Hope Is Not Lost

This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. The most liberty-minded candidate for President from the old parties, Rand Paul, may have suspended his campaign, yet all hope is not lost. The likely nominees on both sides of the authoritarian coin become clearer by the contest, but there are still some torchbearers keeping Liberty at the forefront. Third parties who don’t participate in the primary process will be nominating their candidates for the office in the coming months, but the most exciting prospect comes from a recent Gallup poll. That poll suggests that libertarians currently make up the largest single faction in the American electorate, compared to conservatives, liberals, and populists. The Gallup results aren’t that different from the data we see in the results of the World’s Smallest Political Quiz. While candidates like Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Virgil Goode, and Rocky Anderson didn’t cause any major upsets in 2012, their efforts pushed the non-Democrat/non-Republican vote totals higher. They grew their respective parties’ vote totals and bases of support. Outside of electoral politics, we are seeing free market solutions that disrupt stagnant industries like ride-sharing has with transportation, in-home hosting has with travel accommodations, and crypto-currency has with the monetary system. On top of the free market innovations, we see great things happening with the Free State Project, who just “triggered the move” with the 20,000 signers of their Statement of Intent. Later this month, I’ll be speaking in the Live Free or Die state at The New Hampshire Liberty Forum. I’m excited about their recent milestone, and I look forward to what they accomplish with their new Free Staters. Also this month is the International Students for Liberty Conference, who hosted 1600 students from around the globe last year. We’ll have a booth there for any readers who would like to stop by. Even in the political sphere, we’ll still have Reps. Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, and Tom McClintock, as well as Sen. Rand Paul, who look to have a fairly easy path to re-election in Congress, so things in Washington DC aren’t likely to get worse than they currently stand.