How many of you are part of a libertarian ‘club’ and how is it organized?
So I’m not talking about an organization that is centered around political action, but one that is centered around socializing and education.
Methink I should organize a “DO-NOTHING” political party and symbolically stuff the ballot and elect Lysander Spooner to president of 12th grade or something.
My school has two. One is sanctioned and meets in school buildings once a week. I attend when I can. We discuss the news and libertarian philosophy. The other, more informal, is devoted to anarchy, and meets in a coffee shop once a week. I’ve never made it there.
My city had a libertarian Meetup, but now we just run it through Google Groups. We have six regulars and meet once every month or two.
Run on the platform of abolishing the government. Block for DisAssembly!
It’s hard to find a genuine libertarian club in Australia, when the self-proclaimed “libertarian” political party in this country supports the neo-con agenda of global government and warmongering.
I’d like to be in a libertarian group but there is little hope here in Germany where i get to think that libertarians are threatened with extinction. I do even know of only one major libertarian german site.
I’m a Belgian (the Dutch part) and member of the Flemish Classical Liberal Students Assoction. (Something like a fraternity, but we allow girls too: I don’t know how you would call this?)
We have a ‘board’ of something like 14 people ranging from social liberal ‘the state has a responsibility to redistribute to help the most needy’ to classical liberal to minarchist to anarchist. This might seem odd, but it’s our philosophy to unit everyone in favour of more liberty in the status quo then to seperate ourselves from another. (The fact that we are only with 14 might give you a clue that freedom isn’t that popular. :))
There is 1 department of this students association in every ‘major’ university in Belgium. (Brussels, Antwerp, Louvain and Ghent: all have between the 12 and the 20 boardmembers, but not all - unfortunatly - have anarchists.)
We organize an activity once a week: every wednesday we organize a political debate, try to invite a guestspeaker (a politician, a academic, a businessman, etc.), have a bookreview (once every semester), hold a discussionevening on a certain topic (social security, internation relation, drugs, childeren, the essence of (classical) liberalism, etc.) Sometimes we do certain (small) political action on the university campus; we (succesfully) opposed a refinancing of the university making it ‘free’ for everyone and stuff like that. We ‘publish’ a little magazine of our own in which we write our text in order to attract new people.
Something like this.
I’m part of the “leadership” of the Oxford (University) Libertarian Society, which is quite fun.
We get good speakers, then we take them to the pub afterwards – I was chatting with Tom Palmer for about an hour about free banking vs. full reserve, and the mises institute and other things.
If anyone’s near to Oxford in the UK they should check out our term card and come along.
I noticed there are some quite active forums in Belgium regarding politics and those have a decent amount of libertarians as well I think.
Seems like a good place to promote these activities, if allowed?
I’m in The Netherlands btw.
bump
I just found this site meetup.com . It has a libertarian section. http://libertarian.meetup.com . That seems exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for (look up your city if it has one).
I remember now that back in the Ron Paul presidency days, I went to a few meetups in Amsterdam which were also organized through meetup.com.
Hmmm, you have to pay meetup.com to start a meetup group. It’s roughly $12/month. And they only take credit card (not paypal).
No PayPal? They are soooo 2002.
meetup.com is nice, there actually is a group in the city I go to university.
I am “part” of a SDSU libertarian club. It is not well organized, as we just started it (and the winter break threw off planning), but I think the venture is promising.
You should invite them to the forums.
I probably will once we meet during next semester (hopefully, we will meet more often).
Unfortunately, most of my influence on the group is behind the curtains, since I am not yet part of the university’s student body (I am transferring, but have not transferred yet). I will play a more direct role, hopefully, during the Fall 2010 semester. Nevertheless, I want it to become the premier student liberatarian organization in San Diego (in competition with the YAL UCSD group, and any group that USD may have). Currently, the core membership is rather small, but I think that it can grow dramatically.
For the sake of intellectual growth, I was thinking about reading groups, but that won’t form part of the marketing (who likes to read?); it will just be something on the side. Otherwise, I’ve been thinking about doing public speeches. At first, we would speak ourselves, and so we would take relatively simple topics. I think that we can appeal to a wider student body by speaking about non-economic topics. We can focus on topics which the left and libertarians agree on, such as social rights. In California, I think good speech topics would be:
- Prison-industrial complex (this incorporates both social and economic arguments).
- Gay rights.
- Poverty & crime.
- Mexican-American rights & immigration.
I think more controversial topics should be reserved when we already attract a large audience to our speeches. Over the long-run, I am hoping that we can persuade professionals to speak publically. I have been thinking of asking Dale Ogden once the group becomes more popular, and we can attract relatively large audiences (50+). At first, I will prob. look for speakers who are willing to work for free: that is, they benefit in some other way (for example, Dale Ogden is running for governor, and so he could use it as a way to reach out to students).
I am also thinking of ways of fundraising during these events (at first, asking for donations, and then perhaps selling something [they would still be donations, but at least they are getting something back] like newsletters, pamphlets or even books [if I can get them in bulk]) to fund future events and group activities (maybe travelling to meet with other groups or go to conferences, et cetera).
It is rather amibitious, and I will also have to focus on my frat (which will take some of my time) and work, but I think I can pull off a dramatic beginning to the group at SDSU through 2010, and then use this growth to do some interesting stuff during 2011.
http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/create-successful-outreach.html
Written before the internet took off… so some things are redundant, but otherwise fairly useful.
Education is really touchy with groups such as MEChA, especially in an academic setting. How would respond if they told you that everyone has a (positive) right to education? Do you advocate that “undocumented” people do not have a (positive) right to “their” education? Be careful of their appeals to racism and appeals to emotion.
Yea, I would have to adequately prepare for such questions. I would probably have to avoid their points and “change subjects” (learn from politicians). In this case, I would probably say something close to “everyone has a right to education, but should do so based on their own merits.” The statement is ambiguous, and not as harsh as “they have a right to education, as long as they don’t steal money from others to pay for it.”