tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-39695119903326035972008-01-22T23:15:00.000-08:002008-01-23T13:54:46.656-08:002008-01-23T13:54:46.656-08:00It may seem like this post is piling on, when the <a href="http://www.petitiononline.com/wspp2008/petition.html">World's Smallest Political Platform petition</a> is stalled at 13 signatories and Tom Knapp is trying to resuscitate (from spambot hell) his <a href="http://www.bostontea.us/">Boston Tea Party</a> without fixing its irrevocable commitment to the buggy WSPP 1.0. However, the WSPP is a good candidate for <a href="http://libertarianmajority.net/pledge-proposals">fixing</a> the LP Pledge, and taking it seriously helps keep the formidable Mr. Knapp from working for the dark side (<a href="http://restore04.com/">Restore04</a>, who made a forum-spamming effort this week to get their own petition unstuck from from the 160 neighborhood). Also, it's an interesting intellectual challenge to try to reduce my geolibertarian principles to a size that could fit in an LP radical's, um, bumper sticker. And the world title was just sitting there waiting to be taken...<br /><br />As a reminder, the Platform Formerly Known As World's Smallest says:<br /><blockquote>[X] supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope or power of government at any level or for any purpose.</blockquote>The new reigning champion says:<br /><blockquote>Outlaw only fraud and force initiation. Tax only land rent and polluting/ congesting/ consuming the commons. Provide only network natural monopolies and protection of life and liberty.</blockquote>It's smaller by word count, byte count, and space on the page. However, I don't want the tarnished WSPP trophy, which could obviously be taken away by a determined contender. For now I'll just call this beta draft the World's Smallerest Political Platform (aka WSrPP), since that sounds better than The Three Geolibertarian Commandments.<br /><br />I won't in this posting elaborate on all its obvious and subtle advantages over the PFKAWS. Instead I'll just note that if space had allowed, the next Commandment might be this alliterative one: "Do it all decentrally, democratically, with due process and never discrimination." You can think of these four Commandments as the stone table summary of my draft <a href="http://ecolibertarian.org/manifesto">33 EcoLibertarian Theses</a>. An even shorter version might be<br /><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="font-weight: bold;">What you do or make is fully yours, but what you take or spoil is not.</blockquote>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com1