Philip Bender is running as our Ontario Libertarian Party candidate in the March 17 Dufferin-Peel-Wellington-Grey by-election against Progressive Conservative front-runner and PC Leader John Tory. By the time you read this, the results should be in.

Phil emphasizes principles: “I am inspired by our party's values: personal responsibility, individual liberty, recognition of property rights, free and voluntary associations, freedom of expression, and voluntary mutual aid. Libertarians accept people as they are.”

He is a Professional Engineer, and owner/manager of an independent telephone company, Ability Telecom. He was also a member of a taskforce to bring high-speed Internet service to rural areas of Erin, and he has served on the Erin Township Library Board.

As the owner of a farm, Phil sympathizes with other property owners who are affected by the Greenbelt Act and similar legislation, and unlike John Tory, he takes a strong stand for property rights against government regulation of land use. The Liberals want government to decide what happens to your property. John Tory wants so-called "science" - and government - to decide what happens to your property. Libertarians like Philip Bender want YOU to decide!

Phil’s main reason for running, aside from having someone he can vote for, is to expose more people to the Libertarian name and ideas. John Oakley interviewed Phil during his morning show on 640 AM Radio and had some very positive things to say about libertarianism. Phil was also interviewed by reporters from the Orangeville Banner and the Guelph Mercury. Rogers Cable taped the All Candidates meeting held in Orangeville and is running the program twice a day until the election. Campaign Manager Paolo Fabrizio spent several afternoons in Bolton distributing pamphlets, while Tom Gelmon, Heath Thomas, Bob Shapton and Jim McIntosh spent several hours Sunday March 13 distributing pamphlets in Orangeville.

The next election is only two and a half years away, so start thinking about who you will vote for and how you can help spread the Libertarian word. Call Paolo Fabrizio, Campaign Director for the Party, to find out how the Party can help you.

LPC Convention May 21 & 22

By LPC Party Leader Jean-Serge Brisson

You are invited to the rebirth of the federal party after it successfully achieved re-registration with the participation of many of you who are receiving the Bulletin. The party will be holding its first convention as an officially registered party since 1996. The event will be of great interest with speakers including:

Michael Cloud: a widely read author and seminar leader, joint promoter of a ballot initiative to *end* the income tax in Massachusetts (45.3% of the vote) and 2002 Libertarian Party Candidate for Senate (19% of the vote). Michael will be speaking on "The Possibility of Liberty" and conducting a seminar "The Battlefield or the Marketplace?”

Jan Narveson: Professor of Philosophy (U. of Waterloo), Member of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada, widely read author (Including The Libertarian Idea) and as a member and supporter of the Libertarian Party is currently updating the party policies. Jan will be speaking on choice and conducting a workshop on the party platform.

Mark Mullins: Director of Ontario Policy Studies of the Fraser Institute. With a PhD from the London School of Economics Mark has written extensively on subjects such as Canadian tax reform, stock market and investment issues, and global telecommunications. He is also a regular media commentator and has a regular column at globeandmail.com.

Neil Cameron: a professor specializing in the history of science and ideas, columnist, and formerly an elected MPP with the Equality Party (PQ) will be giving a speech titled 'Liberty in Canada and in the World, 1975 to the Present'.

There will be elections for the party executive and other party business as per the previous conventions. Updates will be made available on the party website and on the LPC forum. Your Master of Ceremonies will be George Dance.

The Venue

Tradition has been to hold our convention on the Victoria Day weekend. Tradition is what should be followed to show the continuity of what the party stands for. The convention is on Saturday May 21 and Sunday May 22.

The cost of attending the convention is $95 dollars for checks mailed prior to March 15, $110 dollars after. This includes all activities, one lunch and three snacks. Accommodation not included.

Ramada Inn

185 Yorkland Blvd.

Toronto, Ontario, M2J 4R2

(416) 493-9000

The hotel is located near Highway 401 and the Don Valley Parkway. A limited number of rooms have been held at reduced rates for convention attendees.

