Interview in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Matt Welch | August 11, 2011

On Milton Friedman's 99th birthday (and my 43rd!), the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran some quotes from an interview the paper conducted with moiself and Nick Gillespie, on the subject of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America. Here's an excerpt:

On the book's aims:

Welch -- The intent ... is to encourage ... fence-sitters, to tell them, "Hey, it's OK to jump off this thing" -- that it's not irrational to not feel any sense of affiliation. ... "Republicanoids" and "Democratoids" alike frequently call independents either crazy people or just incredibly ill-informed ... and I think they're wrong.

Gillespie -- We wanted to write a political manifesto that kind of blows up politics. ... (T)he main message is that there are at least two parts to people's lives: There's the realm of politics and there's everything else, and people know, despite economic troubles and high unemployment rates and screwy policies and housing prices in flux and all of that, they know that the nonpolitical part of their lives keeps getting better, and ... we stress ... that politics is a lagging indicator of what's going on in America ... . It's time to kick down the front door ... and bring everything that is good and decent, all that democratization and decentralization of power and decision-making that we have in so much of our lives, to the political arena. And of course the incumbent powers ... a right wing and a left wing, they're going to scream and cry and shout, but they're finished. They're finished. They're the dinosaurs in the La Brea Tar Pits -- they're stuck, they're sinking and they're not climbing out.

Quotable:

"The impasse over the debt ceiling is exactly the problem that is outlined in the book, and the real issue is that we need to get to a point where we start saying, 'What are the first, second and third priorities of government?' And, 'Let's stop (messing) around with the second and third, much less fourth through 10th, priorities of government.'" -- Nick Gillespie

"We've had three, four years of ... disaster Keynesianism, started under Bush and increased under Obama, and you don't have to be an ideologue, you don't have to even have heard of a single Austrian economist ... to look around you and say, 'Hey, you know what, this really hasn't worked.' ... It's created an appetite for people who want to know, 'OK, what's the alternative to all that?'" -- Matt Welch

There's an enormous pile of interviews, reviews, and more over at the Declaration 2011 site.