1. 2018?? Good luck with that!

2. thanks!

3. He calls himself an independent, but he’s just a maverick.

4. Let him waste his time and money.

5. At least he’s starting early, unlike McMullin.

6. If he really wants to run outside of the major parties, he might as well pick up the LP nomination and have a big head start on ballot access. He’s not a doctrinaire libertarian, but his inclinations are close enough that he could make it work and it would probably be a deal worth taking for the party.

7. Andy Craig – nope, he’s better off running as an independent. The LP is a kiss of death if you actually want to get elected. Why you ask?

   1. Perception of the voters – they believe LPers are open border loving, meth apologist, anarchists. Oh wait – they are.
   2. Sucking up to the 300 doctrinaire LP convention delegates is demeaning. What if they don’t nominate you?

   Besides, building his own independent organization will both create his grass roots organization and get his name even better known than just as panelist on a cable TV show (note that Trump had his own show on a major network – big difference).

   That said, he has zero chance in hell of getting elected president without the D or R establishment behind him. Maybe he should run as a D?

8. Actually Don, anarchists are on the left, not the right. They also oppose private property and capitalism, both things Libertarians worship, so you’d be wrong to just call the Libertarian Party anarchist.

9. Libertarians are neither left nor right and a substantial minority of us are in fact anarchists. We do not oppose private property, but we do believe that people can govern themselves without a government monopoly. We don’t worship “capitalism,” an intentionally confusing term in a political context which is designed to obscure the difference between free markets, which we support, and corporatism, which we oppose. Most LP members are not anarchists, however, it is true that our platform does call for ending the drug war completely. Unfortunately, the current party platform is not completely “open borders,” although certainly more in that direction than actual government policy at the moment, much less the closed borders rhetoric of the Republican base.

   The attendance at the 2016 LP convention was over 1,000 and I suspect that if Cuban runs in 2020 it will not be smaller. If he seeks the LP nomination he could still get on the ballot in many states as an independent if he doesn’t get it. Depending on the dates of the 2020 convention – I am not aware of them having been picked yet, but I could be forgetting something – there may be some states where he will need to choose one or the other before the convention takes place. A majority of LP delegates have shown themselves to be quite ready to accept any celebrity, multimillionaire or politician who comes along making exaggerated promises of success and questionable claims of conversion to libertarianism, so even though we could in fact reject such a candidate in theory, we haven’t shown the requisite backbone in reality.

10. Funny thing about those Libertarian Party national conventions. You often hear radical statements by the attendees, but they often actually nominate the most moderate candidate of the bunch for President.

11. Yes, we are a diverse group of people who don’t always agree with each other. Some of us are radicals whereas others are more moderate, and some are theoretically radical libertarians who like to fantasize that they are being more strategic by nominating more moderate candidates and/or try to give candidates making exaggerated claims about how much money, votes and media coverage they can gather and the extent to which they have come to embrace libertarian principles the benefit of the doubt. Imagine that. It’s a question of who bothers to show up as a delegate and how well organized the various campaigns seeking the nomination are at managing their convention floor operations.

12. I’m just saying that when it comes to European politics (which I frankly use as a base for rational politics considering how conservative the U.S. is in world terms), the anarchists side with the leftists and socialists in those countries against the neoliberals predominate in their main parties. I’m sure there are many definitions of anarchist, some of which most certainly do oppose the owning of private property, and they tend more towards the left on the spectrum.

13. Some anarchists do oppose private property while some don’t. All of these definitional issues and the history involved are explained by Roderick Long very well in “Rothbard’s Left and Right 40 Years Later” which you can find in a variety of formats (video, print etc) various places online.

14. The SCOTUS hacks and the brain dead media have made each Prez into a killer tyrant- dictator- emperor for many decades — the People are paying the price —

    possible Civil War II and/or World War III at any second —

    a quite possible total econ collapse due to USA regime debt — on top of State/local debts and private debts.

    The EVIL top Donkey/Elephant hacks love the divide and conquer E.C. math by having NO chance minor party and independent Prez candidates

    — 1860 Lincoln 39 percent, 1992 Clinton 43 percent, 2016 Trump 46 percent — to name a few.
    —
    PR and AppV

15. Don – I agree that he’s probably better off avoiding the Libertarian Party. His politics aren’t a perfect fit and he doesn’t really need to risk being rejected by the Libertarian debate club.

