Open Letter to Harry Browne
Home Up

 

by Chuck Avey

C-Span broadcast your convention speech last evening in which you enumerated key ideas. I am a Republican on the Libertarian sidelines, just observing but interested. I do contribute both money and ideas to CATO--as well as to Republicans. Old party alignments are undergoing agitation that might lead to considerable platform changes. This is where Libertarians' hope lies: inducing platform changes by Republicans.

I am enough of a dreamer to think that we should start over with the Constitution of 1789.

  1. Harmonize state legislative district boundaries with congressional district boundaries. The original states should have done that as a matter of policy.
  2. Limit state legislative districts to population numbers small enough that people can know personally their two-year- representative.
  3. Divide each congressional district into an odd number of state legislative districts to avoid voting deadlocks.
  4. Empower the two-year-term state legislator from each district to be the representative of that district for voting purposes to fill all other state and federal elective offices.

I read nothing in the 1789 Constitution to prevent it.

The implications are enormous in light of all the present-day problems with the election process. I have become very skeptical of the prevailing amending atmosphere of that 1912 to 1922 decade, when the utopian Progressives were irresponsibly messing with the Constitution. This letter is printed on the back page of just one of the disastrous social changes germinated in that period.

Political scientists should be re-evaluating that period, looking for cause and effect relationships between its amendments and how they have changed our system. Corollary with that study is another puzzler: What causes America to be unique among nations? Is it the people? Or is it the organizational framework within which they operate? My opinion is that, because we have not given enough credit to our founders and their original framework, we have slipped backwards toward less uniqueness.

If the Libertarians stick to such basics, I'm betting that our political atmosphere will become livelier.

 

This page was last updated 07/02/00 01:50 PM