22 – 8 – 4 and your opinion

December 27, 2016
Featured image for “22 – 8 – 4 and your opinion”

So what did the Zero Aggression Project accomplish in 2016? Let’s consider that question in light of…
Our Mission
We have three main objectives…

ONE:  Spread knowledge of the Zero Aggression Principle (the ZAP) to every person on planet Earth. The ZAP says “Don’t initiate force personally or politically.”

TWO:  Locate and activate the 1-out-of-5 Americans who already self-identify as libertarians.

THREE:  Move all Americans in a voluntaryist direction. A voluntaryist is a libertarian who believes the Zero Aggression Principle applies to all issues, without exception.

That third goal depends on software we created in 2015.
That software aims to identify where people stand on various issues and then track how their opinions change in response to two kinds of arguments…

  • Moral arguments based on the ZAP
  • Practical arguments based on logic and evidence

This software also measures degrees of support or opposition. We can track a person’s movement toward or away from the libertarian position.
Our trial run with that software taught us a lot. We identified many necessary improvements. So we’ve spent the past year…

  • Defining those improvements
  • Finding the funding to pay for them
  • Finding the right programmer to execute the project

We located the funding. We just hired the right programmer. That programmer is currently finishing DownsizeDC.org’s conversion to Congressional Quarterly’s Engage software. When that task is done he will shift over to the Zero Aggression Project. We hope to have our software improvements completed before summer arrives. When that happens…
You’ll be able to see and measure the progress of goals 2 and 3 above — finding and activating libertarians, and moving Americans in a voluntaryist direction. We’ll also start spending promotional dollars aimed at our goal number one — spreading knowledge of the ZAP to everyone. In the meantime…
We’ve been adding a large amount of content to our ZAP website.
There’s a lot of libertarian material on the web already. Books and long articles are well represented, so we see less need for new material of that type (though we do produce some of that too). We’re focusing our effort on something that has been sorely lacking….
Presenting libertarian ideas in bite-size chunks.
We call these bite-size chunks Mental Levers.

  • There are are currently 66 of these mini-articles on the ZAP site.
  • We added 22 of them this year!

Each article is about 200 words, some slightly more, but many less. If you read them in order they give a good quick overview of libertarian thinking. This presentation will become increasingly comprehensive as we add more Levers. Check out the Complete Collection.
Our lawyers also filed 8 legal briefs and 4 comments to federal bureaucracies
The Zero Aggression Project is an initiative of the Downsize DC Foundation. The Foundation also does legal briefs and writes comments supporting or opposing various pending actions by federal agencies. Here’s the list of what we did in 2016.
Amicus briefs…

  1. U.S. v. Graham (argument to the U.S. Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit)
  2. Americans for Prosperity v. Kamala D. Harris, by virtue of our membership in the Free Speech Coalition (argument to the U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit)
  3. Birchfield v. North Dakota 
  4. Wikimedia v. NSA (argument to the U.S. Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit)
  5. Hamilton v. Pallozzi (argument to the U.S. Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit)
  6. Manuel v. City of Joliet
  7. Independence Institute v. Federal Election Commission
  8. U.S. v. Graham (requesting the Supreme Court take up the case)

Comments to bureaucratic agencies…

  1. To IRS on Proposed Rulemaking relating to “Substantiation Requirement for Certain Contributions” (With the Free Speech Coalition)
  2. To IRS Proposed Rulemaking relating to “Publication 1075, Tax Information Security Guidelines for Federal, State, and Local Agencies” (Via the Free Speech Coalition)
  3. Response to FDA Request for Comment on the Status of Vinpocetine
  4. To FDA “Dietary Supplements: New Dietary Ingredient Notifications and Related Issues; Revised Draft Guidance for Industry”

Do you like what we’ve accomplished and where we’re headed?
If so, please consider a year-end contribution to support our work. Your donation is tax deductible if you itemize deductions, and you only have FOUR days left to make such deductible contributions for the 2016 tax year.

  • Our one-time donors give between $5 and $15,000.
  • Our largest monthly pledger gives $250, our smallest puts in $2, and the average is about $19.

Thank you for your consideration and support. You can contribute here.
Jim Babka & Perry Willis
Zero Aggression Project, an initiative of the Downsize DC Foundation


Share:

Comments (0)

Share: