Social media has fractured every aspect of our lives, both socially and politically. People are more confused and polarized than ever. What’s it like to grow up in a fractured, polarized, and confused world? In our interview, Larry spoke about these, and other ideas.

Why This Matters to Larry

Larry’s generation grew up in classrooms and on playgrounds. The children and adults in his life were mostly constant, with a few people moving in and out from time to time, but his world felt reasonably static and stable. Finding love, respect, and purpose in a static community was already difficult before the Millennium, but today things have changed in deep, and apparently permanent, ways.

The root of happiness is respect, love, and purpose, and you find those things in your community.

Larry Sharpe

People’s social lives change so rapidly today that the traditional sense of community has been shattered. We change jobs more often, our workplace stretches across continents and cultures, and we are more likely to move thousands of miles away from where we grew up. What happened?

The Rise of Big Tech

Social media happened. The Internet and the Information Age have revolutionized our personal networks. The unintended consequences of making it easier to connect has completely changed the paradigm of personal relationships. On the one hand, it has opened up the whole world to us, on the other, the vast access to people and information has become a flood of chaos.

I asked Larry how kids can even survive, let alone be happy and find their way in such a complicated world. His response was illuminating:

My daughter was watching PewDiePie, and I asked ‘why are you watching this’, and she said ‘because I feel like I’m with him.’

Larry Sharpe

PewDiePie is one of the most popular personalities on the Internet today, and he is popular because he gives kids today a sense of community. The root of happiness is respect, love, and purpose, and if you find those three things you’re quite likely to be happy. But once you have them you have to maintain them. It’s like what the Red Queen said in Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll). You have to run as fast as you can just to say in one place.

Personalities online, streaming services, and online gaming platforms give the participants a sense of community, but only as long as they deepen and strengthen their relationships with the individual. People are forging their own unique personal identities out of the fractured pieces to today’s social landscape.

Watch the interview with Larry Sharpe to learn more.

The post Fractured Communities and the Path to Happiness appeared first on Larry Sharpe, Libertarian.

Small Business Ownership

Larry said that there is a systemic lack of ownership that’s noticeable in lower-income, Black and Brown communities and among immigrants. Business-minded people come to the United States with a high level of enthusiasm, and visions of a better life than the one they left. People everywhere imagine owning their homes and starting businesses. Yet, our system of governance puts major obstacles in the way of their success.

Here in New York, they are faced with a wall of regulations and occupational licenses for everything you can imagine, from braiding hair at a whopping $20,000 required spend on education and other prerequisites, to its crackdown on unlicensed dog-walkers. Seriously?

How is a person expected to respond to such entrepreneurial spirit-killing over-regulation? Unsurprisingly, Larry says that with limited choices, these impoverished people begin looking at high-risk activities and crime. Those people who turn to crime will prey on their neighbors, where these crimes often go unreported, particularly in immigrant communities where undocumented people fear deportation, or where previously incarcerated individuals don’t want to increase their own risk of recidivism. According to Larry, this endless cycle continues, increasing incentives for human trafficking, the illegal drug trade, protection rackets, and sweatshops.

Larry believes that one approach to reducing poverty in these communities is by creating incentives for business ownership. For example, licensing requirements can be replaced with non-compulsory credentials. A hair-braider can just braid hair if they want to, without a license, or they may take the courses necessary to qualify for credentials in which some people may find value. This is especially true for low-risk jobs that do not involve dangerous activities. In this regard, a hair braider or dog-walker may get to work right away to earn an honest living, and they may also choose to get credentialed after they have the necessary funds in hand. As a result, consumers have more choices and can make rational decisions. They may choose the lower-priced, non-credentialed dog-walker, or they may choose to pay more to the dog walker who took a 12-hour class on animal care.

Home Ownership, and Poverty

According to Larry, wealthy, and often middle-class people are able to give their children an edge with the savings they accumulate through homeownership, but impoverished people have no corresponding equity. This leaves their children in a cycle of dependence and poverty, where money spent is money lost, as is the case with rent,  and a community that encourages the use of government programs that are funded by taxpayers.

Larry wants to see these communities thrive. People from every background are eager for homeownership, business ownership, and self-ownership. Yet because of barriers to ownership, people stay on welfare and stay poor.

