LPWS Platform Needs Major Surgery

by Tom Stahl

There will be a Libertarian Party platform committee meeting from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM at the Burien Public Library on January 18, 1997. The platform committee meeting will immediately follow the Libertarian Party state executive committee meeting held in the same room. All interested party members are invited to attend and express their ideas.

The theme of the meeting will be "Putting The Platform On A Diet" in order to remove some of the unpopular dead weight out of the platform that has doomed our candidates and our party to failure for 25 years. The national Libertarian Party convention this past July took the long overdue step of deleting the impractical and obnoxious Children's Rights plank from the national platform. I suggest that we do the same with our state platform.

I also suggest that we delete the Open Borders/Open Immigration plank. This plank is a formula for disaster. Our government has created a hell overseas by supporting oppressive dictators abroad and has created a giant welfare magnet here at home.

With that kind of carrot-and-stick dynamic at work in the world, throwing open our borders will only encourage one billion poor people to make a beeline straight for our shores to overwhelm our infrastructure. Besides, open borders is about the least popular stand any candidate could ever take. If our goal as a party is to take office and restore the Bill of Rights we will never have any hope of doing it with open borders in our platform.

We should also delete that portion of our Land Ownership plank that calls for selling off the national parks to developers. This portion of the Land Ownership plank has nothing to do with restoring freedom and invites the destruction of our last few remaining treasures of natural beauty and is another big loser with the voters.

My preference is that we should abolish all 35 planks of the present Issues Section of our platform and replace them with a short, simple, concise, and above all, popular libertarian platform that we can run on and win on. We should adopt something like the Washington State Libertarian Party Program.

We have made a grave mistake over the years by pushing a platform containing a minefield of obnoxious planks that the majority of voters can never go for all at once. This has kept us impotent for 25 years. We should instead take our most popular libertarian positions that will actually bring a large measure of freedom if implemented right now, put them together as our new platform, then run on them and win on them.

We should take a lesson from history and remember that the fascists and socialists who started to take over the two major parties and the country over 80 years ago did not begin by publishing a giant platform detailing all of the rights that they intended to take away from Americans. Instead, they went from one popular statist issue to the next winning the country one step at a time until now they have created a police state. We need to adopt the same method in reverse. We need to win one popular and practical freedom issue at a time until we have restored a free Republic.

In order to become the majority party we must become a big tent that welcomes, and puts to work for liberty, every freedom-loving American. We must put aside the differences we have with our natural allies, and put aside most of our present platform planks, and distill our message down to a few essential freedom goals that the majority of voters can agree with.

We should focus on the popular libertarian stands that the voters already like—-such as restoration of the Bill of Rights, referendum of all new or increased taxes to a vote of the people, and fully informed juries—-and we should avoid giving our opponents and establishment journalists ammunition from our platform which they can use to detract from our inherently immense popular appeal. If the voters come to view the Libertarian Party as the party of liberty, prosperity, and peace then it will become the majority party.

A general statement of our principles (preferably composed of excerpts from the Declaration of Independence) is good and necessary to keep us anchored to the concept of liberty, but the present Issues Section of the platform should be abolished and retired to archives. We should pick a few specific libertarian issues that we know are popular with the people and run on those.

If there is doubt about what libertarian issues are most popular with the people then we should do some polling and find out. The issues we pick for our new platform may not be our personal favorites but they must be ones that we can win on and that will restore a great measure of liberty to our society.

I urge you to attend the platform committee meeting on January 18, 1997 and express your ideas.

Tom Stahl is LPWS Platform Chair