How Elected Libertarians Are Changing the World

-Source-Reason- What exactly do Libertarians do? Wait dont answer that. As someone who edited a small-l libertarian magazine for eight years I know all your jokes: Libertarians are the people who lose (or spoil!) elections. They perform aesthetically challenging stripteases on CSPAN conduct unfortunate personal experiments with colloidal silver. I GET IT. But at least 169 of these exotic creatures also hold elected office across the country from a broke 19-year-old college student who sits on the Board of Assessment Appeals in tiny Cromwell Conn. to the land commissioner for the state of New Mexico. And what these critics of government power are doing once they acquire it may provide a flicker of whimsical hope in these dark and fractious times. Brandon Phinney a 30-year-old Army vet who found libertarianism through Ron Paul was elected to the 400-member New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2016 as a Republican. He then switched parties after discovering to his horror that elected GOP officials did not mean what they said about cutting the state budget. I didnt appreciate and Im sure my constituents wouldnt appreciate that I would vote in favor of a bill that was contrary to what I ran on Phinney told me last week at the biennial Libertarian Party National Convention in New Orleans. Ah youth! Phinney in New Hampshire does something I wish wed see more of in California: He pores through the ever-expanding state code looking for laws that are anachronistic impossible to enforce and/or just plain wrong. The he tries to remove them. For instance the Live Free or Die State had on its books for more than a century a prohibition against reusing glass milk-delivery bottles for any other substance besides milk. This bit of dairy industry protectionism wasnt exactly high on inspectors things-to-fine list but as Phinney explains Anything in a statute that has a financial penalty or a chance to get charged for a crime its something that I care about. One of the countrys few elected atheists Phinney has played in a bunch of bands (including one called Godcrusher because Libertarian) and that experience led to another discovery of legislative arcana: New Hampshire is one of the few states in the union where performers are barred from drinking alcohol on stage. Or I should say were until Phinney tackled the problem.