It’s our last “Mailbag Monday,” and today I want to turn the tables by asking the question myself.

What color are yield signs?

Most people say yellow.  I did.

But yield signs haven’t been yellow in decades.  Yield signs have now been red and white for almost 40 years, which is more than twice as long as they were yellow.  If you answered that yield signs are yellow today, you were letting some mental impression from long, long ago trump your more recent experience with yield signs.  And unless you were driving back in the early 70s, your mental impression of the yellow yield sign may have been created by a toy or a picture rather than an actual yield sign; it may never have been true in your personal experience.  If I asked you when you were looking at an actual yield sign, you wouldn’t make that mistake.

Now suppose I ask you this:  Which political party stands for limited government?  Which political party stands for civil liberties?  Which is the party of the free market?  The party of peace?

It’s important—critically important—for all of us to answer these questions based on our actual experience rather than the mental impressions we may have formed decades ago.  If you want smaller government, vote Libertarian.  If you want peace, vote Libertarian.  If you want to restore free enterprise, vote Libertarian.  If you cherish your right to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and all the other precious civil liberties in our Bill of Rights, vote Libertarian.  Voting for another party on false pretenses—or on reputations that haven’t been accurate since your grandparents’ day—won’t get you what you want.  It won’t get you what you think you’re voting for.

Many of my Republican friends in Maryland’s 8^th District are most anxious to stop the relentless growth of government.  But I have bad news:  The Republican party has been gerrymandered into impotence in this District.  That doesn’t mean you should give up and stay home, but it does mean that you should make sure your vote communicates what you really stand for.  I’ve talked to enough of you to know that you don’t really stand for the kind of government that Republican officeholders consistently favored over the last ten years.  Vote Republican, and you’ve successfully communicated only that you want John Boehner to lead the Congress.  Vote Libertarian, and you’ve successfully communicated that you’re for less government, more liberty, more prosperity, and more security.

Many of my Democratic friends in Maryland’s 8^th District are most anxious to give ordinary people a fighting chance at economic security.  But I have bad news for you as well:  Democrats are more like Republicans than you think.  The economic policies that Democrats have been pursuing may be good for the rich and powerful people who have made careers out of pretending to like the poor, but they do not actually make poor people richer.  They make us all poorer, by squandering our resources and discouraging our innate drive to produce.  Tens of thousands of you know this, but you haven’t been willing to criticize your own party for fear of sounding like the Republicans you despise.  Beware!  It was precisely that brand of party “loyalty” that allowed the Republican party of the Bush years to march over a cliff.  Vote Democratic, and you’ve done your part to keep our country and your party barreling down the road to ruin.  Vote Libertarian, and you’ve helped call all of us back to principles worthy of the party of Jefferson:  less government, more liberty, more prosperity, and more security.

And what of my independent friends?  Some of you are closet partisans, but surveys say about half of you are lifelong independents.  And I know from talking to you that a good many of you are spitting mad at Democrats and Republicans alike.  Some of you are so mad that you plan to stay home.  Others plan to vote for the “lesser of two evils.”  For you, I have some good news:  You don’t have to do that anymore.  And you shouldn’t.  After all, a twenty-foot ladder is no better than a ten-foot ladder if you’re at the bottom of a fifty-foot hole.  And unfortunately, that’s where Democrats and Republicans have left us.  We need to keep calling for that fifty-foot ladder until we get it, and we’re fortunate that in our system we always get the kind of government we call for if we call persistently enough.  This year, try calling for less government, more liberty, more prosperity, and more security.

There’s a deeper problem with “lesser of two evils” voting:  It’s unworthy of our heritage, no matter what your party affiliation is. Our ancestors didn’t fight and bleed for your rights to life, liberty, and the lesser of two evils.  Patrick Henry did not thunder for all the ages, “Give me Liberty, or give me whatever everyone else is having.”  Martin Luther King did not stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and tell us, “I have a dream, but I’ll settle for less.”  No.  The great ones who have preceded us showed their greatness in their commitment to principle—and specifically in their recognition that sometimes the “lesser of two evils” just isn’t good enough.

Now it’s your turn to march in that same parade of history.  Don’t blow it—your children are watching.  Stand up and be counted for the kind of government you’d really like to have.  Vote for less government, more liberty, more prosperity, and more security.  Vote Libertarian.

For the last five months, I’ve poured out thousands of words about the libertarian approach to many of the problems we face as a community.  I hope I’ve persuaded you that the country needs a course correction.  Still, the upcoming election is not just a yes/no vote on whether we need “change”; it’s a choice among particular candidates.  So why Grannis for Congress, instead of another candidate?

