Reason Magazine: Nick Gillespie & Matt Welch- 'Ask a Libertarian Lightning Round: Recalls, Libertarian Paternalism, & Tea Party v. Libertarians'

Source:Reason Magazine- Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie.

"Welcome to Ask a Libertarian 2012 with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Matt

Welch. They are the authors of the book The Declaration of Independents:

How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, coming out in

paperback later this month. Pre-order:Amazon 

On June 12, 2012 Gillespie and Welch used short, rapid-fire videos to

answer dozens of reader questions submitted via email, Twitter, Facebook,

and Reason.com.

In this episode, they answer whether recalling fixes political corruption, whether 'nudging' will create more libertarians, and whether the Tea Party as made libertarianism obsolete. 

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, Josh Swain, and Tracy Oppenheimer

with help from Katie Hooks." 

From Reason Magazine

I'll just go through the questions here one at a time and tell you what I think about them and what my positions are. 

As far as nudge paternalism that I guess Cass Sunstein coined: I'm in favor of government doing research on activities in society that comes with real risks and telling people about the negatives and positives of every activity in society. I think it's a helluva lot better than trying to outlaw or sanction people for doing doing something that might only hurt themselves. But then that's as far as I would go. 

As far as recalls: elections have consequences. You would think that would've been something that the great political satirist George Carlin coined himself, but he didn't. I guess I could live with recalls if they're done democratically and a politician doesn't face a recall simply because there was a low turnout or the recall met a low threshold. But let's say l/2 plus one of registered voters turned out and voted to recall a politician. And then you have a yes or no question only on whether the politician should get recalled or not, if the recall gets on the ballot. 

As far as the Tea Party: right now they look like a very diverse political movement on the right, from Center-Right Constitutional Conservatives or even Conservative Libertarians like Senator Rand Paul and a few others in Congress. But then the populist-Christian-Right movement from the 1990s and 2000s that gave the Republican Party complete control of Congress for the first time in 40 years in 1995, are also part of the Tea Party movement. So yes, if you believe in constitutionalism and limited government, you shouldn't put all of your eggs in the Tea Party basket, because the Libertarian Party is still needed for that very reason.