From wikipedia:

Among other things, the Natural Law Party proposed to:

Establish a team of 1,000 yogic flyers. According to the party, such a group “dissolves collective stress, as indicated by significant reductions in crime, unemployment, sickness, and accidents, and improved economic indicators and quality of life”. They would also would provide an “invincible defence”.

Introduce daily Transcendental Meditation for all school students

Lower taxes, as yogic flyers will supposedly increase prosperity, allowing the government to collect the same amount of money with a lower tax rate

Ban genetic engineering, and encourage organic farming
The NLP proposed that a government subsidized group of 7,000 advanced meditators known as Yogic Flyers would lower nationwide stress, reduce unemployment, raise the gross national product, improve health, reduce crime, and make the country invincible to foreign attack. Hagelin called it a “practical, field-tested, scientifically proven” solution. TM would be taught to the military, to students, in prisons, and to ordinary citizens.
Hagelin predicted that implementation of the program would result in $1 trillion in savings from reduced costs for medical care, criminal prosecutions and prisons, national defense, and other government expenses. It recommended adoption of The Grace Commission reforms.^[7] The party supported a flat tax.
Election-related proposals included replacing the Electoral College with popular vote, automatic voter registration, public funding of campaigns, reducing the campaign season, and the elimination of political action committees.
Civil right planks included equal rights for women and gays, replacing bans on abortion with prevention programs, and a national referendum on capital punishment. It opposed the legalization of drugs. In 1992, it suggested the appointment of former Secretary of State George Schultz as drug czar.
It endorsed organic, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and conservation.

Hagelin proposed that all candidates should have their brain waves recorded by EEG and the resulting “mental profiles” should be publicly disclosed, so that the voters could see which candidates had the best “brain-wave stability”. He said that the test would “allow us to avoid the possibility of a brain-dead candidate”. The proposal was dropped due to a poor reception.Like a lot of third parties, America — and the World — will never know if we would have been in better shape had we followed this platform.  Well, they continue — elected or not — and they write letters to let everyone in every corner of the Earth know what they are up to.

I once posited an idea for a book — finding the final member of the Federalist and Whig Party to win or run anything as a member of the Federalist and Whig Parties.  The truth is the two parties each dissolved into a hybrid of things — into an “Opposition” Party — and the ballot laws of the time also offered an ending to parties themselves.  In the twentieth and twentieth-century, things are not so cut and dry.  The party lines continue to exist — there are still remnants of the “Reform Party” of Ross Perot laying around — snatched up by anyone interested in using them, sometimes maintained by a party hierarchy who endorses other party candidates just to keep the party line there.  (Such that in the last presidential elections, as you see at wikipedia, individual state parties endorsed Ralph Nader or Brian Moore.)  Just as well, individual state parties just up chunked and moved into Green and whatever other parties — if the Transcental Meditators have left the building, why stay with them?

Meantime, I am fascinated that in 2010, there appears to be one candidate in the United States who ran on the “Natural Law Party”.  Alan Jacquemotte ran the very last Natural Law Party candidacy.  Maybe.   His platform does appear to be an off-shoot of the Party line, though there aren’t any yogic workers to the number of one percent of one percent of the population of stress areas — and even if he’s vying for the Ron Paul supporters.

To be honest, I don’t really care about Alan Jacquemotte.  What I want to know is … will the NLP line still be available for his use in the next election, and if not what line will he use?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 2:24 pm and is filed under 3rd Parties. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.