Throughout the campaign, I’ve emphasized five pressing needs:  balancing our budget; liberating our economy; restoring civil liberties; reorienting our foreign policy toward defense; and reforming Congress.  In each of these areas, libertarianism is our best chance to move forward together as a nation.

On the budget, I’ve explained why we can’t keep borrowing forever, and I’ve produced a balanced budget for fiscal year 2012.  My opponents have not produced budgets of their own, nor have they commented on mine.  In fact, Chris Van Hollen and Mike Philips have mirrored their respective parties’ head-in-the-sand approaches.  It’s not just that they’re not offering proposals to balance the budget by 2012; they’re not offering proposals to balance the budget ever. That should be disqualifying.

In Chris Van Hollen’s case, the neglect is made worse by the hypocrisy that accompanies it.  When President Bush and the Republicans were serving up big heaping helpings of fiscal irresponsibility, Chris Van Hollen knew it was wrong.  He criticized the recklessness of the Bush budgets, but vigorously defends the even larger Obama deficits.  Indeed, with each new spending proposal, it becomes clearer that he just can’t say no.

On the economy, I’ve laid out the reasons why free markets create greater prosperity for everyone, especially the poor.  I’ve drawn upon historical experience with economic liberty, which has been superior in every way to historical experience with government planning.  I’ve emphasized that jobs are things we create for ourselves to respond to the needs of those around us, and I’ve explained why “stimulus” spending doesn’t work.

By contrast, my opponents offer more of the same policies that got us into the mess we’re in.  Chris Van Hollen railed against taxpayer bailouts back in his first term, but in his fourth term he voted for the “no banker left behind” bailouts, multiple rounds of reckless “stimulus” spending, a “cash for clunkers” program that is probably the dumbest piece of legislation ever passed by Congress, and countless tax breaks and subsidies that increase federal control over private economic activity.  He voted to nationalize GM, then he voted to nationalize health care.  (He voted for a costly and pointless cap-and-trade bill as well, which fortunately his party was unable to get through the Senate.)   He has left his successor a great deal to undo.

Mike Philips criticizes the government interventions of the Obama administration, but gives little reason to believe he really understands what’s wrong with them.  In fact, he favors federal intervention in energy markets, labor markets, and investment markets.   Late in the campaign, he has apparently decided to make PEPCO’s performance a federal issue.  This rather desperate lurch shows the same kind of proclivity toward micromanagement that spawned the bailouts and stimulus bills – not to mention a certain disrespect for the ability of state officials to manage their own regulatory affairs.

On the issues of war and civil liberties, Chris Van Hollen once had a record of which he could be proud.  But that was when a different president was in office and a different party controlled Congress.   During this Congress, Mr. Van Hollen has made shown no interest in ending our foreign wars or reining in the expansive foreign policy that produced them.    He voted to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, and offered not a word of objection when President Obama ordered the summary execution of a U.S. citizen, without trial, on the unproven suspicion of having been involved in terrorism.  And of course Mr. Van Hollen co-sponsored the dreadful “DISCLOSE Act,” which says there should be one set of rules for political speech by groups friendly to Mr. Van Hollen, and another set of rules for everyone else.  (Thank goodness that bill also died in the Senate.)

Not to be outdone, Mike Philips wants to increase our commitment of troops in Afghanistan, leave troops in Iraq, increase sanctions on Iran, and continue air raids in Pakistan.  On the so-called DISCLOSE Act, he favors banning even more political speech than Mr. Van Hollen proposes to ban.  Mr. Philips does not even trust Americans to work out their marriages for themselves without federal involvement.  These are not the positions of someone who genuinely wants smaller government, greater liberty, or the peace and prosperity that go along with them.

Finally, on government reform, I’ve campaigned for term limits, tax reform, redistricting reform, and the Downsize DC Agenda.  Mike Philips supports some of these measures, but not all of them.  Chris Van Hollen is a career politician in a custom-gerrymandered district whose tenure in office—on the Ways and Means Committee, no less—eloquently testifies to the need for these reforms.

These are the reasons I ask for your vote.  Please cast that vote wisely.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, we looked at questionnaires and surveys distributed by the League of Women Voters and Project Vote Smart, comparing my issue positions with those of the other candidates who are asking for your vote. On Wednesday, we looked at ratings and endorsements from groups like the Americans for Prosperity, Gun Owners of America, Liberty Candidates 2010, and others. Today we’re back to candidate questionnaires.

