10-12-2012
UW Political
Science Alumnus Enters Race for U.S. House
Independent write-in
candidate to seek Wisconsin’s 2nd-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 2nd
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 13th.
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 17th.
The thirty-minute debate will feature Pocan and Lee.
On October 7th,
Kopsick - a self-described libertarian-leaning independent - spoke at the steps
of the State Capitol during the 42nd 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-19th-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.
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Joseph W. Kopsick
Candidate and Committee Treasurer
Joe Kopsick for Congress
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