Here is a summary I sent friends and family about the cpnvention speakers and
attendees. I'm just
copying it with no editing. So some stuff may seem unrelated to this group, like
my interest in
the vegetarians at the convention. (I happen to eat the herbavorous diet our
digestive system was
meant for, so I was happy to meet more.)

================

The convention was some of the most fun I have had in a very long time. The
discussions were the
most intellectually stimulating; nearly everyone of course was at least familiar
with, if not well
read in, all the great philosophers and economists. One person there even knew
Nathaniel Brandon
personally. He named his children after John Galt and Howard Roark. I met a few
vegetarians and
one (possibly more) of the speakers was also a vegetarian. And one guy had a
name tag that said
"John Birch Galt". (Remember John Birch is the first Christian the commies in
China killed.) It is
a bit of an odd combo since Rand and Christianity do not mix well. Any time
someone asked him if
that was his real name he would just ignore the question as if it was never
asked. A very odd
fellow...


So here is a summary of the different speakers at the convention. I did not see
all of them, and
in fact there were of course usually multiple events scheduled at the same time.


"Misc. Anecdotes"

The first was a lady named Mary Ruwart. She talked opened things up with general
anecdotal
stories. For example, she once owned an apartment bulding. Two poor women
violated the lease
agreement by running a daycare in the apartment, but Mrs. Ruwart did not mind
since they were not
hurting anything. But the government found out and shut them down for violating
zoning
regulations. The area of the city they lived in was zoned for residential use
only; no one was
allowed to conduct business. Plus they did not have an expensive daycare
license. End result: they
were forced to get on the welfare payroll.

In Atlanta, where the convention was held, a homeless man was once arrested for
shining shoes on
the street, which he used to make money rather than begging for it. His crime
was not having a
license for shoe shining or being a street vendor or something along those
lines. One problem was
that the license cost hundreds of dollars which, being homeless, he could not
afford. The second
problem is that the city government restricted the number of licenses and was
currently maxed out
so he could not get one if he could afford it. And lastly, by not having an
address, he would not
have been able to even apply for one even if it was free and not restricted in
number.

She talked about the environment, noting that the US military makes more
pollution than the top 3
polluting corporations but cannot be held accountable because the government
does not permit
itself to be sued over damages it causes. She also noted that on 9/11 2001, the
inept FBI had
twice as many people tracking down narcotics than those tracking terrorists
domestically and even
forbade an agent from investigating the hijackers in flight school due to their
limited resources.


"The Environment"

The next speaker was the most interesting. It was Carl Pope, the executive
director of the Sierra
Club, speaking about the environment. Though he is not a party member, he got a
standing ovation
and there was much interest in his ideas afterwards. 80%(?) of Americans are
concerned about the
environment, so it is not an issue we can ignore! (This was stressed by many
speakers, not just
Mr. Pope.) So here are some of the points he made. First he pointed out the
government subsidies
encourage over production and over consumption, such as the $80 billion sent to
the meat and
farming industry. The US also bans 3rd world agriculture imports, but then it
takes the surplus of
domestic food (caused by the subsidies) and dumps it in the 3rd world as
"foreign aid". He claims
that this makes it impossible for farmers in those nations to earn a living
since they are
competing against free wheat, so it destroys the agriculture industry in those
nations. He
estimated the economic damage to the 3rd world from such "aid" programs to be
around $100 trillion
dollars.

He made a similar point with energy, that government subsidies of energy
supplies causes over
production and over consumption of fossil fuels, and since fossil fuel gets most
of the subsidies,
the government gives them an unfair advantage over renewable energy sources.

He promoted the idea that the best way to improve the environment was to set up
economic
incentives for imporvement rather than economic penalties against hurting it. He
felt the ideal
way to do that was by turning resources into investments through privatization
like Britain did
with its waterways fishing rights, which has greatly improved water quality and
decreased
over-fishing problems that we currently see destroying life in the oceans.
Though he pointed out
that this only is possible when such property rights can be clearly defined. For
things that are
fuzzy, like the atmosphere, the only feasible approach is a more "command and
control" approach
through legislation, though he prefers creative ways privatize things when
possible. He
acknowledged it was not very libertarian but said that we have to accept that
100% libertarians
are not the best solutions in every single and so we should be open to
compromise at times. He
clearly prefers the libertarian solutions when they work, but he lacks faith
that pure libertarian
solutions can work for the atmosphere by virtue of the fact privatizing the
atmosphere is
essentially impossible.