I hope to see as many of you as possible at this very special event.

Leader’s Report

Sam Apelbaum

The state continues its relentless growth. Meanwhile, Canadians remain deferential to authority and many even welcome more government intrusion in their lives. Save for fringe libertarian groups, like our own party, almost no one is questioning the legitimacy of all the meddling, controls, regulations, prohibitions, demands, hindrances, interferences, threats, seizures and imposts. While there are some cries for better management, even those voices are becoming fainter and increasingly irrelevant in the face of growing cynicism, apathy and political corruption.

There is no modern culture of freedom in Canada. Until we have a culture in which freedom is valued and defended, nothing will change. With half of everything produced in Canada now being confiscated by various governments and the other half beset with as many barriers to efficient production and enjoyment as the politicians and bureaucrats can invent, Canadians are inexorably attaining the status of plantation slaves.

Why have we so meekly permitted governments to consume our lives? I think it mostly follows from unthinking acceptance of two false premises. The first is that democracy equates to freedom. In fact, democracy is no more than a useful means for control of governments and not permission granted for unrestrained exercise of power and disregard for individual rights by the elected power holders. Being able to vote for new masters at the next election does not make us free.

The second false premise is that governments are indispensable for certain activities such as medical care, education and caring for the poor. This in spite of governments consistently failing to deliver, no matter how much money they are given to burn. Couple these two phony premises with greed of the worst sort for stolen money and favours, grandiose socialist entitlement schemes, entrenched interest groups, fear of personal responsibility and fear of change, and the result is today’s toxic culture of slavery.

In weaker moments I sometimes wonder whether individual liberty is fundamentally inconsistent with human nature, always destined to be a short-term anomaly in human affairs.

Advocacy of freedom seems to challenge the experience of history, which instructs us that every society will eventually develop a group of elite rulers, courtiers and other self-seeking hangers-on feeding upon the servitude and ignorance of everyone else. Fortunately, such moments of doubt have been brief, and I choose to believe we will eventually free ourselves from the chains of the past. If liberty is to triumph, however, we must not undermine our message by compromising in any way with the irrational collectivist ideology dominating the thinking of today’s intellectuals. Stridency in the defence of liberty is a virtue, which should be cultivated.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.

-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Honouring the Legacy of Ayn Rand

By George Dance

February 2 was the birthday of two important women.

One was my wife, Maureen; the other was novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, born 100 years ago that day in St. Petersburg, Russia. Libertarians can learn much from the latter’s writing and from the example of her life.

As a teenager, Rand grew up under Soviet Communism - an experience that left her a lifelong enemy of socialism. At 21 she escaped to the United States, stayed by marrying, and lived in near-poverty while learning English and her writer’s craft and creating her philosophy. During the next 30 years, she presented that philosophy in four novels: We The Living (1936), Anthem (1938), The Fountainhead (1943), and Atlas Shrugged (1957).

That philosophy (which she later named Objectivism can be summed up as: An external world objectively exists. Humans are living beings in that world, who face an inescapable alternative - life or death. They can survive only by choice; choosing to live is what gives them a purpose and a morality. Survival requires that they use reason; reason alone tells them how to live, and what form of society to have. In such a moral society, each person is an end in himself, all have rights, and no one may initiate force against another. In economics, that implied pure laissez-faire capitalism; in politics, limited-government libertarianism.

All that defied conventional wisdom. For many, the Great Depression proved that free enterprise had failed - politicians, economists, and the public alike embraced big government in all its-variants: Fascism, Communism, the New Deal and the welfare state.

Determinists and others claimed scientific proof that men did not reason, or even choose to do anything. Philosophy had given up on questions such as ‘What really exists?’ and retreated to ivory-tower debates of ones like ‘What does existence mean (and for that matter, ‘what does meaning mean?)_

That mainstream consensus vehemently rejected Rand’s message. We the Living was a commercial failure. No American publisher would touch Anthem, and one declared point-blank that ‘the author does not understand socialism. The Fountainhead was rejected 13 times before finding a publisher; it was promoted poorly, received almost exclusively negative reviews, and took two years to become her first bestseller.

