There is an axiom underlying the libertarian philosophy. The axiom holds that individual liberty should be supreme among all of the political values competing for our loyalty.

Here is my understanding about what "individual liberty" means:

Human beings own themselves, and are entitled to retain their property and to select for themselves its uses. This self ownership is violated whenever an institution or a person initiates force or the threat of force against another individual as a means of attempting to control that other individual's choices either in the personal or in the economic arena.

Most of the particulars concerning policies and platforms of the Libertarian Party derive from the axiom I have just described. It is for this reason that there is overwhelming consensus about issues among Libertarians -- a consensus which is generally absent in political parties that are not founded upon, or which for reasons of expediency habitually ignore, any coherent underlying philosophy.

Whereas Libertarian candidates for elective office do seek election to those offices, every such candidate is aware of the low probability at the present time that Libertarians will actually be elected to high office.

So, it should be understood that candidates and activists in the libertarian movement measure their "success" in terms which supercede the question as to whether the Libertarians actually attain the offices for which they may be candidates.

For most libertarian activists, their principal goal is to increase the influence of libertarian views determinating the nature of government and of society in our country and state.

We hunger for a libertarian society more than we hunger for Libertarian Party members to hold governmental jobs.

Indeed, if the Libertarian Party ever became as powerful as either of the present two "major" parties, then I would expect a fair percentage of present-day Libertarian Party members to have deserted our Party in order to found a competing party.

For, most of us do hold to the dictum that power corrupts.

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THE PRINCIPAL AIM OF MY OWN CAMPAIGN is to bring a halt to the present war emanating from government itself against our citizenry, and against their Constitution's Bill of Rights.

I believe that the root of this usurpation of power, in a escalating warfare conducted against harmless and innocent American citizens and their rights, is the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs is a misnomer, in that it is not a war on chemical substances, but against people, their property, their rights and liberties, their families, and on occasion against their very lives. For instance, the rampant spread of such blood-born diseases as AIDS and hepatitis throughout American communities is a direct consequence mainly of the War on Drugs and that War's dunderheaded refusal to permit sterile hypodermic needle exchanges -- on the "grounds" that to permit such needle exchanges would "send the wrong message".

I believe it is high time for the government to get out of the business of sending messages. It is time for government to start *receiving* a few messages which We the People send to its unlistening ears.

We in the Libertarian Party insist that all of the drug laws are unconstitutional on their face. They should be repealed immediately and en masse.

Not only are the drug laws themselves unconstitutional, but they lead to further, and unlimited, usurpations of power.

Among the most dangerous threats to the basis of liberty in our American republic, which grows out of the War on Drugs, is the movement towards what is deceptively called "gun control".

The gun-control movement represents an obvious endeavor to deprive the citizenry of our republic of their ultimate and constitutionally guaranteed power to threaten, and thus to bound the operations of, what has become an increasingly arrogant, unresponsive, governmental apparatus in our land.

The gun-control movement implements this deprivation by attempting through victim-disarmament legislation to increase the vulnerability of citizens to the depredations of street criminals. The anticipated consequence of such insecurity is to engender an ever increasing dependency of citizens upon police protection.

This augmenting fearful dependency nurtures the growth in America of a police state.

The modern evil called "gun control" springs from the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs thus lies at the heart of our current American political disease.

It is the ghetto turf battles, over sales territory for the drugs whose illegal status has grossly inflated the prices they command at the street level, which lie at the heart of the "violence" decried by those who use would cite it as an excuse to call for the disarmament of the general citizenry.

It is the robberies, committed at gunpoint by desperate and impoverished addicts, which mislead the public into calling for gun control.

It is the ghettos' twenty-year-old drug entrepreneurs, who carry guns to protect themselves against their business competitors with whom they engage in gun battles over issues that would be far better settled via contract law in civil court, who provide the malunderstood role models for their twelve-year-old brothers who shoot one another out of sheer bravado or in order to obtain a new pair of running shoes.

It is these sorts of tragic absurdities, nurtured in the Drug War hothouse, which provide the spurious basis for augmenting propaganda and consequent public outcries for gun control... in a republic which was founded by a revolution that was sparked by the Shot That Was Heard Around the World, a Shot which was fired in colonists' reaction against British attempts to impose gun control.

The present American counterrevolution, spearheaded by the gun-control movement, is being maintained by the War on Drugs.

The drug laws were enacted, one after another, either in secret and in the stealth of night, with no public debate, or in the heat of hysteria and a propaganda storm, again with no public debate.

My campaign is aimed at jump-starting that honest public debate which has never occurred on the drug question. I believe that the result of any significant real public debate on the drug laws will be the repeal of those laws.

The so called "anti-drug" laws should be repealed, I claim.

The agencies charged with enforcing those drug laws should be defunded and disbanded forthwith.

The personal property "forfeited" or otherwise stolen by those agencies from individual American citizens must be restored to the original and rightful owners or to their heirs.

The hundreds of thousands of those political prisoners, of the Drug War, whose acts have involved no violence or fraud, must be released from their unjust incarcerations, and must be restored to their full rights as citizens. To the extent possible without burden to the also-innocent taxpayers of our land, those whose liberty was in this way roughly and outrageously robbed from them should be compensated by the government which thus violated their basic rights.

In New York State, an immediate realistic objective is the repeal of the Rockefeller drug laws. The Rockefeller laws are now repudiated even by some of those legislators who were responsible for their enactment a number of decades ago.