Mises Caucus

Mises Caucus
General Information
Chartered:	2017
Officers
Chair:	Aaron Harris
Vice-Chair:	David Hynes
Secretary:	David Hynes
Treasurer:	Patrick Mitchell
Contact
Website:	Website
Social Media
Facebook:	Facebook
Twitter:	Twitter
Instagram:	Instagram

The Mises Caucus was founded in 2017 by Michael Heise and fellow Libertarians. The main goal is to promote Austrian economics within the Libertarian Party and to utilize grassroots organization to ensure the party's effectiveness in this direction.

Platform

Statement of Purpose: The Mises Caucus aims to recruit, train, and support the liberty vanguard. It focuses on libertarian political, cultural, and educational action. It emphasizes self-ownership, property rights, non-aggression principle, political self-determination, and Austrian school economics.

The Four-Point Strategy

• Party Organizing – This encompasses everything from recruiting members into the Libertarian Party, the state and county Libertarian Parties and creating new county level Libertarian Party affiliates where there are currently none, encouraging attendance and involvement in them and organizing around state and national conventions.
• Candidates – Training, equipping, volunteering for, and financially or otherwise supporting local candidates running for offices that have the authority to make an impact on liberty issues, ideally to help a local area nullify federal and/or state laws. Ensuring that candidates for high visibility, difficult-to-win races such as president, governor, etc. are headed by candidates and campaign teams that effectively convey the libertarian message.
• Issue Coalitions – Creating issue initiatives and/or building relationships with other organizations, elected officials, and private individuals who support the libertarian position on one specific issue, and coordinating with them to, where possible, achieve a libertarian political outcome.
• Liberty Culture – Creating events and media, as well as relationships with other media figures and platforms, that draw in audiences from the general public and the liberty movement to educate them on Austrian economics and libertarian principles, then funnel them into the Mises Caucus, the Libertarian Party in general, or another project in the liberty movement that is suitable for their talents and interests. To foster and sustain a culture and/or counterculture of liberty in the United States of America.

Planks

• Plank 1 – Property Rights: We recognize the right to property as natural and self-evident, and advocate private property rights from both a deontological and utilitarian perspective. We affirm that private property rights extend from self-ownership and that scarcity is inherent to our material existence. We condemn all fraud and initiatory violence towards a person’s life, liberty, and property. We contend that private property is the best way to reduce and reconcile conflict among individuals. We advocate non-corporatist privatization wherever possible. We categorically reject socialism, defined as the non-private collective ownership of resources. We hold that the Non-Aggression Principle cannot be properly applied outside the context of sound property rights.
• Plank 2 – Economics: Economics is the study of human action in the context of scarcity. We recognize the Austrian School of Economics as the preeminent body of economic science, whose analysis should inform libertarian policy prescriptions.
• Plank 3 – Money: We reject all forms of State intervention into money and banking, with the understanding that competing monies are the cornerstone of a functional economy. We define State intervention to include, but not be limited to, private or public central banking, State issue of currency, banking regulations, legal tender laws, and trading and other attempts to manipulate the market by the State or its cronies. We advocate the aggression-free competition of free-market monies and currencies in all their forms.
• Plank 4 – Decentralization: We support decentralization—subsidiarity, secession, nullification, and localism—of political units all the way down to the individual as a moral end and as a means of expanding choice and competition in governance for all individuals. We recognize and affirm that the State is not the same thing as governance.
• Plank 5 – War: We advocate the abolition of the empire including ending the terror war, bringing all the troops home, and closing at least all foreign bases. We advocate a policy of armed neutrality in all conflicts where the United States of America are not directly attacked. We advocate the non-corporatist transition of defense and security services from the State to the free market whenever and however feasible, including the abolition of all laws regulating private ownership of firearms. We advocate peace and trade with all and alliances with none. We advocate a precipitous reduction of nuclear weapons. We reject non-defensive war against State actors, and reject war as a means of pursuing justice against non-state aggressors. We reject the first use of sanctions, which are a form of siege and therefore an act of war. We reject the subsidy of corporations through taxpayer-funded security and intelligence services. We reject the State’s use of proxy entities to perform any of these activities.
• Plank 6 – Lifestyle Choices: We take no stance on the personal, cultural, or social preferences of individuals or groups. One’s lifestyle is merely an extension of one’s property rights. We assert only that any and all lifestyle choices must not violate the Non-Aggression Principle.
• Plank 7 – Identity Politics: We affirm that the rights to self-ownership and to be secure in one’s life, liberty, and property are natural rights inherent in every individual human being and are not contingent on any other characteristic. Therefore, we categorically reject all forms of identity politics, defined as the State persecuting or conferring privilege on any person or group based on real or perceived membership in any identity group. We oppose any effort by the State or non-state actors to enforce abstract notions of equality or equity by any action that violates the Non-Aggression Principle. We also oppose any effort by the State and its corporate, academic, media, or other allies to encourage political tribalism, which only serves to pit individuals against one another and distract from the crimes of the State and its allies. We affirm the right of all individuals to associate voluntarily based on any criteria they wish and to act collectively to achieve their desired ends, so long as they do not violate the Non-Aggression Principle.
• Plank 8 – Corporatism: We oppose the combination of State, corporate, and/or labor union power known as corporatism or fascism. Likewise, our support of the free market does not compel us to endorse the criminality of individuals, privateers, mercenaries, contractors, proxies, so-called “non-governmental organizations,” academic institutions, media outlets, or any other non-state actor that performs duties in support of the State or any other criminal enterprise, as such actions are as immoral as more obvious violations of the Non-Aggression Principle such as socialism, communism, and welfarism.
• Plank 9 – Absentee Tyranny: When the State appears to remove itself from governing a part of society, and yet prevents the free market from establishing its own governance in its place, it creates a destructive state of manufactured chaos and injustice that we refer to as “absentee tyranny”. We recognise this as a false form of anarchism or the free market that is actually the State using its illegitimate monopoly privilege for the purpose of manipulating and abusing those under its rule to further its aims. We reject the policy of absentee tyranny and advocate for state involvement in the market to be permanently and completely abolished, not temporarily or partially suspended. We advocate that market governance replaces the state when it withdraws from anything.
• Plank 10 – Omissions: Our silence about any other particular government policy, law, regulation, ordinance, directive, edict, control, regulatory agency ruling, or machination should not be construed to imply approval. We seek to enunciate our top priorities, not the entirety of our positions.

Executive Committee

Mises PAC Executive Committee
Name	Position
Aaron Harris	Chairman
David Hynes	Vice Chairman and Secretary
Brodi Elwood	IT Director
Jeff Douglas	National Coordinator
Kat McElroy	National Coordinator
Zach Tatum	National Coordinator
Matt Lorence	Candidate Officer
Luke Ensor	Community Officer
Josiah Baker	Event Officer and Board Member

State Teams

The Mises Caucus has teams in many states. Refer to the "Meet the Team" page on the Mises Caucus website for contact details.

Conventioneering

• 

  Mises table at the California Convention 2021

• Parliamentary Opinion written by Jonathan R. Jacobs for the Mises Caucus regarding the Porcupine voting software at the 2020 National Libertarian Convention (info)

External Links

• Mises Caucus Website