One Rand biographer describes the 1947 filming of The Fountainhead as a constant war to protect her work, a war from which she would emerge battered, bleeding, and without illusions. At one point she even copied her book’s hero, Howard Roark, by threatening to blow up the Warner studio if certain changes were made. In the end, her victory was incomplete: key lines like the one from Roark’s climactic courtroom speech – ‘I am a man who does not exist for others’ ended up on the cutting room floor.

For her next (and last) novel, Rand invested 14 years and over 1000 pages to explain her philosophy and why it mattered. The response was as negative as before.

Liberals hated her advocacy of business and capitalism; conservatives her rejection of religion and faith. Communist pundit Granville Hicks (reviewing Atlas Shrugged for the New York Times) declared that this book was written out of hate. Gore Vidal railed against its ‘nearly perfect immorality’. National Review claimed that it could hear, from almost every page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice commanding ‘To a gas chamber – go’.

Yet Atlas, like The Fountainhead, became a major bestseller. Each has now sold more than 5 million copies, and over 100,000 of each are sold every year. (Total sales of Rand’s books are now over 20 million). One US survey rated Atlas as the most important 20th century novel; another found it the most influential book of all time, after only the Bible. Rand can be found everywhere: in books, articles, scholarly journals and anthologies, on the web, even on a US postage stamp.

Even more importantly, Rand’s ideas now are part of the mainstream. To cite just one example: Her 1964 book on ethics was widely attacked for its title, The Virtue of Selfishness. Yet just 40 years later, when Survivor winner Richard Hatch cashed in with a motivational book full of clichés - and ‘Selfishness is good!’ was one of the clichés - no one batted an eyebrow.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Julia Kellor puts it: ‘Re-reading Rand as an adult in 2005 ... the ideas from Atlas Shrugged you thought you had outgrown ... start making a bit of sense again, in a world upended by religious fanaticism and a nation crippled by soaring government deficits.’ Syndicated columnist Steve Chapman concludes: ‘The truth is that for all [Rand] did, they are no longer her ideas. To a large extent, they are ours.’

That would have pleased Rand, who believed that one should take ideas seriously - which for her meant that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true ... ‘[understanding] that truth and knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life." She often returned to that theme, as in this paragraph - a fitting last word that brilliantly illustrates and integrates her philosophy, her literary style, and her life’s motivation:

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title.”

“Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.”

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

Ayn Rand, "The Meaning of Money," Atlas Shrugged

Community Currency

By Jim McIntosh

On Wednesday February 9, 2005 the Ontario Libertarian Party sponsored a presentation by Tom Kennedy on “Community Currency” in Woodbridge. Tom was interviewed on MOJO Radio, 640 AM the previous morning and gave the Libertarian Party lots of free publicity.

Tom explained that the book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen inspired Michael Minton to create the first Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) in the midst of the 1983 depression. It was a relatively simple accounting system. The buyer would phone the system operator and report the value of the purchase. The system operator would credit the seller’s account and debit the buyer’s account. This allowed for the exchange of goods and services even though “money” was scarce.

In December 2001 citizens of Argentina had lost faith in the value of the government peso and were withdrawing their money from the banks to convert them to US dollars. So the government placed severe restrictions on bank withdrawals, effectively closing the banks, which meant most Argentineans were unable to make exchanges. To fill the vacuum communities turned to “Creditos,” a form of community currency. The market developed a network of such local currencies, with over half a million participants. Many rural communities are accepting Creditos as partial payment for taxes. They can use them to buy local supplies and services. Many communities in Japan are also implementing community currencies to overcome the problems caused by deflation of government currency.

After attending a 4-day conference on Community Currency in June 2004, Tom decided to work on implementing a community currency in his hometown of Tamworth, about an hour north west of Kingston. He found that people in rural communities quickly grasp the concept and are eager to give it a try. Tamworth currency is “labour-based” and called a “Tamworth Hour.” It is convertible to 12 government dollars. The currency is printed with security features to make counterfeiting difficult, however Ithaca, NY, has used “Ithaca Dollars” for many years and has not had a problem with counterfeiting.

