In a dramatic speech at the National Press Club on September 10, libertarian Republican Congressman Ron Paul called on U.S. voters to back a third-party candidate for president.

Paul rejected overtures by the Republican Party to endorse John McCain. He denounced the current presidential race as a "charade" with voters faced with choosing "the lesser of two evils" between two pro-war statists.

Instead, Paul urged voters to choose among four candidates who will be on enough state ballots to, in theory, win the presidency: Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney, independent candidate Ralph Nader, and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin.

Further, Paul announced that all four candidates have signed onto a policy statement drafted by Ron Paul's new Campaign For Liberty organization.

The policy statement addresses what it calls "four key principles central to the health of our nation ... that should be key in the considerations of every voter this November and in every election."

Those four principles are of huge importance to libertarians, as well as principled liberals and conservatives. Here they are, from the statement...

FOREIGN POLICY: The Iraq War must end as quickly as possible with removal of all our soldiers from the region. We must initiate the return of our soldiers from around the world, including Korea, Japan, Europe and the entire Middle East. We must cease the war propaganda, threats of a blockade and plans for attacks on Iran, nor should we re-ignite the cold war with Russia over Georgia. We must be willing to talk to all countries and offer friendship and trade and travel to all who are willing. We must take off the table the threat of a nuclear first strike against all nations.

PRIVACY: We must protect the privacy and civil liberties of all persons under U.S. jurisdiction. We must repeal or radically change the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the FISA legislation. We must reject the notion and practice of torture, eliminations of habeas corpus, secret tribunals, and secret prisons. We must deny immunity for corporations that spy willingly on the people for the benefit of the government. We must reject the unitary presidency, the illegal use of signing statements and excessive use of executive orders.

THE NATIONAL DEBT: We believe that there should be no increase in the national debt. The burden of debt placed on the next generation is unjust and already threatening our economy and the value of our dollar. We must pay our bills as we go along and not unfairly place this burden on a future generation.

THE FEDERAL RESERVE: We seek a thorough investigation, evaluation and audit of the Federal Reserve System and its cozy relationships with the banking, corporate, and other financial institutions. The arbitrary power to create money and credit out of thin air behind closed doors for the benefit of commercial interests must be ended. There should be no taxpayer bailouts of corporations and no corporate subsidies. Corporations should be aggressively prosecuted for their crimes and frauds.

Paul said a strong vote total for the third-party candidates who have united in endorsing these four principles would be a dramatic statement in favor of liberty.

"I have no doubt that the majority is on our side," Paul added, citing public opinion polls. "We represent the majority of the American people."

Libertarian writer Anthony Gregory nicely summed up why so many are excited by this ideologically broad anti-statist consensus:

"I've dreamed of this: The good leftists and good rightists all agreeing on gutting the empire, dismantling the national security state and ratcheting back the profligate corporatism. Anti-Fed and anti-war, a wonderful, cross-spectrum, short-term American populist program that would do away with the worst of the national leviathan."

(Sources: Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/
Anthony Gregory: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/022788.html )

Fully 55% of all American voters believe Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr -- who will be on almost every state ballot -- should be included in the upcoming presidential debates, according to a recent Zogby Poll.

That includes a whopping 69% of voters identifying themselves as independents; 52% of Democrats; and 50% of Republicans.

But -- thanks to a little-known and scandalous manipulation of the U.S. presidential debates -- it's not likely to happen.

Few Americans realize that the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private corporation which controls the debates, was actually created by the Republican and Democratic parties themselves, in order to control the debates for their own advantage.

In 1988 the Republican and Democratic National Committees took over the presidential debates from the non-partisan League of Women Voters. Both parties were angry that the League refused to operate the debates the way the parties demanded, including keeping out viable third party candidates.

Upon withdrawing, the League of Women Voters declared: "...the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."

History has proven the League correct.

Since its founding, the Commission on Presidential Debates has been chaired by former Republican Party chair Frank Fahrenkopf and former Democratic Party chair Paul Kirk.

Yes, that's right. The former heads of the two dominant parties set the rules for who gets to be in the presidential debates, who the panelists will be, and what questions are asked.

Needless to say, the Commission stacks the deck against third party and independent candidates.

The Commission has set three requirements for inclusion in the 2008 debates.

First, candidates must meet the basic Constitutional requirements to run for the office. That's reasonable.

Second, candidates must appear on enough state ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning a majority of Electoral College votes. Fair enough.

Third, a candidate must be winning at least 15% support in several national public opinion polls before the debates. Uh-oh.

This extremely high and utterly arbitrary requirement (why not 10%, or 20%, or 5%?) will neatly exclude every candidate except McCain and Obama. And, by excluding them from the national arena, it effectively guarantees that these candidates will never get the exposure needed to reach that 15%. (By comparison, it takes only 5 percent of the vote to qualify for public financing.)

Critics of this scheme ask: Why not allow every candidate who is on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win to be in the debates? That would allow Barr, Ralph Nader, Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party, and Green candidate Cynthia McKinney to participate. Voters had no problem with debates featuring several candidates during the presidential primary debates.

This would allow a lot of important issues to be raised that Obama and McCain don't want to have to address -- but that are vital to the nation's interest, and that deeply concern vast numbers of the American public.

Of course, that's exactly why this elaborate political machine was created: to suppress such genuine debate.

QUESTION: I've been frustrated by some libertarians who think that "compromising" libertarian principles is the best way to get the libertarian message accepted by the public, on issues including mandatory health insurance and campaign finance restrictions. When I disagree with them, I am derided as a "purist." How do I answer them?

MY SHORT ANSWER: Those who advocate mandatory health insurance and other government programs usually do so because they believe that freedom doesn't work, at least on that particular issue.

Ask your fellow libertarians if they truly believe the government solution they advocate is better. If they do, provide them with the facts and figures showing how liberty trumps government every time.

Tax-supported government programs, like mandatory health insurance, invariably give us less than the free market would. For example, every country with mandatory health insurance has long lines for the expensive procedures, even if they are life-saving. In Britain, those over 55 years old are often denied kidney dialysis outright, so that the available spots can be given to younger people. Canadian heart patients flock to the U.S. for cardiac surgery, rather than die waiting in line. Patients who would get life-saving treatment in the U.S. are told to go home and prepare to die. You can find a great deal of documentation on this particular issue at www.ncpa.org and www.heartland.org.

You can get hundreds of examples proving that liberty, not coercion, provides the best outcome on this and many other issues from my book Healing Our World, available either from the Advocates (updated 2003 edition) or as a free download from www.ruwart.com (the older 1992 edition).

If your friends already believe that liberty provides the better solution, ask them how they can, in good conscience, encourage voters to adopt something that will harm them. If they answer that the end justifies the means, you can use arguments -- like the ones in Healing Our World -- to show how the means ultimately dictate the ends.

Instead of compromising libertarian principles, they can work to craft a persuasive way to present their arguments. The Advocates for Self-Government web site is full of resources to help anyone do just that.

Libertarians often believe that they can't be effective unless they are elected. However, consider the effectiveness of U.S. socialists in the twentieth century. Even though only a few explicit socialists and Socialist Party members were elected in the past century, most of the major economic planks of the 1928 Socialist Party platform were quickly adopted by the Democrats and Republicans and became, to a major degree, U.S. law.

"In our opinion, the Socialist Party was the most influential political party in the United States in the first decades of the 20th Century," wrote renowned libertarian economists Milton and Rose Friedman in their 1980 book, Free to Choose.

Maybe we should be less focused on election outcomes and more focused on winning hearts and minds, something that we can't do by comprising our message. We wouldn't want to win the "battles," only to lose the "war!"