Larry believes that public housing should have a path to ownership, too. Renting housing to low-income families is a bandaid, even when rental costs are low. Instead, Larry believes that we should give people the chance to purchase their public housing units. Instead of throwing away money on rent every month, people can invest in their property. In addition, when people own their property, they take better care of it. This is a win for society, and for the new homeowner. London already has a similar model for homeownership, where low-income families can have shared ownership in property, without investing the full market rate.

Fixing Families and Prison Reform

Larry Sharpe applies this concept to the idea of taking ownership of your life. This is most apparent in Brown and Black populations, where men are incarcerated at a considerably high rate. These people–predominantly men get convicted for nonviolent crimes like drug-related offenses, resulting in fatherless homes. The other people in these populations who actually have productive lives are incentivized to work for the government, where their lives aren’t self-owned, either.

Larry believes that we can do a lot of good by eliminating the fear among potential employers when it comes to hiring less-skilled, minority, and immigrant employees. Presently, employers may be targeted by the government if they fail at complying with any number of regulations, and so they hire the “safer” employees.

Want to know more? Watch the video, below:

The post How to Decrease Poverty in America appeared first on Larry Sharpe, Libertarian.

Using propaganda with half-baked ideas, politicians tempt us with promises of financial or physical security. They can never deliver those. Worse, the price they ask is your freedom.

By Dan Smith

“Power tends to corrupt”, Lord Acton tells us.  When you give away the power to run your own life as you see fit, politicians tend to use that power to look after their own needs, first and foremost.

The lesson is that you should be suspicious of any slogan or philosophy which asks you to hand over that power. A great many popular political philosophies ask you to do just that. Be wary of such potentially bad philosophy. It’s everywhere and politicians are trying to get you to vote for it, and then use it against you.

Many politicians and pundits will claim they are not linked to any philosophy or ideology. They will claim they just do “what works.” Such supposed pragmatism is often just what sounds good in the moment, as long as you don’t ask too many questions or look at where similar ideas have been tried before. But they’re rooted in philosophy, nevertheless.

Politicians and “thought leaders” will propose all manner of slogans, policies and ideas to see what gets accepted by the public. They drop the ones which don’t catch on and pursue those which the media or their constituents find appealing. While this might sound like representing the will of the people, it really is just groping around trying to find a way to sell bad ideas. Many of the ideas are old failures, repackaged to appear as though they’re new and worthy of trial.

Further, the ideas seem to benefit politicians and their friends a lot more than you or me.

These slogans tend to have one thing in common. They want to cut a deal: you give away more of your personal freedom and the money you’ve earned and, in return, the politicians and elites promise they’ll punish some group you don’t like or make sure you’re safe and taken care of.

That’s been tried, many times and in many forms. It doesn’t work. It’s a raw deal—every time.

Here are a few of those sentiments and philosophies which have been popular over the years [along with commentary about some underlying issues].

• “It takes a village” – originally an African proverb about raising children, Hillary Clinton popularized the idea that modern society should be run like a small village, where everyone shares the burdens of everyone else and village elders (politicians and elites) make decisions for the villagers [forgetting that the elites and elders whom you’ve never met have no idea what’s best for you and your family; oh, and we’re not living in a small village!]
• “Promoting family values” – strong families tend to produce productive and kind people, so our laws should subsidize and enforce such a morality, while punishing deviant behaviors [such as defining marriage to that written in scripture, promoting the subprime mortgage crisis and unleashing the brutality of the failed War on Drugs]
• “You didn’t build that” – Barack Obama’s idea that no one is successful on their own—the public roads deliver products and the public schools trained you and your workers, so the successful should “give back”—offer to forfeit more of their income to the collective who support them [forgetting the fact that taxes and fees were already paid for those things; and you weren’t given your success—you risked, sacrificed, created value and exchanged that value freely . . . so there’s no obligation to ‘give back’]
• “Protecting our vital national interests” – as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said many times, the United States should intervene in World affairs if our national interests are at risk [our “interests” are usually a nebulous concept, but seem to involve oil or allies who purchase our weapons systems]
• “The paradox of choice” – life today has too many options and choices, you become confused and make bad choices [and you should surrender many of your options—to politicians and intellectual elites who somehow know best]
• “The wealthy become indifferent to human suffering” –social experiments show that the wealthy lose touch with other human’s problems, they are bad people and politicians and elites should help them be better people [as if politicians and elites corner the market on goodness; and despite the vast amounts of charity that the wealthy contribute]
• “We must be policeman of the World in order to spread American values”—the United States is the indispensable, exceptional nation which must force its values on other nations [often through occupations, hand-picking dictators, election tampering, bombings, invasions and buying foreign officials]
• “Inequality of outcomes is wrong and dangerous”– pointing to the French Revolution, warriors for economic justice claim that inequality of outcomes is unjust and will tear our society apart; they wish to redistribute wealth to correct for such injustice [despite the curious lack of historical examples of free societies facing these dire outcomes; forgets the incredible standard of living our “unjust” system has created; forgets that redistribution locks people into dependency and stunts investment; and doesn’t consider that a large, active state may be the cause of much of the inequality]