Let’s look first at the questionnaire distributed by the Maryland Catholic Conference, because

Read the rest here… »

The candidate surveys and voter guides we’ve looked at over the last two days (look here and here if you missed them) just collect the candidates’ opinions and publish them without comment.  But some organizations go further and issue a grade, ranking, or endorsement. Today we’ll look at a few of those.

For example, the Americans for Prosperity awarded the grade of B+ to both me and Mike Philips.  (The only differences in our positions were that Mr. Philips oposes term limits (which I favor), favors federal energy subsidies (which I oppose), and wants to address tort reform at the federal level (whereas I think state-law issues should be left to the states).  That B+ was the highest grade a non-incumbent could earn, on the theory that A’s have to be reserved for people who vote right, not just people who say the right things on the campaign trail.  (Chris Van Hollen, as an incumbent, was eligible to receive an A from the Americans for Prosperity.  As it happens, however, he received an F.  Ouch.)  Fred Nordhorn did not participate.

Turning from economic liberties to civil liberties, the Gun Owners of America also handed out letter grades.  I got an A, as did Mike Philips and Fred Nordhorn.  Chris Van Hollen got an F minus.

I also picked up two endorsements a few weeks ago.  Liberty Candidates 2010 endorsed me (and no one else in the 8th District) on the strength of my answers regarding the financial system, U.S. sovereignty, the PATRIOT Act, and foreign policy.  As many words as I’ve written during this campaign, I haven’t been able to do justice to all those topics on this campaign blog, so I hope you’ll read what I wrote on the Liberty Candidates website if you’re interested. I was also endorsed by a group called the Boston Tea Party, about which I know very little except that they seem to have sought out Libertarians to endorse nationwide, and I’m in favor of that.

The line between a survey and a pledge is sometimes a fine one, but here are two that are pretty clearly on the pledge side of the line:  the Contract From America, and the Downsize DC Agenda.  I signed onto the Contract From America fairly early, but I now have plenty of company, including Mike Philips (but not Chris Van Hollen or Fred Nordhorn).  By contrast, only fifteen House candidates have seen fit to support the package of regulatory reforms in the Downsize DC Agenda, and I am the only Maryland candidate to do so.  I really admire the work done by the DownsizeDC.org folks in coming up with the six short pieces of legislation that make up their Downsize DC Agenda.  If you missed my blog post on those bills, you can find it here.

Why don’t the six short pieces of draft legislation in the Downsize DC Agenda find more assent among those who aspire to be elected to Congress?  Maybe they’re practicing not reading the bills.

Yesterday we started going through the issue positions staked out by each candidate in response to the candidate survey distributed by the League of Women Voters.  Today let’s look at the 2010 Political Courage Test administered by Project Vote Smart, a really fine organization that tries to pin candidates down on the specifics of the policy questions that really count in any given election.  They also have a new service, VoteEasy, which turns the tables and asks voters to answer the survey questions so they can see which candidate best matches their own views.

You can view my results here.  If you want to try VoteEasy for Maryland races, you can do that here.  I can vouch for the VoteEasy service, as it told me I was the candidate whose views were closest to my own.

Chris Van Hollen did not complete this survey, but the Project Vote Smart staff went through his various votes and was able to infer some policy positions for him, which you can peruse here.

Mike Philips, to his credit, did complete the test.  His answers tend to reinforce the differences we noted yesterday, and they also reveal a few more.  Specifically,

• Mr. Philips is more timid with the budget knife than I was when I took the test.  That’s a problem, because after completing an actual balanced budget proposal, I now know that balancing the budget was harder than I thought it would be when I filled out this survey.  That’s one reason I think every candidate should have a fairly specific budget proposal:  because until a candidate (or a sitting representative) actually goes through that exercise, he or she probably has almost no idea how serious our budget problem is.
• I was surprised to see that Mr. Philips wants to increase capital gains taxes and maintain the income tax rates for low-income families while cutting rates for middle-income and high-income families.  Junking the overall income tax structure would be much better for the country, and much easier politically than offering tax cuts for everyone except the poor.
• Nagging tendencies toward intervention in the economy flare up once again in Mr. Philips’s positions on minimum wage laws (which increase unemployment for the poorest workers), fuel efficiency standards, and alternative energy subsidies.
• On civil liberties, Mr. Philips supports restrictions on campaign speech.  He also supports the war on drugs and a federal ban on gay marriage.
• On foreign policy, Mr. Philips supports the war in Afghanistan and wants to expand it.  He supports continued air strikes in Pakistan and increased sanctions on Iran.  And he opposes withdrawal of our troops from Iraq.  Curiously, however, he opposes foreign aid on the ground that “the US should stop tinkering with foreign, sovereign states.  Let each nation decide their own issues.”  I think reasonable minds can differ about the wisdom of foreign aid, but I don’t understand how one can support outright invasions of foreign countries but condemn foreign aid as meddlesome.  This is another area where we need more principle and less ad hockery.

