Attorney and software engineer Richard Sarvis will seek the Libertarian Party of Virginia nomination at their state convention in late April.
Sarvis joins fellow northern Virginia Libertarians attorney Lindsey Bolton and IT manager Laura Delhomme, who are both running for Delegate from Arlington districts.
Lindsey Bolton with Ron Paul
Sarvis ran for State Senate in 2011 and told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about his campaign. He noted that he thinks of himself as a libertarian and participates in the activities of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Virginia.
His libertarian philosophy is reflected in his answer when asked about his favorite economist. Without pausing, he named Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian Nobel laureate who taught at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago.
“Hayek is someone who really influenced my thinking,” Sarvis explained: “How to think about problems that face national economies and how public policy can influence it in many unintended ways,”
Hayek, Smith, Sumner
While a lot of people, such as talk-show host Glenn Beck, focus on Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, Sarvis said he “was more influenced by his ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society,’ which was probably the seminal paper that won him the Nobel Prize, and also [volume] one of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, where he talks about rules and order.”
In addition to Hayek, Sarvis cites Adam Smith as an influence in his economic thinking.
“In philosophy, they say, there’s Plato and all else are footnotes,” he quipped. “I think that can be said more truly of Adam Smith than of Plato.”
Among contemporary economists, Sarvis pointed to Bentley University professor Scott Sumner, who blogs at TheMoneyIllusion.com. As Americans have focused on the financial crisis and the recession, he said, “Sumner has been the most persuasive in what exactly is going on [with regard to the] monetary policy mistakes of the Fed. We really are in many ways repeating some of the mistakes of the depression.”
Ballot Access
Virginia Libertarians must collect over 10,000 valid signatures to put a statewide candidate on the ballot. Last year a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the LP made it possible for non-Virginia residents to circulate petitions, and libertarians from DC, West Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Tennessee and elsewhere are needed to help collect signatures.
The Insomniac Libertarian 