Roland, I love your concluding comment: "My standard comment in North Dakota of what I would do if Libertarians took over our state government, is that I would have to immediately start a new anti-Libertarian Party to get the corrupt bastards kicked out!" Wouldn't your pithy comment be even more applicable at the federal level and hence a powerful argument for decentralization? Bigger centralized government (or political party) inevitably results in an exponentially larger scale of corruption. :) Thoughts? ~David Pratt Demarest -----Original Message----- From: riemers@juno.com [mailto:riemers@juno.com] Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2016 3:37 PM To: dpdemarest@centurylink.net Subject: RE: [Lnc-business] The risks of centralized power and what to do about them We know a weak central organization is not going to do it, as we seen what happened to the US under the Articles of Confederation. And our current party system is not working that well either. We have a somewhat weak national organization and we have strong and weak states, and we have some states at war against either themselves or the national party. I think - as pointed out - we need a well run national program to tie us all together as we are really nothing if we were just broken down into local state parties, and national should facilitate strong state parties. But it is also important that state parties support the national party. I think national needs to supply workable tools for the states to be an effective organization. Be it internet support, to the very basic of having a boiler plate state constitution and bylaws that each state can build on to meet its needs. (Currently a lot of state constitutions and bylaws appear to be nothing but a joke, that no one really knows and no one really follows, and it appears some states just blindly adopted the wordings from a neighboring state with no regard to state needs or requirements). So, national, hand out the effective tools to the state parties. And states, make membership in national a basic requirement for state membership. But mostly, we have to really stand for something, otherwise just winning elections makes us no better then the other parties. My standard comment in North Dakota of what I would do if Libertarians took over our state government, is that I would have to immediately start a new anti-Libertarian Party to get the corrupt bastards kicked out! Roland Riemers ND ____________________________________________________________ 1 Fruit That "Destroys" Diabetes (Try This Tonight) Medical Health Advisor <http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3131/5868256812f332567793est51vuc> http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3131/5868256812f332567793est51vuc