Fred Nordhorn deserves credit for filling out the survey, which is more than Mr. Van Hollen did.  But according to VoteEasy, I agreed with his views only 41% of the time (about half as often as I agreed with Mike Philips), and I think it would be tedious to go over each point.

In closing, let me make a real pitch for the people at Project Vote Smart.  I’ve learned a lot as a first-time candidate, and one of the things I’ve learned is that there just aren’t enough truly non-partisan organizations trying to facilitate robust discussion of the important issues.  Most surveys mailed to the candidates make it embarrassingly obvious how the sender wants the candidates to respond; this one played it entirely straight.  Please check it out, and if you find it a useful resource I encourage you to offer your time, talent, or treasure to the enterprise.

The League of Women Voters has a long history of hosting debates in elections large and small, and in Montgomery County the League has been admirably inclusive in the past.  In 2008, the League held an 8th District debate to which they invited all candidates, even write-in candidates who had already lost in the Democratic primary.  Unfortunately, the League has decided not to hold a debate this year for the 8th District House seat.

Naturally, I’m disappointed.  Given the choices we need to make and the wide divergence of opinions about where we should go from here, it’s odd to find so little public discussion of the alternatives.  I had hoped that the League would play its usual role of facilitating a more robust exchange of views than one typically gets from materials published by the candidates or even from news coverage by professional journalists.

The League did, however, distribute a survey to all candidates, and responses from all four can be found online here.  In lieu of a debate,

Read the rest here… »

On the front page of this website I have reduced my platform to eight words: Less Government, More Liberty, More Prosperity, and More Security. Everyone seems to understand why “Less Government” means “More Liberty,” and most people understand why “More Liberty” creates “More Prosperity.” (Stragglers who doubt this should read this essay from September.) But some people do wonder about the “More Security” part of my platform, particularly after nine years of having the federal government tell us we have to surrender important civil liberties to stay safe. How exactly do less government and more liberty lead to more security? Let me mention just four ways.

Read the rest here… »

It was August 3, at a candidate forum at Leisure World, when the man in the back of the room hit the nail on the head: Every candidate says it’s very important for us to balance the federal budget, but they never give specifics. What, specifically, does each candidate propose to cut?

I gave a pretty specific answer that day, but it was nothing compared to the actual balanced budget proposal that Ohio Libertarian Travis Irvine and I released earlier this morning. You can read all about the proposal here, and you can even watch a video about it here. That’s as specific an answer as I can give to that gentleman at Leisure World.

But the experience of producing a balanced budget helped me focus a bit more clearly on a few facets of the budget problem, and perhaps by extension the sorry state of our politics in general. I’d like to share those thoughts with you in the rest of this Mailbag Monday post.

The fact that Travis and I are the only two candidates to produce a balanced federal budget for 2012 tells us volumes about the people we currently have in Congress, and none of it is very flattering to them. Balancing the budget all in one year was very, very hard; it required deep cuts in spending as well as the elimination of tax loopholes that many powerful people really like. But balancing the budget in two years wouldn’t have been that hard. Balancing the budget in four years would have been child’s play. So what are we to make of people who produce ten-year budgets in which even the tenth year fails to balance? We can only conclude that such people do not really want to balance the budget. If they say they do, they are lying. That’s blunt language, but the conclusion is inescapable.

This is a complete failure of nerve by the two major parties rather than a question of gridlock. It’s not as if we have a Republican balanced budget plan on one side of the aisle and a Democratic balanced budget plan on the other, with a lack of national consensus about which one we should pass. No; we have in fact no proposal to balance the budget from either Democrats or Republicans, and most candidates won’t even talk about their future fiscal plans except in the vaguest and most general of terms. Again, I think the only conclusion we can draw from this is that the vast majority of politicians in both major parties place their political careers above the health of the republic. By contrast, Travis and I don’t have political careers and we don’t particularly want them. We just want the government to run right. So we tried: We crunched the numbers, and our budget balances. You can decide for yourself what to do with the men and women whose job was to do this but who nonetheless didn’t even try. I would recommend firing them.