On another note, he also gave some criticisms to the overall libertarian
movement. While
acknowledging that there are plenty leftist environmentalists that are
irrational and spew
junk-science, he said that the libertarian environmental movement was also quite
susceptible to
that. He called on the audience to not respond to one side's junk with more junk
and to focus on
the real solutions that work. He praised our approaches to many environmental
problems and I think
he warns us on this for his own sake as well; if he believes in our market-based
solutions then it
does him no good if we discredit ourselves by being as irrational knee-jerk as
the leftist
environmentalists often are.

The environment seemed to be an unofficial theme. Two other people besides Mr.
Pope spoke entirely
one the environment, including one vegetarian. (Though the other speaker
probably should not count
since he took the sort of stance Mr. Pope criticized as I described above. I was
happy to note he
got a lukewarm applause, as opposed to the standing ovation Mr. Pope got.) In a
"tactics workshop"
another guy stressed the importance of the environment as an issue that needs to
be addressed, and
other party leaders in banquets stressed the importance of addressing the issue
more.


"Freedom Fries!"

Harry Browne did not have much interesting stuff to repeat. But he did make one
amusing note. Just
as Congress renamed its menu to have freedom fries and freedom toast rather than
being French, in
WWI, people changed the name of sauerkraut (a German food with a German name) to
"liberty
cabbage". History certainly does repeat itself!


"Pentagon Insider Look at Iraq"

A lady who used to work inside the Pentagon spoke about life on the inside of
the military's
center of operations. She made fun of Rousseau and made the claim that Bush and
the
neoconservatives are heavily influenced by his works, either directly or
indirectly. She
specifically pointed out his "Social Contract" writing, which is what he is most
known for. She
said that book had a quote along the lines of "If men do not want freedom then
they should be
forced to be free," which completely sums up the Bush rhetoric on Iraq and
foreign policy in
general.

She also talked about Iraq's WMDs. 96% of the known weapons had been accounted
by the UN for as
destroyed. The other 4% was unknown. The intelligence community made many
suggestions about them,
including that they were simply lost or record of their destruction was lost,
but never made
anything conclusive. Bush then grabbed the one idea he liked (that Saddam still
had them) and ran
with that as though it was fact.

She noted a few interesting points I had not heard before about motivations for
going to war. One
I do know for a fact is Iraq was changing its internation oil trade from US
dollars to the Euro.
Other nations have also started doing this. The problem with that is our
debt-based monetary
system stays afloat by other nations demanding the currency, so when that demand
drops then our
currency loses value and the nation goes bankrupt. But what is new to me is that
there was talk in
DC's inner circles that the UN was close to removing trade sactions against
Iraq. The US and UK
had been bombing Iraq for 10 years in the north and south. (Many think the
no-fly zones were a UN
thing, but the UN actually had nothing to do with it.) Thus when trade sactions
got lifted, the US
and UK would have gotten 0 oil contracts from it. Furthermore, that would lead
to normalized
relations with the world, meaning that more embassies would be in Iraq. This
makes it harder to
invade Iraq because the other nations do not want their new oil contracts
disrupted, plus you run
the risk of killing non-Iraq citizens by accidentally blowing up an embassy for
another nation, as
the US accidentally did to a Chinese embassy in Afghanistan.

Two other shorter points she noted is that the Likud party of Israel really
wanted the US to do
that since Saddam was offering large sums of money and also houses of Iraqis he
murdered to the
families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Since the neocons and Israel scratch
each others' back,
that had to have had sway. And secondly, the US got 14 military bases in Iraq.
She said if you
look at a map of US bases in foreign nations, it helped fill in a hole in some
sort of encircling
pattern to control that continent.


"The Vice President"

I heard Richard Comagna speak, who ended up getting the nomination for VP
candidate. His history
is interesting. He entered Brown university at the age of 15 and graduated
college cum laude at
the age of 18. He also has a efw masters degrees, a PhD, and went through law
school. He speaks 6
languages fluently and can get by in 12. I was amazed at those credentials on
his intelligence!


