The Aquarian Agrarian: October 12th Press Release

Friday, October 12, 2012

October 12th Press Release - Version 2

10-12-2012

UW Political Science Alumnus Enters Race for U.S. House

Independent write-in candidate to seek Wisconsin’s 2^nd-district congressional seat

Joe Kopsick, a twenty-five-year-old Madison resident and former political science major at UW-Madison, is running as an independent write-in candidate for this November’s election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Wisconsin’s 2^nd congressional district.

In September 2011, he declared candidacy for the seat, which was left vacant when seven-term Democratic congresswoman Tammy Baldwin declined to seek re-election and decided to instead run for the U.S. Senate.

Kopsick - one of nine candidates to have formally declared intention to run for the office - has had only three opponents since the two major parties held primaries in mid-August. They are Democratic State Assemblyman Mark Pocan; 2010 Republican nominee Chad Lee; and independent write-in candidate Rocky Ison.

Having failed to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot, Kopsick and Ison have been excluded from three events featuring major party candidates. In late September, the League of Women Voters sponsored a debate which was solely attended by Mark Pocan.

100 Black Men of Madison excluded Kopsick and Ison from appearing as guest speakers alongside Pocan and Chad Lee at the organization’s general membership meeting which is scheduled for the morning of October 13^th.

Additionally, the Rotary Club of Madison excluded Kopsick and Ison from the debate at the Alliant Energy Center Exhibition Hall which is scheduled for the evening of October 17^th. The thirty-minute debate will feature Pocan and Lee.

On October 7^th, Kopsick - a self-described libertarian-leaning independent - spoke at the steps of the State Capitol during the 42^nd Annual Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival. He invoked the Interstate Commerce Clause to criticize the constitutionality of federal drug laws; and criticized candidate Lee’s silence on the issue, as well as candidate Pocan’s lack of consistency on matters concerning related personal freedoms.

Kopsick supports the decentralization and diffusion of political power, whether geographical, structural, or policy-topic-oriented. He promotes the reconciliation of capitalism and socialism through the synthesis of panarchist- and polyarchist-compatible aspects of classical liberalism, Agorism, Mutualism, National Personal Autonomy, and Functional Overlapping and Competing Jurisdictions.

Kopsick believes that the unnatural geographically- and ideologically-territorial exclusivities, monopolizations and oligarchializations, and concentrations and centralizations of power represent social transaction costs which through malice or negligence are externalized onto quasi-consenting citizens.

He believes that agencies creating such transaction costs are inherently corrupt, and that legitimate governance only exists when and where one is free to choose one’s public-goods providers-from among sets of logistically-available independent alternatives which compete fairly and transparently in non-exclusive overlapping physical and ideological territories.

Kopsick - whose slogans include “less government, more governments” - believes in keeping the markets for political, commercial, and collective-bargaining representation competitive, as well as free from undeserved inhibitions, interventions, and compulsory integrations. A supporter of Neo-Institutional Economics, Kopsick believes that markets and market actors should openly exclude and refrain from associating with unnaturally oligopolistic and disproportionately influential actors.

An admirer of mid-19^th-century theorists Max Stirner and Lysander Spooner, Kopsick desires to fight legal fictions like corporate personhood, which include what he terms “governmental corporationhood”, “union corporationhood”, and “personal corporationhood”. Kopsick believes that it is imperative to refrain from requesting and accepting monetary donations in order to remain consistent with such principles.

Kopsick believes that if accidental, negligent, and malicious detriment (as well as inadvertent benefit) are sufficiently insured- and protected-against - and non-negligible transaction costs are eliminated from government, the monetary and credit systems, and collective bargaining - then an environment of perfect, total, and complete competition in all markets can lead to a minimally economically-efficient - and an inter-subjectively socioeconomically-just - re-allocative outcome; a manumitted (freed) market.

Kopsick believes that such an outcome should be brought about by a coalition of diverse and competing firms, syndicates, individual persons, and collectives and cooperatives which offer and seek to offer diverse combinations of varieties of goods and / or services to the public. According to Kopsick, the abundance – as well as the proportionality of market influence - of such agents and agencies is crucial to ensuring that the excesses of actors seeking to associate in markets while wielding disproportionate information or share of trade volume; speculating without full assets; or causing undue externalization of costs, responsibilities, benefits, or detriments; will be guarded against.

Kopsick also believes that such an outcome would almost certainly feature the widespread imperative to support the vast predominance of systems enacting similarly-proportioned exponentially-graduated redistributive insurance against accidents and crimes against person and property, and that such a system would and should be maintained through boycott and information-sharing as a pillar of socioeconomic-ethical convention under conditions of rationality, scarcity, and dissatisfaction.

Reifications of such market-preferred redistributive insurance would feature restitution, recompense, and reparations for institutional historical exploitation; as well as consequential agreements to become subject to transparency and oversight regarding the assessment of customers’ and protection agencies’ tendencies to fall victim to crimes and accidents, cause accidents and malicious crimes, and successfully cause the restitution of injustices.

Kopsick’s campaign is active in social-media coordination; the candidate administers the Facebook group “Joe Kopsick for Congress in 2012”, and runs a YouTube channel called JoeKopsick4Congress, a blog called The Aquarian Agrarian, and an official website, which can be viewed at www.wix.com/dontvoteforjoe/2012.