There are other examples which don’t lend themselves directly to policy, but which lay a foundation for permitting the government to take away more of your money and freedoms. There’s today’s popular postmodern philosophy claims that there may be no reality, so one can justify any policy or action which feels appropriate.  There’s also the view that science is showing that there is no free will—our decisions are predetermined, so you might as well submit to your fate [which is apparently defined as what politicians and elites have prescribed for you].

Note that these are simplifications of ideas summarized by someone who finds them largely repugnant. So, you should research and consider them yourself. But be sure to look at the examples where they’re put into practice—because reality is the best yardstick of a philosophy’s worth.

But looking at these slogans and philosophies, one notices a pattern:  you should not live your life as you see fit. Rather, elites and politicians should be making critical decisions for you and everyone else.

The propaganda is designed to sell you on that idea—to get you outraged . . . to say, “something ought to be done!”. Proponents of these ideas want you to surrender your rights and give elites the power to take some portion of what you’ve earned and run ever-larger portions of your life for you.

They use guilt, fear, pride, envy or anger—primitive emotions to keep you from using your logic and reason which might have you question the half-baked, self-nullifying behavior of giving such people more power over you.

They all presume you are a tool of the collective and can be directed by elites to the presumed benefit of the collective. In such a World, your needs and desires are secondary, at best. Many of the same people who claim to fight for diversity also fight to make outcomes and our lives uniform. You are being asked to forsake logic and reason. Your individuality is lost as you become a pawn of the collective.

What could go wrong?

People want “justice”. That’s a good and proper thing. But there’s a huge difference between:  justice in the form of being left alone to pursue your dreams, versus the justice of pursuing equality of outcomes. The former promotes individuality and leads to prosperity. The latter is a dead end. It gives power to people who will invariably use it to benefit themselves. Yielding freedom doesn’t even achieve its primary goal—as elites always end up with better outcomes.

Freedom is the one thing that works, again and again.  People free to make their own social and financial choices, and free to make and learn from their own mistakes, tends to generate the best outcomes.

Question these slogans. Hold onto your options. Consider choosing freedom.

The post Bad Philosophy appeared first on Larry Sharpe, Libertarian.

Most Americans would like the government to spend less money (therefore, taking less of ours) and most Americans are socially tolerant of other peoples’ lifestyles. So specifically, what do libertarians believe in terms of current political, economic, and social issues?

At the core of libertarianism is a Non-Aggression Principle, or NAP. No use of aggression or force is legitimate except in self-defense, or defense of property. All other use of force is unjust. Because of this principle, many libertarians tend to believe that the government’s use of force in terms of taxation and programs funded by taxation is illegitimate. This may seem extreme, and in our current political structure it is, so the Libertarian Party structures its platform on limiting government and giving the power back to the individual.

Larry Sharpe is a firm believer in the idea that most people have the same goals when it comes to political hot topics. Libertarians, Republicans, and Democrats all want less poverty and more prosperity. We all want easy and affordable access to healthcare. We all want to live happily and peacefully. Here are some ways Libertarians want to make those goals a reality:

Marriage

Goal: Anyone can consensually marry whomever they want, regardless of sexuality, religion, race, etc.

How to get there: We do not believe a certificate authenticates a relationship. The government institution of marriage should be abolished. The parties involved can agree to a law-binding contract, or a faith-based contract if they wish. While government is in the business of marriage, Libertarians do support marriage equality.

