Tips in Messaging Liberty: Break-Out Session

1. Think about how others interpret what you say.

• Substance is important- but spend time on your presentation
• Don’t brush aside challenges
• Ask yourself: “How could someone twist the meaning of my words around?

2. Be sociable.

• You have to spread the message, especially to those who don’t agree with you.
• Be the person others want to emulate, and respect.

3. Be positive more than negative- remember, liberty is a GOOD thing.

• Don’t:

1. Focus on how bad everything is.
2. Try to persuade people with fear and anger.
3. Don’t let people portray you as angry.

• Hayek was positive, and talked about how things COULD be better.

4. Use demographics to your advantage.

• Logic is different for different people- be aware of motivating factors.
• Vary your argument based on your audience (War on Drugs is detrimental because minority groups have been disproportionately harmed, for example).
• Should we advocate liberty to specific groups? YES!

5. Don’t idealize the past- and look towards the future.

• We have never been completely free. Blacks and women may see the past as different than white men.
• Focus on the future, and the positive nature of liberty.
• Don’t say society was ever ideal (necessarily), because full liberty was not available.

6. Humanize the argument:

• Don’t talk in the abstract. Get down into the nitty-gritty.
• It’s easier to argue against a theoretical position against a real-world problem.

7. Use sound bites.

• Catchphrases and soundbites work.
• The shorter the better.
• Convey key points.
• They should be easy to remember.
• Stay on message, and REPEAT the soundbites.

Immigration II – The Moral Obviousness of Immigration

The case for open immigration is simple.  It is simple, that is, for anyone who begins from an assumption of human freedom, rather than arbitrary authority.  People should be free to live where they please.  They should be free to travel.  They should be able to do business or associate with whomever else is also willing.

These are obvious, basic freedoms.  Because they are so basic, they are extremely important.  Any more complicated freedom we could pursue would almost without fail build on them.  Life in America would be unimaginable without them.  My family’s history would have been impossible.  Without the ability to travel across the country, my mother from Chicago and father from Rochester would never have met.  My father could not have taken his current job in Kansas City to support his family.  I would have been unable to attend college in Massachusetts or work in the District of Columbia.  How obviously unjust would it have been to prohibit all of these things?

Just as unjust as current immigration law, in America and world-wide.  All of the things my parents and I can do easily within this country are, in various arbitrary degrees, restricted or prohibited across national borders.  When we forbid people from immigrating from the third world, we condemn them to a shorter lifespan beset by poverty and disease, life in tyrannous police states or corrupt kleptocracies, and the chaos of civil war.  How could we defend this?

I’ll discuss and reject the possible reasons over the next couple of posts.  I’ve moved through the moral argument quickly because it is simple.  There is no need to make a thorough review of the strangling annoyances that exist under current law.  If you do not share an instinctive appreciation for the value of human beings to live their lives freely, if you do not at least see the facialappeal of open immigration, I would suggest some introspection.  What moral principles could deny the right of people to freely seek a better life?

Hell Under Seige

Reuters reports that the offensive targeting Marjah (or Marjeh, for all those google mappers reading this), a small town in the southern province of Helmand, has been, and continues to be highly successful.  Marine Captain Abraham Sipe is quoted as saying “We are making steady progress …”, and a slightly more enthusiastic Helmand Governor Gulab Mangai has stated that “[t]he situation moment by moment is going the way the government had expected. The forces are extending their advances from points they have captured and the operation is going on successfully …”  It seems the Afghani’s are kinda’ fired up about defending their newfound freedom.  Maybe that crazy cowboy strategy of invading terrorist-funding regimes in order to replace tyrannical dictatorships with free, republican forms of government isn’t such a bad one after all.  So much for a quagmire.

The Monopoly Power of Government