From the Archives: Libertarian youth leader from New Zealand discusses his party’s politics

Libertarian youth leader from New Zealand discusses his party’s politics
May 22, 2012 12:25 PM MST

Libertarians are not active in politics solely in the United States. There are libertarian movements and political parties scattered through the Western democracies.

In New Zealand, for instance, there is the ACT Party. That name may seem funny, at first, until one understands that it began as an acronym.

Peter McCaffrey was a parliamentary candidate for the ACT Party in 2008 and 2011, when he was just 21 and 24 years old, respectively. He recently sat down for an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner during a Republican Liberty Caucus social event.

At the time, McCaffrey was traveling through the United States on his way to take a job with a free-market think-tank in Regina, Saskatchewan.

About that acronym

The letters A-C-T, he explained, “used to stand for the ‘Association of Consumers and Taxpayers.’ That was when ACT was set up as a think-tank” almost 20 years ago.

“New Zealand adopted the mixed-member proportional electoral system” in 1994, he continued, with plans to hold the first election under that system in 1996. At that time, “the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers decided that with the implementation of a proportional electoral system, actually it would be better to be set up as a party rather than a think tank and so it became the ACT Party.”

The initials do not “stand for anything now but that’s the origin of the name,” McCaffrey said.

‘Classical liberal’

He describes the party as “a classical liberal party but there’s a bit of a fusion there.”

Older members, he explained, tend to be “more conservative-leaning” or split among liberals and conservatives, while “the younger membership tends to be much more liberal, even leaning towards libertarian.”

During the most recent parliamentary elections in November 2011, McCaffrey explained, the party’s “main focus was on the economy, getting tax rates down, [and] cutting regulation,” as well as advocating for school choice.

“We’ve been doing a big push for charter schools,” he said.

“In New Zealand, we have some private schools that are generally privately funded and we have state schools that are state-funded and state-run but there’s not a lot of choice in between those, so we ran a big push for more choice in education,” he said.

During the election campaign, he noted, the ACT Party made a coalition agreement with the National Party, a conservative party in New Zealand, and the two partners “pushed for an implementation of some trials of charter schools in New Zealand.” As a result, he said, “we’ll be setting up a couple of charter schools, one in South Auckland and one in Christ Church and hopefully more over the next three years as part of that deal.”

Under the new charter school law, he explained, the schools may “be run by any number of different non-profit organizations. Whether that’s Iwi, which are local Maori groups (Maori are the indigenous people in New Zealand) or charities, church groups, anything like that will be able to set up a school and run it.”

The new rules allow “more flexibility in the arrangements of the school so that there’s more choice for people in which schools they send their children to,” he said.

Liberalized drug laws

Generally, McCaffrey said, the ACT Party does not “get too involved in social issues. We try to focus on economics but that doesn’t always happen. Our leader last year” -- Donald Brash, a former New Zealand reserve bank governor – “surprised a lot of the journalists when he came out in support of liberalization of marijuana laws,” including decriminalization or legalization. That position came after heavy lobbying on the part of “some of the younger members of the party.”

That position, he pointed out, “startled a lot of people and maybe scared off some of our older members and supporters but it really got the media talking about the issue. It surprised a lot of people who saw us as sort of an old white conservative party, which, I think, was good for the image of the party long run.”

McCaffrey’s own involvement in ACT is relatively recent but it has spanned his whole adult life, so far.

Learning in high school

“I turned 18 in 2005,” he said, which is the voting age in New Zealand, as it is in the United States.

While he was still in high school, he said, “I just read the web sites of all the main parties that were in the parliament and had a bit of a think. ACT seemed to make the most sense, and so I voted for ACT in 2005,” the first year he was eligible to cast a ballot.

Then, he said, “having voted for ACT, when I got to university, there was a table at the orientation week for ACT on Campus, which is the youth wing of the ACT Party. I signed up to ACT on Campus and then over the next couple of years I got more and more involved in the ACT on Campus group and also in the party itself.”

McCaffrey explained that the “party is very open to young people, volunteers coming in, even coming into the parliamentary offices, helping out, volunteering, doing research -- all that sort of stuff -- so just sort of slowly I got more and more involved.”

Eventually, he “ended up being the ACT on Campus president, leading the youth wing of the party” and later he was selected to serve on “the board for the Wellington region” (equivalent to the unit committee of an American political party) “and stood as a candidate for the party for parliament in 2008 and 2011 in my local district,” Otaki.

He was not elected, however, noting modestly that “to be honest, my district isn’t a very good area for ACT, so I was kind of the only one who was willing to do it in my area.”

That turn of events, of course, is what brought McCaffrey to North America, where he continues to work on the sorts of issues that brought him into politics in his native New Zealand.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on May 22, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

You Keep Using That Phrase, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

An article published this week in Foreign Policy brought to mind the memetic line of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, "You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means."

Writing under the headline "Economic Rights Are Human Rights," Yale University's Samuel Moyn shows by the second paragraph of his article that he doesn't know what he's talking about:

For 40 years, America’s human rights policy has focused narrowly on political and civil liberties and has been coupled with a free market libertarian agenda for the world. By neglecting social and economic rights and the vast disparities both within and among nations, U.S. policy has exacerbated many of the evils it set out to eradicate. It needs an overhaul.

A "free market libertarian agenda for the world" is exactly what has promoted economic rights and liberties for the past generation. By promoting free market policies around the world, poverty has been reduced to a tiny fraction of what it was only 40 years ago. People nearly everywhere are healthier, wealthier, and better educated than their parents and grandparents were.

