constitutionalists from Days of Yore — Libertarians value a teensy governmental influence and massive individual liberty. Awright!

Adopted in Convention, July 2, 2006, Portland Oregon

(Portland, Oregon? Uh, oh... can any good thing come out of Portland?)

As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others.

Okay; I can support this. I read it, "that a person can benefit others, but by volunteering to sacrifice, and not under compunction," and that makes sense to me.

"All individuals are sovereign over their own lives" is pretty, but sounds fairly boilerplate, especially when one begins to consider (for over 30 seconds) how that would work out in a real-life situation involving more than, say, one person.

It's like that "land where dreams come true" in C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. After about 30 seconds of thought, the sailors row like mad to get away from it.

We believe that respect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free and prosperous world, that force and fraud must be banished from human relationships, and that only through freedom can peace and prosperity be realized.

...um... hello? ... any one going to mention any basis for human rights? Any basis for the idea that force and fraud are universally bad things? Am I supposed to take your word for it? Does this make you more moral than me? What if I think that force is a good thing?

(with such a line of questioning, you can sometimes cause atheistic humanists to actually start spinning in a circle — try it! It's fun!)

Consequently, we defend each person's right to engage in any activity that is peaceful and honest,

"honest?" ... hmm ... that opens the door to a Whole New World of activities! What could I do, with a personal credo that found "peaceful and honest" a necessary and sufficient morale?

and welcome the diversity that freedom brings. The world we seek to build is one where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, without interference from government or any authoritarian power.

Stop, stopstopstopstopstopstop! Aren't we getting just a little TOO anarchistic here? A tad? And — I can say this from years of painful experience — that whole "welcome the diversity" bit, and the "free to follow their dreams in their own ways" bit are just WAAAY to 1968 Californian to be applied in 2006, doncha think?

"without interference from government or any authoritarian power" suggests that these folk think authority itself is a bad thing. They are, of course, totally wrong if that is the case.

In the following pages we have set forth our basic principles and enumerated various policy stands derived from those principles.

These specific policies are not our goal, however. Our goal is nothing more nor less than a world set free in our lifetime, and it is to this end that we take these stands.

A person like me looks at this and says, "well, okay; world freedom! I can live with that!" And, to a large extent, I am personally willing to take the bad with the good when it comes to world personal freedom (see later notes on platform planks of the LP).

But this document just reads... like a convention platform drafted in a little too much of a hurry, by people who haven't thought all this stuff through.

But — at least it's a different approach than plan A (Democratic Party) and plan B (Republican Party). I do like a little diversity...

And then I realize the irony of a document setting forth a mass plan to achieve personal liberty, and I am brought up short again.

Well - what are the principles of the Libertarian Party? Let's find out!