What is the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus?

The Libertarian Party Mises Caucus (LPMC) is named in honor of Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist whose work focused on how the unhampered market is the only means of allocating resources to satisfy people's wants. His insight was that every government intervention in the market, whether in the form of money printing, wage and price controls, licensing restrictions, subsidies, taxation or anything else, only serves to divert resources away from satisfying consumer preferences, leaving everyone generally worse off.

Mises, together with his students Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard, founded the modern Austrian School of economics that continues to study the benefits of the free market and the evils of government intervention.

This Austrian revival in turn helped inspired the modern libertarian movement, particularly the presidential campaigns of Ron Paul.

The LPMC believes the economic insights of the Austrian School are a crucial weapon in the Libertarian arsenal. We need to understand not just how government intervention is immoral but also how it undermines our own material interests by wasting resources and lowering living standards.

Austrian economics also shows us that certain government activities, like war and central banking, are particularly harmful and should be the focus of our opposition.

The LPMC platform focuses on the following issues:

• Property Rights: Private property rights are natural and essential to a free society. Only property rights allow us to determine just ownership of scarce resources and avoid conflict. Property rights are incompatible with our current corporatist system of government privileges for favored businesses. They are also incompatible with the proposed socialist alternative of public ownership and management of all resources.

• Sound Money: The Federal Reserve is a particularly odious institution because it has the unique privilege (protected by the federal government) of creating new money out of nothing to fund government activity and favored corporate interests. This sets in motion inflationary pressures that essentially redistribute wealth from the working and middle class to the ruling elite, i.e. it is a hidden form of taxation that enables the government to continue its other activities at our expense. The LPMC seeks the abolition of the Federal Reserve system and of a centralized monetary policy, allowing individuals to choose what money to use, whether gold, silver, Bitcoin or anything else.

• Armed Neutrality: The longstanding policy of global interventionism has got to go. Our armed forces (if used at all) should be used only against direct attacks on our territory. Not only do our interventions create chaos and instability across the world, they also provoke retaliation and divert vast amounts of resources from productive uses on the market to funding militarism at home and abroad. The LMPC seeks withdrawal of all our troops from foreign countries and an accompanying downsizing of the military-industrial complex.

• Political Decentralization: The central government is far too powerful and overrides local communities with impunity, when state and local authorities should be the main bulwarks against its encroachment on our liberty. The right of political self-determination is simply a manifestation of freedom of association that all Libertarians support. Every smaller political unit, down even to the level of the individual, has the right to unilaterally secede from a larger political unit or to nullify the larger unit's legislation. For the LPMC, this leads to a special emphasis on local campaigns and ballot initiatives, and they have developed model legislative proposals that Libertarians could introduce at the state and local level to nullify unconstitutional and oppressive federal laws.

Check out the initiatives of the LPMC here

What I like about the LPMC platform is its focused radicalism and openness to coalition building. They give Libertarians much-needed guidance on what issues to push hard on and how to do it most effectively.

For example, political decentralization suggests that we should work for drug legalization as much at the state and local level as at the federal level, and to work with other groups focused on that issue who might strongly disagree with us on most other issues. There are movements across the states to nullify federal prohibition of cannabis and other drugs; the more we can get states to simply ignore the federal government on this issue, the less it will even matter that we have failed to capture Washington and the more we can show Washington to be powerless to enforce its edicts when enough localities refuse to cooperate. (JG)

To learn more read their platform

And visit the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus Facebook page