    He’s a billionaire. If he started early enough, he could write a check without blinking that would get him on the ballot in all 50 states.

    I would also point out that Cuban’s “Shark Tank” is an ABC show, reruns air on CNBC almost nightly. It draws comparable ratings to the President’s own (now cancelled) Celebrity Apprentice series. He’s also the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. So he’s not a obscure figure.

    But I suspect Cuban is just doing what Trump did for years, teasing a presidential campaign as a way to stir up press coverage and promote his various projects and businesses.

16. Last year Cuban said he was willing to be the vice-president for both Trump and Clinton. I wonder what he has against Jill Stein?

17. Andy Craig said: “If he really wants to run outside of the major parties, he might as well pick up the LP nomination and have a big head start on ballot access. He’s not a doctrinaire libertarian, but his inclinations are close enough that he could make it work and it would probably be a deal worth taking for the party.”

    Screw this. I’m sick and tired of the Libertarian Party not running candidates on its presidential ticket who are actually libertarians. The last time the LP had anyone on its presidential ticket that I’d even reasonably call a libertarian was back in 2004. The Libertarian Party either needs to run actual libertarians on its presidential ticket, or it might as well shut down.

18. Paulie said: ” Unfortunately, the current party platform is not completely “open borders,” although certainly more in that direction than actual government policy at the moment, much less the closed borders rhetoric of the Republican base.”

    The true libertarian position on borders and migration/immigration is that the state should not exist, and all land should be in the hands of private property owners who’d have the full right to discriminate against whoever they wanted for whatever reason, so this does not mean “open borders”, it means private property borders. “Open borders” into a democratic welfare state that has forced association and public property, which is the present conditions under which we live, is not a libertarian position, it is a position held by Marxists and those who want global government, and is NOT libertarian at all.

    It is no coincidence that Socialist International and the Council on Foreign Relations push for “open borders”. These people are not remotely libertarian.

    So if you want to abolish state control of borders and immigration, the ONLY way to do it and not cause a disaster (as in lead to more conflict, and more government), is to privatize all of the land, eliminate all welfare programs, eliminate taxes and government control over money, eliminate all forced association laws, eliminate democracy (voluntary organizations could still have democratic elections, but the results would apply only to those who consented to the election), all of which means eliminating the state, which means establishing an anarcho-capitalist society, which would not have “open borders”, as it would have private property borders.

19. I wouldn’t be thrilled with Cuban at the top of the LP ticket. If someone more principled were at the top, I’d tolerate Cuban as the VP if he were also injecting substantial sums of money, which I’m not sure he would. Cuban’s advice for a $1.6 billion dollar power ball winner was “Tell all your friends and relatives no. They will ask. Tell them no. … No one needs $100,000 for anything.” So I’m not convinced he would be willing to put $50 million of his own money into the campaign, and if he didn’t, what’s the point?

20. The Council on Foreign Relations is not libertarian, but they are no means at all anywhere close to socialist either. They’d fall into the neoconservative, corporatist label, I’d guess, but I can almost promise no socilaist would ever claim them.

21. “The true libertarian position on borders and migration/immigration is that the state should not exist, and all land should be in the hands of private property owners who’d have the full right to discriminate against whoever they wanted for whatever reason, so this does not mean “open borders”, it means private property borders.”

    That is false. Only a minority of libertarians believe the state should not exist at all. Regardless of whether it exists or not, its borders are not and never can be analogous to private property lines, because the state is not the legitimate owner or co-owner of everyone’s property within the borders it claims. If it were, it would legitimately have much broader powers than it does currently, never mind that it would have in any kind of libertarian theory, to exercise the customary property rights of all property owners anywhere. Your goofy pretzel logic would have us asking the government how we can wear our hair on “its” property, or who we may or may not invite into our homes, even if “own” them.

22. Andy’s notions of “true libertarian” are actually a far right perversion of libertarianism mixed with the extreme ethnonationalist far right known as “paleolibertarianism,” an embarrassing failed experiment in fusionism with extremist bigots which has continued to plague the larger libertarian movement.

    Even the term paleolibertarianism is nonsensical – it doesn’t represent an older or original form of libertarianism, but is a mix of paleoconservatives (the “Old Right”) and libertarianism.

23. That would be Andy J., not Andy Craig, in case anyone isn’t clear, since they both commented here.

24. How many adjectives, adverbs and nouns in the New Age politics dictionary ???

    — each with at least a thousand words definition.

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