"Allying with the Enemy"

Republican ex-Congressman Bob Barr spoke briefly. It is a bit ironic because he
lost office due to
angry Libertarians campaigning to steal away his votes. In the Libertarian
circles, he apparently
was one of the most hated politicians in Georgia. But he has since become a
strong critic of
Bush's anti-privacy issues and has even joined hands with the ACLU, which is
unusual for hard core
Christian conservative. He trashed both the Democrats and his own Republicans
for not knowing the
Constitution, and he voiced support for an idea in the wonderful novel
"Fountainhead" that privacy
is the basis of civilization. He was well received by the audience.


"Civil Liberties"

A notable political author named Mr. Bovard spoke on civil liberties. He noted
that the Patriot
Act was advertised as something only usable for chasing terrorists, so people
doing traditional
crime need not worry about it. He then cited that since its passage, the law has
been used to
chase down criminals in cases related to gambling, drugs, and bribery. He thinks
those are rather
low-key things that by no means justify the broad powers the government gets
from that law. He
noted that the Arab round-up in the US had problems like in Iaq's prisons,
though maybe not as
extreme. It is not widely known nor reported on in the media, but there were
cases of Arabs being
held for over a year without charge and being severely beating while imprisoned.
(So far the only
"crime" prosecuted by the round-ups has been having an expired visa.) People who
denied such
beating occured were later to have been found on video tapes portraying the
beatings. Yet the
government managed to keep it out of the public eye.

He also read a question from the TSA test given to people applying who want to
be an airport
screener for weapons, etc. Let's see if you are qualified to be a TSA agent! The
question is as
follows: why is it necessairy to screen for bombs?
a) The bomb's batteries could leak and damage other luggage.
b) Wires in the bomb might come lose and short circuit with wires in the plane.
c) Bombs could cause damage to the property on the plane and loss of life.
d) The ticking timer could worry other passengers.

His point is that with all the snooping the government does to you at the
airport, they are
probably not getting much done. He recited a story to prove this point. Someone
once managed to
get box cutters on a plane, twice. That is the same weapon that the 9/11
hijackers used. In both
cases he hid it in the plane's lavitory. He then e-mailed the TSA saying where
the items were so
that they could realized the holes in their system and improve upon them. The
e-mail was promptly
ignored. When the airline found the blades while cleaning the plane, the
government tried to
prosecute him and the TSA claimed that it did not help them identify any flaws
in their screening
processes. (It is also worth noting that one of the party's presidential
candidate had trouble
flying to the convention because they wrongly put him on the "no-fly list", and
he had to get the
FBI and TSA involved to clear him!)

Though he intended to talk about domestic civil liberties, it turned into a
general rant about
Bush. One interesting point he touched on is that CBS told Bush about the
prisoner abuse photos
before releasing them. Due to a delicate hostage situation in Iraq, CBS agreed
with a Bush request
to delay releasing the photos so as to not inflame the hostage takers into
killing the hostages.
(Note that Nick Berg was one of those hostages.) So Bush knew about the photos
at least for that
week, yet during that week he was seen on TV bragging that he had ended the
abuses Saddam did to
his people!


"Outreach to the Left"

The next speaker I heard was on the topic of speaking to the left on economics,
the most
fascinating presentation second to Mr. Pope's environment presentation. His main
premise is that
the left and libertarians generally have the same goals, though they may express
them slightly
differently; the main difference he sees is the means they employ to achieve
those ends. So his
presentation and web site are about satisfying leftist concerns (the
environment, extreme wealth
iniquities, etc.) through libertarian means. One example he gave of libertarian
policy achieves a
leftist goal is that costs related to government regulations of businesses do
not grow
proportionally as the company grows, which means that they are a greater burden
on small
businesses. Thus repealing such laws help the small and local businesses compete
with the giant
conglomerates rather than creating a wider divide in wealth. Many of his points
showed how
government regulations have unintended side effects that artificially create
situations like CEOs
making insane amounts of money, or make it hard for anyone to start a business
who is not already
wealthy to begin with. Here is his very fascinating web site on achieving
left-wing value through
libertarian means:
http://www.holisticpolitics.org
(Unfortunately it is a new site and there are still some pieces missing.)


If you want to see the debates, here it is:
rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/c04/c04052904_libertarian.rm

And more video from the event:
http://www.cspan.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryTex\
t=libertarian





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