Many retailers in Tamworth accept a combination of Tamworth Hours and dollars as payment. Tom recommends they take enough dollars to cover their costs. He plans to go to council when he has enough support to get the town to accept Tamworth Hours as partial payment of taxes.

Some History of Money

Gold and silver have been used as a medium of exchange for centuries because of their intrinsic value and scarcity, and because its value can be determined by weighing. Coins with a known weight of gold or silver were created to eliminate the need for weigh scales. Unfortunately Roman emperors would melt down gold coins, add lead and re-mint them, creating inflation even then. Tom Kennedy explained to us that dishonest moneychangers of the Bible would do the same when Jews brought Roman coins to be “changed” into temple coins, acceptable to God.

In 1685, the government of New France had no money to pay the wages of soldiers stationed at Quebec. Intendant De Meulles had the ingenious idea of taking ordinary playing cards and writing an amount on the back. The cards were given to the soldiers, who accepted them as legal tender and began to use them in their transactions. The following year the cards were exchanged for coins of the realm sent by boat from France. The experiment was such a success that playing card money continued to be issued on a more or less regular basis.

Up until the early 20^th century, most currency was backed by gold or silver. Before government took over the responsibility for currency, banks would accept gold and issue “bank notes” in exchange. A bank could issue more bank notes than it had gold on the assumption that not all of the bank notes would be redeemed at the same time. If customers lost confidence in the bank, they would all want their gold back, creating a “run” on the bank.

Such runs were the excuse for the government to take over currency. Up until 1971, $32 US could be exchanged for an ounce of gold. When foreign bankers lost confidence in the inflated US dollar, they created a run on the US Treasury, causing Nixon to “close the gold window” and triggering a dramatic rise in the price of gold.

Health Savings Accounts

By Jim McIntosh

On February 1, 2005 Sally Pipes, President and CEO of Pacific Research Institute, gave a presentation on health care at the Fraser Institute’s Toronto office. Ms. Pipes is author of the book Miracle Cure: How to Solve America’s Health Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn’t the Answer. In the US there are two competing visions for health care. PRI’s vision is one of consumer-driven health care, with consumers in the driver’s seat. The other vision is one of increasing government involvement.

PRI recommends Health Saving Accounts (HSAs) as the primary way to empower consumers to control the cost and quality of health care. HSAs in the US are a lot like RRSPs in that the individual can put up to $2,650/year into an HSA tax-free ($5,250/year for families) and no taxes are paid on earnings in the account. Unlike RRSPs, no taxes are paid on withdrawals if they are used to pay for medical expenses.

An HSA must be combined with a “major medical” insurance policy with a high deductible equivalent to the amount in the HSA Any balance left in the HSA at the end of the year is carried forward to the next year, giving individuals an incentive to spend their health care dollars wisely.

Whole Foods switched to an HSA-style health plan in 2003 after claims exceeded premiums by $7 million. As a result:

· Medical claims dropped 13% while other employers experienced a 14% increase

· Hospital admissions dropped by 22%

· Only one in ten employees drained their Health Savings Account

· The average account rolled over $560 for use in 2004 and beyond.

There are different ways of dealing with welfare (or charity) cases. Many U.S. hospitals have clinics where doctors and other health care professionals provide their services at no charge for one day per week or per month. The least libertarian way is for the government to fund their HSAs and pay their high-deductible insurance premiums.

HSAs provide a solution to our spiraling health care costs. They give individuals control over health care and an incentive to keep costs down. But the big advantage is that the government would not be controlling and rationing our health care.

Sunday May 15, 2004 – Noon to 3 PM Rain or Shine

By LPC Party Leader Jean-Serge Brisson

By George Dance

By Jim McIntosh

By Jim McIntosh

Sunday May 15, 2004 – Noon to 3 PM
Rain or Shine