Oh, brilliant idea!

The Dallas suburb of Farmer's Branch voted unanimously to make English its official language and fine landlords who rent to illegal immigrants. It is also enrolling its police officers in a federal program which would functionally make them into immigration officers.

Huh?

Texans don't realize how good we have it. Illegal immigrants make everything cheaper, because there's not a government-set price floor on their labor - no minimum wage. Construction is cheaper. Cleaning services are cheaper. Landscaping services are cheaper. And when those prices fall, other things often get cheaper too, because fixed costs are cheaper.

Plus, it's a ridiculous infringement of property rights to limit who landlords can rent to, especially as it's hard for landlords to know - illegals could send somebody else to sign the lease, or landlords might refuse to rent to anybody who has difficulty speaking English. This will be a disaster for landlords and a disaster for Farmer's Branch.

Well, crap.

As anyone who was paying attention knows, the elections held on the 7th were pretty dismal for Libertarians. It's not that we lost any ground; we didn't. Ballot access was maintained in many states; in Wyoming, we were awarded major-party status, for what that's worth. But neither Bob Smither or Michael Badnarik were elected to Congress; neither Phil Maymin nor Bruce Guthrie broke 1%. None of those names probably mean anything to many of y'all, and that's kind of a problem too.

So what do we need to do? The candidates the Libertarian Party ran in November 2006 were, from what I can tell, the best group of candidates it's ever run. The problem is that they were running for the wrong offices. Nobody will elect somebody they'd question on their city council to Congress. Libertarians need to put their best candidates in low-level races where they can get elected and make positive moves towards liberty, as opposed to living in a state of perpetual electoral martyrdom.