Healthcare

Goal: Affordable and accessible healthcare for all.

How to get there: Larry Sharpe posted a great video saying that if you ask a libertarian if they support universal healthcare, they’ll shout “no!!!” But, if thinking about the result we want, then yes, we do support universal healthcare for everybody. We want everybody to have easy access to affordable healthcare, just not at the hands of the government. Libertarians support a free market approach to healthcare, with no government involvement, so crony capitalism would not be possible.  The market would adjust prices of visits and drugs to what people are willing to pay. Insurance should no longer be based on your job, but purchased in-market, much like auto insurance, and be for unexpected illnesses.

Self-Ownership

Goal: Ownership of our bodies back in the hands of the people, not the government.

How to get there: Each person owns their own body and have the only legitimate right to do to it what they want. Any laws restricting which substances we can ingest, which medical procedures we elect to undergo, or which profession we choose to engage in should be repealed.

Criminal Justice

Goal: Reforming criminal justice to ensure fewer lives are harmed by unjust laws.

How to get there: Laws that hinder an individual’s life choices (which do not infringe on others’ rights) are unjust and should be abolished. Because of these unjust laws, the incarceration rate in the US is much larger than other nations. Libertarians call for a reform in criminal justice by ending the racist war on drugs and putting an end to the unconstitutional civil asset forfeiture laws.

Environment

Goal: For everyone to live in a safe and healthy environment free from pollution.

How to get there: Considering government is the worst polluter in the world (and rarely gets punished for it), they should not be the ones regulating environmental protections.  Enforcing private property rights is a great way to make sure people care for our land, water, and air. If the EPA became a national organization similar to the ACLU, they could do a lot more in protecting our right to live in a healthy environment.

Economy

Goal: To have a prospering and innovative economy.

How to get there: Libertarians believe in free market capitalism as the only equitable economic system. Without governmental regulations, subsidies, and arbitrary values, the good products and services that are produced and sold in the free market would flourish, and the bad would fail. Crony capitalism would be very difficult if government involvement was minimal.

Immigration

Goal: To allow any peaceful person to easily become a US citizen.

How to get there: The US, and especially New York, is a place people dream of immigrating to. We are proud of our melting pot and believe that the path to citizenship should be an extremely easy process. Any peaceful person who wants to become a citizen should have that right, regardless of which country they come from, which language they speak, or which religion they practice.

Foreign Policy

Goal: To defend the US against attacks and coexist peacefully with the rest of the world.

How to get there: In adherence with the Non-Aggression Principle, Libertarians believe there is no reason to get involved in wars unless in defense of our nation. Also, the US military consumes a very large percentage of our spending budget. The US should stop policing the world and getting involved in decades-long wars that do not improve with our involvement.

Abortion

Goal: To make abortion a family matter, not a government issue.

How to get there: The Libertarian Party is known to be the pro-choice party on every issue. The party’s view is that government should not decide what medical procedures we elect to do. Understandably so, abortion is a very personal issue, and based on this position, the government should not be involved in making that choice.

Gun Rights

Goal: To allow law-abiding citizens the ability to self-defense, defense of property, and defense of liberty.

How to get there: Libertarians support the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Any obstacle from the government to restrict that right in any way is unjust and should be repealed. The more restrictions that are in place, the larger the black market for guns, and the more weapons in the hands of dangerous people.

Education

Goal: To improve education at all levels.

How to get there: The free market, as with any industry, would allow for a flourishing educational system. Great schools would succeed and underperforming schools would be replaced with better ones. Ideally, education would be placed back in the states’ hands and out of the federal government’s. While the government is in the education business, libertarians want to reform education by getting rid of location-based education and blanket regulations. We support school choice as a great stepping stone to a market-based system.

David Boaz of the Cato Institute put it perfectly saying, “libertarianism proposes a society of liberty under law, in which individuals are free to pursue their own lives so long as they respect the equal rights of others.” If that sounds good to you, and you agree with some of the above stances, give Larry and the LP a chance. Larry believes in an 80/20 rule. If you agree with someone on 80% of their platform, then there is enough reason to vote for them. Check out Larry on more specific New York issues here.

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