Libertarian Roger McBride Campaigns for the Presidency, by David Shutts, the Cavalier daily, February 20, 1976 page 4. (link)
“Abortions, marijuana smoking, supplying arms to some arcane tribe in Angola, that’s none of my damn business.” That is the attitude that Roger L MacBride, 46, believes to be generally popular across the United States as he campaigns for the presidency on the Libertarian party ticket.
He contends that while people don’t always vocalize a laissez-faire and power-to-the-individual outlook, it is present today as it was in the frontier days of the old West. But while present, it is stifled by moral restrictions that America’s superego, the Calvinist Doctrine, supplies. “We’re anti-Calvinist,” said MacBride bluntly.
MacBride has been a resident of Charlottesville for the past eight years where he has practiced law, written, and directed the estate of the late Rose Wilder Lane, whose mother wrote the basis for the nationally televised Little House on the Prairie series.
MacBride’s association with Rose Wilder Lane was not dissimilar to Ernest Hemingway’s association with Gertrude Stein. MacBride looked to Lane for political wisdom and inspiration much as Hemingway learned of the art of writing from Stein.
MacBride met Lane when he was a reporter in Oklahoma during a summer vacation from Winston University. She knew such diverse political figures as Herbert Hoover and Trotsky, and they spent much time together and developed a warm friendship.
When she died, she had named MacBride executor of her estate, which was considerable. Today, MacBride, who owns a DC-3 which he uses for business and campaigning, has solidified his political past into an active belief in the Libertarian party. It is important to realize that a vote for the libertarians is a vote for a government that would be opposed to government, or at least, government as we know it now.
The libertarians would like to see more emphasis on individual freedom, no restrictive moral laws, and a governmental body whose only function is the administration of the most essential welfare programs and defense against foreign aggression and internal disruption.
In essence, libertarianism means a desanctification of the state and a “don’t tread on me” attitude.
“The libertarians don’t believe in the cozy relationships between big business and the federal government, corporation coddling, and we’ve had enough of it,” said MacBride.
He spoke of “utter abolition” of such agencies as the CIA, adding “we should beef up the Defense Intelligence Agency and not have clandestine operations at all.”
On foreign policy, MacBride says simply that there should be a non-interventionist policy. He said that a working, growing, successfully free nation is the best defense against communism.
“The ideology of Lenin says basically that the spread of communism would not be successful with the outright militarism. They will try to win from within us,” he said.
McBride said without such ventures as Angola, which he terms “only a geographically marked reality,” Vietnam, and the general pattern of outdated Wilsonian foreign-policy, “we could save half of the hundred and $12 billion defense budget.”
On taxes, the fuel of such massive programs as defense, McBride said, “I would take a meat axe to federal spending, reducing taxes. I would do away with welfare, except for those who could not work: we couldn’t pull the chair out from underneath all welfare people just because of Franklin Roosevelt’s doings. We would give them an alternative chair… a free economy.” He decries wage and price controls.
“If you would like to take your perfectly good car and turn it into a taxicab just to earn some extra bucks, you would have to get a license, take tests, pay taxes, and on and on, but you shouldn’t have to. You should be free enough to work on your own, and let the customer determine the quality instead of an expensive government bureaucracy,” said MacBride.
He admires private citizens like Ralph Nader, who are showing the public defects in governmentally approved market items constantly. “The government lulls people into a feeling of safety,” he added.
MacBride’s party, which stresses what could be termed responsible anarchy, requires a vastly new psychology from Americans: “we aren’t psychologically prepared now,” he said, “but we have to start somewhere. It’s clearly time for a change.”
To effect these changes, the libertarians are working with approximately $2 million in their treasury.
“We don’t need as much money as the Democrats and the Republicans because our platform stands out clearly, while they have to pay to differentiate between themselves,” McBride said, adding with a smile, “wealth is always three weeks from our door.”
Mail-order requests for contributions are the most common way the libertarians have of raising funds. Their funding is sufficient for them to have opened a headquarters office in Washington DC, where MacBride’s staff cooperates with Eugene MacCarthy’s campaigning team.
“Gene should have been the winner in ’68, and we wouldn’t have had Nixon and the rest of that mess. While I don’t see eye-to-eye with him (MacCarthy), I think he’s a great man.” He added that contacts acquired through MacCarthy have aided in his campaign.
The Libertarian party’s cry for laissez-faire and individual freedom does not include an official stance on such delicate issues as abortions. [False! Link ]
MacBride believes, that abortion should be left up to the woman and her doctor, following the Supreme Court’s restrictions on timing.
[1976 Libertarian Platform plank language: “We further support the repeal of all laws restricting voluntary birth control or the right of the woman to make a personal moral choice regarding the termination of pregnancy.”] (history link)
When asked why he thought abortion was such a major issue in this year’s presidential campaign, he said, “I’ll be damned if I could answer you, but I’ll tell you this: I was giving a speech one night in the Midwest, and after the speech this man came up to me and said he agreed with me 100%, then he asked me what I thought of abortion, and when I told him I felt it should be up to the individual and not the state, he said he couldn’t vote for me.”
MacBride and his running mate, David Bergland, 40, a California lawyer, realized that it would be a longshot for them to win in ’76, but, said MacBride, we are going to run in 32 or 39 states and hope people will see the other choice they have.” (The Cavalier Daily 20FEB1976 4)
The Libertarian Party candidates did indeed WIN again in 1976, just as the we WON in 1972. It is true that the entrenched looter parties got more votes than we did, but the purpose of the Libertarian Party back then was to increase freedom, that is, reduce coercion. In 1976 the LP earned 4600% more votes than in the previous election–forty-six times a many votes.
The slope of the trendline in original scale is 88.8 degrees! The loss of votes from frustrated girl-bullying males was clearly dwarfed by the votes gotten from women. Women had for the first time in history enjoyed four years of increased individual rights, thanks to the Libertarian plank the Supreme Court copied into Roe v Wade the month the first Libertarian electoral vote was counted. The 1972 LP campaign freed women of coercion into involuntary servitude by laws written by Anthony Comstock and the New York Book-Burning Society of 1873–year of the Financial Panic by that name. Yet the backlash from disrupting that 100-year reign of hateful superstition arrived with the infiltration of the Republican Party by a smaller, harder, angrier bunch of race-suicide mystical conservatives herding Ronald Reagan ahead of their coercive platform. Ayn Rand had something to say about that.
Good reading: Viable Values, by Dr Tara Smith (link)
Get the big picture in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.
Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle (link)
ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the Political Asylum instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)
Check out LIBtranslator, my political economy blog at https://libertrans.blogspot.com/
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or www.amigra.us
My financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, is at libertrans.blogspot.com