Where do we go from here? That depends in part on how other candidates respond, but ultimately it’s up to the voters. I imagine voters will respond in one of two ways. One group will look at our budget and say, “That’s all you cut? Defense is still too large, and I can’t believe you’re leaving Social Security and Medicare untouched even temporarily. And where’s the tax reform?” This will be a small group, almost entirely composed of Libertarians. But these are my people, and they are dear to me; I value their good opinion, so I wish to say to them that some things take longer than one year. Because we took the need to balance the budget in 2012 as an absolute constraint, we were unable to rely on many excellent policy proposals that we should absolutely try to implement by 2013. Tax reform, in particular, has long been at the top of my list.

By far the larger group of voters will look at the cuts we have proposed and they will be horrified. The ones who take the proposal seriously will call it Draconian, and perhaps a larger number will simply dismiss the proposal as unrealistic. This is the group I am most anxious to reach. I want to make them understand that the severity of the cuts we had to propose in order to achieve balance is a consequence of how far out of balance our budget currently is. It doesn’t do us any good to propose “glide paths” or “sustainable trends” or other allegedly “moderate” solutions that aren’t equal to size of the problem.

Our national debt and our future entitlement liabilities are already so high that we will not be able to repay additional loans we give ourselves from future income. Do you know what they call it when you take out a loan you know you can’t repay? They call that stealing. We’re stealing from the future right now, and the only fact that mitigates our guilt is that we aren’t really stealing from our children any more; we are so near the point of collapse right now that the vast majority of us will live to regret it if we don’t step back from the brink.

Whichever group you fall into, take action. If you like the budget, tell your friends about it and urge as many candidates as possible to sign on. If you don’t like our budget, ask your favored candidate what his or her alternative budget plan is. Now that we’ve shown that it can be done, you don’t have to put up with any excuses any more. You sure don’t have to put up with people who say it can’t be done, or that it has to take ten years. That’s unworthy of anyone’s vote.

Let me end with an appeal to my fellow candidates, here in the 8th District and across the nation.

Each year’s deficit adds to our debt burden, and we simply cannot afford any more debt unless we want to condemn ourselves to sluggish economic growth, falling living standards, and increasing danger of financial collapse. We must break free from the swirling vortex of laziness, cowardice, and self-delusion that has prevented us from dealing with this problem. It’s our job as candidates to propose ways to bring federal spending in line with federal revenues, in a way that respects individual liberty and makes us stronger as a nation and stronger in our local communities.

If you don’t like our budget, do your own. You can get the agency budgets and historical figures from OMB. You can find all kinds of great policy proposals from budget experts at Cato, Heritage, Brookings, and many other respectable think tanks. Use as much or as little of our budget as you want, and knock yourselves out. There are lots of different ways to balance the budget, and you might come up with something that even I like better.

But there’s one thing you can’t do with the budget any longer: You can’t hide behind it. If you don’t like our numbers, let’s see yours. Mike Philips, you were there in Leisure World when that gentleman in the back row asked us for specifics. What’s your answer? Chris Van Hollen, you’ve had a full-time job minding our money for eight years, and you have all the resources of the Ways & Means Committee at your disposal. When are you going to balance the federal budget, and how?

This press release went out early this morning, announcing that Ohio Libertarian Travis Irvine and I have successfully developed a proposal to balance the federal budget by FY 2012—the first year for which the next Congress will pass a budget.  You can see the budget proposal itself here.

The release of the budget is also being announced in another of Travis’s increasingly popular video messages:

The Libertarian Balanced Federal Budget Proposal

Kick the tires and see what you think.  I’ll have more to say about the Libertarian Balanced Federal Budget in a Mailbag Monday blog post later this morning.

Some people who viewed my “Where Do Jobs Come From?” video a couple of weeks ago found fault with the assumption that government spending on “stimulus” projects inevitably leaves us with less money to spend on the things we want.  These critics pointed out that if government borrows the money for the stimulus spending, we don’t necessarily have to change our spending habits at all.

Well, of course, that’s the story of the last forty years, and especially of the last ten.  But there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  Spending with borrowed money kills jobs too; it just kills them in the future.

Here’s another animated video on the fiscal insanity the Democrats and Republicans have inflicted on us.

Why can’t we keep borrowing?

After my son saw this one, he said, “You know, you’re starting to make a lot of sense.”  If you think so too, please share this video with your friends, no matter what Congressional district they live in.