LPC 2021 Platform Committee Initial Report
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Dear Convention Delegates and Members:

Attached is the initial report of our committee for the upcoming state convention. It is the result of work over the past two months by members from across the state. We hope you will take the time to review it, and send us comments.

The work of this year's Platform Committee differed in two important ways from what has been done in the past. First, we tried to focus our efforts on two specific kinds of problems with our current Platform, with the goal of presenting you with a set of proposals that would be seen as an improvement by most delegates. Second, we were operating for the first time under new procedures that were adopted at the 2020 convention.

Focus of Our Work

As a result of the way our Platform has developed over many decades, parts of it have become unwieldy and disorganized. As additions and modifications have been made to planks, sometimes not enough care was taken in where new wording was placed, or about balancing the attention given to new and earlier points, or to maintain consistency of style. Because many ideas are related to each other in many different ways, sometimes too many topics ended up in a single plank. In some cases this resulted in them becoming so long that readers had difficulty finding our positions on any of those topics. These kinds of problems tend to compound, making it harder each year to make further amendments in a satisfactory way.

As we began our work, we reviewed the current document to identify planks that could most benefit from rewriting or restructuring. These were often, but not always, the longest ones. We decided that rather than trying to fix everything at once, we would focus on fixing things that would allow us to make as much improvement as possible in the document overall by focusing our attention mainly on the "worst" planks. These changes will not satisfy everybody – there are too many different ideas about what an "ideal" Platform might look like. But we hope that most of you will support making these changes in the spirit we offer them – as better than what we have now.

At the same time, because our current Platform was last amended three years ago, we found that there are a number of issues that have attracted the interest of Libertarians and/or the general public that it doesn't yet address. These include cryptocurrency, alternative voting systems, and the concept of "universal basic income". And of course the recent pandemic has drawn the attention of the public and the media to quite a few problems with government's response.

So those are the two kinds of amendments on which we decided to focus: (1) "cleaning up" some of the planks that seemed in the worst shape, and (2) addressing topics that seemed most urgent to address given recent public policy debate and world events. We have also included a few other proposals, to address points that some committee members felt were important, but our priority was to present you with proposals of those two types (including some where we have addressed new topics as part of a rewrite). We make no claim to have solved all of the problems of these types. But we believe that if you approve the changes that we are proposing, the result will be a far better Platform than the current one. We also see our work as part of an ongoing effort, which we hope to see continued by next year's committee and those that follow. Having a better document from which to start will allow future committees to give more attention to additional improvements.

New Procedures

Historically, in many years the Platform Committee did not present anything like a complete report until the weekend of the convention. While the amount of work done ahead of time varied from year to year, the committee always met on Friday just before the start of the convention, and most years the final decisions on what would be included were not made until then. This in turn meant that the report itself was often not made available to the delegates until after the convention business had started. This made it very difficult for delegates to do any meaningful preparation for dealing with the proposals.

The 2020 convention amended the bylaw that defines the job of the Platform Committee in three important ways: (1) It requires that the committee report its recommendations to the delegates in advance of the convention. (2) It defines a two-step process for this, with an "initial report" due 30 days before the convention and a "final report" due 10 days before the convention. (3) To make this earlier work possible, it requires the county organizations to make their appointments much earlier (now 90 days rather than 30 days before the convention).

This is the first time these new procedures have been in effect, and I am happy to report that so far they seem to be working pretty well. Sixteen county organizations made appointments in line with the new earlier appointment requirement. This allowed us to work together over an extended period, which allowed our work to be much better organized than in the past – when sometimes some counties didn't even pay much attention to the existing rule and new committee members would make their first appearance at that Friday meeting!

This year, we were able to meet (via Zoom) eight times. In parallel with those meetings, we made extensive use of a Discord server for presenting and discussing ideas. Once the actual text of the proposals had been developed, we made use of a web-based system that allowed committee members to vote on them asychronously, so that most of those kinds of decisions did not take up time during the meetings.

We of course have not yet had a chance to see how the remaining part of the new procedures will work in practice, but we intend to make use of this initial/final report feature to make the proposals that will actually be presented during the convention even better than what you see now.

How You Can Help

We hope you will help us take advantage of this opportunity, by reviewing what we have done so far. Under the new procedure, our final report cannot include any new proposals, but we can make improvements in the proposals we have already included in this initial report.

So please give us your feedback! We welcome comments on anything from spelling/grammar errors to better ways of explaining an idea. We would also be interested in hearing from people who feel they will not be able to vote in favor of one or more of these proposals because of the way we have stated the libertarian position. Of course there are real differences among LPC members on some points of philosophy and public policy, and we can't expect everything in the Platform to meet with the approval of every member. So if you point out a problem like that we can't promise to "fix" it the way you would prefer. But if there is some way to make a point that could satisfy a greater number of delegates while still making the same basic point, we would like to know that so we can consider some adjustment in the text.

Our hope is that enough of you will be willing to provide these kinds of feedback, soon enough, that the language in our final report will have many fewer problems than in the past, which we hope in turn will significantly reduce the time that needs to be spent during the convention handling amendments from the floor. Basically, if you see something that you think needs fixing, we'd rather hear about it now than during that very limited time allowed for debate. We can't promise to fix everything in our final report, but we would appreciate the opportunity to try!

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the members of the committee for being involved in this process – by being willing to serve, by attending meetings, by drafting text, by participating in the online discussions, by voting on the proposals, and by providing supporting technology. Not everybody participated in all these ways, but enough did that the job got done! I would like to thank the 16 county organizations that made those appointments so we could get to work in accordance with the new schedule. I would also like to thank LPC Chair Mimi Robson for getting us started by providing the mailing list and Zoom facilities and chairing our initial meeting so we could begin our work.

If you have any questions about anything in this letter, or in the report itself, don't hesitate to contact me.

Joe Dehn
Platform Committee Chair
jwd3@dehnbase.org
408-774-1570

Platform Committee Roster

In addition to the above, the following individuals served as members or alternates for a time but are no longer part of the committee: Tyler Braaten (Kings), Becky Freeman (San Diego), Anthony Fratta (Kern).