Well, it’s worth noting that part of the vision of the slate I’m running with is to separate the roles of Chair and chief administrator, making the Chair primarily an ideological spokesperson rather than a party manager — and also to substitute online meetings for in-person meetings in most cases. So the trade-off is not quite what you may have been assuming.

That isn’t *quite* my argument. I was attempting to point back to my original argument that was (as I see it) ignored — namely that pointing to people recruited to the LP is no more than a minimal demonstration of LP efficacy in recruiting people to libertarianism because it simply reflects the choices libertarian activists have made, not whether or not those were good choices.

Now, you DO have a point that competition can reveal which choices are better — but we might have to have a very long talk about metrics in order for that point to be placed in context.

Doing the education & speaking parts.

Professor, we need people like you so badly right now. Thank you.

Most of Paulie’s suggested outreach strategies sound excellent, and none of them necessarily have to be tied to a party or electoral campaign. Why would you need a political party for a network of student activist groups?

I’m not saying that it’s impossible to run for office and advocate direct action at the same time. I’m saying that if you consider campaigns valuable primarily for their ability to communicate to a large audience, then there are cheaper and more efficient ways to do that that don’t also carry the moral hazards and incentives to sell out down the line.

A libertarian infoshop on the model of “Laissez-Faire Books” in downtown Birmingham, or an alternative currency with a simple written message on it will probably reach more Alabamans than a third-party campaign in an election that most of them aren’t paying attention to anyway.

*Aster**,

Fine, but he’s still getting cursed. For the lulz.

**Roderick**,

If you somehow make into power, you know what to do

That seeems to be the situation with many of us.

Regardless of what we do getting the word out about an alternative system might help. To that end I’ll post these comments I made elsewhere.

Thanks,
MW

I have a bunch of other things to do over the next few weeks, but I’m going to take a few minutes to comment on this issue as to why the LP hasn’t had much success.

We’ve done wonders on the ballot access issue, but haven’t made much headway on anything else. To be sure some individuals have taken on specifics issues and changed things, but I don’t think the party can say it has had much impact on policy per se.

Why? Well for one thing we don’t seem to understand much about advertising, public relations, marketing and things that fall under those categories. However one care to describe those things. Sales in other words. Something they don’t teach in college.

Many, if not most Libertarians are males and not inclined to read news papers ads, but if they did they would find that much of advertising is simply repeating the same or similar message over and over.

For example a grocery store may stock over 30,000 items, but if you read their ads week after week you will notice that certain household staples are advertised all the time. Different items are mentioned along with those basic staples every week, but for the most part the ads are simply a repeat week after week.

Perhaps some day we will learn that we need to develop ten or twenty basic issues to hang our hat on until we achieve some degree of success with those few. Not that other issues are less important, but we simply cannot run with everything at once.

Those issues will need to be repeated over and over in brochures, media releases, on the website, in white papers and letters to the editor. Then maybe we can look back and learn.

Keep it simple. Keep it consistent & Repeat. None of which we are doing today.

MW

I’d be happy to give you as many ALLies as there are LP members. I’d be even happier to give you far more ALLies than there are LP members. How do I do that? If your argument is that ALL is a superior tool for recruitment, it should be attracting more people than the LP, should it not?

If I recall my reading correctly, what caused the LP to develop to the stage it did was Roger McBride’s electoral vote for Hospers in 1972. Perhaps ALL can come up with something else to be propelled to national or world attention, but I don’t know off hand what that would be. If you know, I’m interested.

I would suggest funding professional field organizers as one thing that could make a small organization grow, but only if its members have the money and are willing to part with it.

More to the point: if ALL is a superior tool for recruitment (and I’m not saying it isn’t), shouldn’t its existence in the marketplace for such recruitment tools mean that those who try it will so dazzle everyone else in said market with their performance that its growth would be unstoppable, and would naturally outpace the LP in short order?

If so, why has it not happened yet?

If you have practical thoughts on why it hasn’t, or what could change that, I’m interested.