Why only "nearly everywhere"? Because some countries have refused to liberalize their economies, thus perpetuating and deepening the poverty experienced by all but the political elites and their cronies in the limited business sector. Compare, for instance, Botswana and Zimbabwe -- neighboring countries but one is politically free and economically prosperous while the other is both politically oppressed and economically depressed.  The conditions on both sides of the Botswana-Zimbabwe border are inextricably intertwined.

Check out anything posted to HumanProgress.org if you are skeptical of my claims.

By the way, I clicked on the article;s link because I agree with the headline: Economic rights are, indeed, human rights.  In fact, I addressed that issue from a somewhat different angle way back in 1991, just as the economic freedom revolution began to advance around the globe.

#StarWarsDay Guest Post: What's So Bad about the Galactic Empire?

by Sean Malone

Everyone familiar with Star Wars knows that the Empire is bad, and the Rebellion is good.

But, why?

Seriously. What makes life under Emperor Palpatine so unbearable, and what would make life under the New Republic so much better, for the ordinary citizens of the galaxy? The movies offer surprisingly little information as to what's actually wrong with Imperial rule.

Now, I'm not talking about blowing up planets or Anakin murdering Jedi children. I'm talking about the daily lives of ordinary citizens. People who don't have any connection to the Sith or the Jedi or the battle for the Senate or any of that stuff.

Sure, behind closed doors, Emperor Palpatine is secretly a Sith Lord who can shoot light bolts from his hands. That definitely seems evil, but, according to the movies, nobody but a few Jedi even knows about it. He doesn't walk down the street electrocuting random peasants.

For the most part, his brutality seems to be limited to confrontations with the Rebel Alliance.

And yeah, Darth Vader is one of the most intimidating villains of all time, and he's obviously a menace to Rebellion soldiers and the Jedi, but imagine you're just some ordinary moisture farmer going about his business on Tatooine. Unless your name is Owen Lars, Darth Vader almost certainly doesn't care about you. He's mainly interested in finding Luke Skywalker. So the question is, what would it mean to live in a Galaxy "ruled" by the Empire, and why is it the ultimate depiction of Tyranny in popular culture?

The more I've thought about this, the more I have struggled to come up with an answer based on anything actually depicted in the films themselves.

Part of the problem is that in most Star Wars movies, the characters are all fighting in a single political struggle. And apart from Padme's interminable dialogue about Senatorial procedure in the Prequels, there's almost no discussion of governing philosophy in the entire series.

Ask yourself: What does the Rebel Alliance stand for besides the destruction of the Empire, and what does the Empire stand for apart from maintaining power?

In A New Hope, Grand Moff Tarkin at least offers some insight into the Empires operation, when he explains that regional governors have “complete control” over their territories.

But, what does that actually mean? What policies does the Emperor want to be enforced across the Galaxy? What is it that he's actually imposing on his citizens that requires multiple planet-destroying superweapons to enforce?

I mean, I get that Palpatine wanted power, but, what does he actually do with it?

Once he acquired political control over the Galaxy, did he ban gay marriage? Droid marriage? Gay droid marriage? Did he ban books and restrict speech? Does Star Wars even have books? Did he nationalize (or “Galactize”) major industries?

For something that's so important to the story, Star Wars doesn't really even try to answer these questions.

When Liberty Dies

But here's what we do know.

First, there's a lot of smuggling in the Star Wars universe. And that probably means that there are a lot of laws and regulations making various goods and services costly or illegal. Prohibiting or restricting trade creates Black Markets, it can also impoverish many people and make their lives much harder when they can't access the things that they want and need.

Even though it's the invisible fabric of everyone's daily life, commerce doesn't really seem to exist in the Star Wars universe at all, but one way the Empire could be ruining people's lives is by controlling what gets bought, sold, or traded; dictating prices; or by taxing everything so much that even basic necessities become impossible to afford.

Another thing we know is that the Imperial military uses its power against citizens of the Empire, and not just in terms of collateral damage.

In Star Wars: Rebels, Storm Troopers and other Imperial agents are often seen conscripting innocent people into their armies and seizing their property without compensation. More recently, in Rogue One, we see a Star Destroyer hovering over a Kybur Crystal mine, and the Empire appears to force people to work in the mines in order to acquire key components of the Death Star.

We might assume that the Imperial military gets many or most of its supplies and resources through similar means – stealing from people around the galaxy, taking their property by force. But that assumes some kind of property rights, and that's never fully established in that world.

And there's one more terrible thing we know about the Empire from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Reformed Storm Trooper Finn (FN-2187) explains to Rey that he was actually taken from his family as a child, conscripted into the Imperial Army, and trained to be a soldier. That's a form of slavery that many real-world governments have used throughout history. Sadly even the United States government still has the power to draft its citizens into war, though that hasn't happened for decades.

Unfortunately, Star Wars never actually wrestles with these issues in any meaningful way.

It seems to assume that the major difference between a "good" world and a "bad" world is the presence of Democracy, but that's hardly a guarantee. Many Democratic leaders have created misery for their citizens and even used Democracy to amass power and become dictators themselves – just like Emperor Palpatine did.

I think the idea that a Senator becoming Chancellor becoming the Emperor works so well in the film because it's so true to what we actually see in real life. And when Padme says “This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause,” she gets to the real issue here.

Liberty.

The only answer to this question that actually makes sense is that the Empire is an awful place to live because its people lack individual freedom.

Citizens of the Empire aren't secure in their possessions and property. They can't go where they want without being stopped by Imperial forces. They can be imprisoned or forced into an army without a trial or the opportunity to say no, and restrictions on trade and commerce make them poor and condemn them to getting what they need from dangerous black markets, smugglers, and gangsters.

If the Rebellion stands against that, then they are true heroes.

Sean Malone is the Director of Media at FEE. His films have been featured in the mainstream media and throughout the free-market educational community.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.