Those who voted Libertarian instead of for Trump seem likely to have helped elect the most anti-Libertarian President in my lifetime, and the least mentally competent. I was expecting a Trump landslide, based on the enthusiasm gap, but lots of mail-in ballots probably reflect Democrats who do not normally get out much.
Trump is also hated at levels that I do not fully understand. He's brash, and responded to claims of treason in ways that are perfectly understandable, but seem to turn a lot of people off. The next Republican nominee will not be Trump, at least in style and demeanor. Of course, another generation of kids will have been raised to hate capitalism and America, so it's still a question what happens. The good news is that I will likely have passed before the trains start loading my kind for transport to the Nevada re-education camps.
Trump is fairly anti-libertarian himself. From trade wars to tariffs to protectionism to immigration there is a lot not to like.
ReplyDeleteBiden is a big government nightmare.
You can't expect libertarians to choose between these two. It is like asking if you'd rather be beat to death or strangled to death. The result is the same. It is a false choice.
Trump is not really a protectionist. He is battling China, not all nations. And Chinese manipulation of the yuan is longstanding and intentionally destructive of other nations by theft of intellectual property. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china-steal-canada-s-edge-in-5g-from-nortel
ReplyDeleteI am hard-pressed to see how enforcing our immigration laws is anti-libertarian, except that it prevents companies from driving down wages to levels that make poor Americans more dependent on government aid.
ReplyDeleteAnd Biden wants to take away the single tool most needed to overcome a full fascist government or runaway private socialist mobs: guns. Trump has not been perfect on guns (bump stocks), but his judicial appointments are the most progun in recent times.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand why libertarians vote for the Libertarian candidate, since it only siphons votes away from the Republicans, so in effect a vote for the Libertarian is a vote for the Democrat.
ReplyDeleteBy the same mechanism, a vote for the Green Party is a vote for the Republicans.
The US manipulates its currency. We call it quantitative easing.
ReplyDeleteTariff history repeats itself.
https://www.cato.org/blog/tariff-history-repeats-again
Most of the libertarians I know are fairly open border and open immigration.
There is some disagreement on immigrants and wage reductions.
https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2017/does-immigration-reduce-wages
You're correct on gun control. Biden is just awful.
This points out two ways to vote: The idealist view where you vote for the person who most represents your views. And the realist view where you strategically vote for the person closest to your views who has a realistic chance of winning.
ReplyDeleteFor good or evil, we are stuck with a two party system. That being the case, the rest of the parties are on the fringe. Voting for a fringe candidate is therefore a wasted vote. Your best shot instead is to work to get candidates closest to your views in the primaries of a major party.
Libertarians subscribe to a philosophy that doesn't work even better than its polar opposite, communism. Both result from flawed views of human nature.
ReplyDeleteSo, it's not surprising that Libertarians can convince themselves that the two mainstream candidates are precisely equally bad, as if by a miracle, and therefore a vote for the Libertarian candidate makes sense. But it is annoying, and if it ever results in a major loss for conservatism, it would be time to give the Libertarians a good ideological thrashing.
No, from a Libertarian standpoint, Trump and Biden are not equivalent.
While Trump has some authoritarian impulses, that isn't his main thrust. Furthermore, he belongs to an anti-authoritarian party and his staff is drawn from there.
Biden, while not as overtly authoritarian, belongs to a party that is no less authoritarian in principle than Leninists. Furthermore, Biden's long history is hardly reassuring to those who value liberty.
To me, the choice is crystal clear: the Republican, in this case, Trump, is the candidate most aligned with liberty.
The libertarian candidate, whoever that is, has no chance of winning. A vote for that candidate is an abdication of the responsibility to vote in a way that best furthers liberty. In other words, it is a narcissistic cop-out!
The only thing I've seen that compares to the Left's hatred of Trump was the Right's hatred of Obama. Not born in America? Never attended the colleges he went to? Secretly a Muslim? Beyond ridiculous, but there it is, not that the true believers were swayed.
ReplyDeleteIs there a future where courtesy--or even lip service to courtesy--exists in political discourse?
StormCchaser: Where socialism goes wrong is its belief in the perfectability of people: True Socialist Man looks out for the good of all, not self-interest. This misunderstanding of human nature has created societies where self-interest has created some of the greatest evils we are capable of doing. (National Socialism, with its focus on the good of the master race, just had to remove the inconvenient non-Volk first.)
ReplyDeleteLibertarianism relies on self-interest and future orientation. This is why at a Silicon Valley LP meeting, the only question you needed to ask was, "Hardware or software?" Most people are not future-oriented. Even if something is CLEARLY not in their self-interest beyond the next couple of hours, many people will do dumb things. Nearly all addictions are clearly not in the addict's self-interest. That's why libertarian ideals, while a good general theme, do not work with the masses. Most of the masses know this; not because of themselves but those "other people."