A Plea to Libertarians

I am a libertarian, but I am not a Libertarian. That is, I believe in libertarian principles of minimal government, free enterprise, and individual freedom and responsibility, but I refuse to vote Libertarian in our current plurality voting system because I would be wasting my vote. Sorry, fellow libertarians, but that's reality, plain and simple, and denial of reality is unwise. If you insist on voting Libertarian in our current system, you are doing nothing but standing by and watching uselessly as Republicans try valiantly to stop the spread of socialism by the Democrats. Let the socialists deny reality and drop out of the picture. We're too smart for that -- or at least we should be. Until we have a better election method, the best we can do is to vote Republican.

Libertarians like to claim that Democrats and Republicans are essentially indistinguishable. The two major parties are very similar on important issues such as Social Security, Medicare, and legalization of drugs, unfortunately. However, you'd have to live in a cave to honestly believe that Democratic positions are identical to Republican positions on national defense, taxation, gun control, environmental regulation, education, and other major issues. The Democrats would enthusiastically overturn the Second Amendment if the Republicans do not stop them, and their campaign finance reform proposals would overturn the First Amendment too, were it not for the Republican opposition. They forgot about the Ninth and Tenth Amendments a long time ago, and they ridicule Republicans who try to remind them. Nor will the Democrats ever end the government school monopoly as Republicans would do.

Libertarians make a sport of chiding Republicans for abandoning their principles. While it is true that Republicans often abandon their principles, they are in a very different position than Libertarians. Libertarians take no political risk in rigorously adhering to their principles, because they have no chance of winning anyway. Republicans not only have a chance of winning -- they must win or the Democrats will win and impose their own, diametrically opposed "principles" (if they can be called that). On some issues the public is simply unwise or not well educated, and if the Republicans try to educate them too fast, they will get their own fast education in the realities of politics. Social Security, for example, is known as the "third rail" of politics, because any politician who proposes to reduce it, let alone phase it out, is bound to lose big. Republicans risk being shut out completely if they try to force the issue.

Some Libertarians seem to believe that their party can eventually muscle out the Democrats and Republicans. Needless to say, they are deluded if they think it will happen any time soon. First of all, if the public were educated enough and wise enough to favor libertarian principles, the Democrats and Republicans would be forced to move in that direction. More importantly, the stronger the Libertarians get, the more power the Democrats will get. Suppose the Libertarian vote surges to, say, 10-20%. The socialists in the Democratic party are unlikely to vote Libertarian, so the Libertarians would split the vote with Republicans. In the process, they would hand the government over to the Democrats, who would essentially rewrite the Constitution along the lines of the Communist Manifesto. Under that scenario, we could lose the right to vote altogether before the Libertarians actually win, and those die-hard, "principled" Libertarians would be largely responsible for the whole nightmare.

The answer for Libertarians is not to vote Libertarian -- at least not yet. First, our outdated election method must be reformed. Our current plurality voting system is the cause of our entrenched two-party political system. Condorcet voting and Approval voting, on the other hand, allow voters to register their support for minor parties without wasting their vote, which is the key to breaking up the current political duopoly. Condorcet voting is the best system, but Approval voting is much simpler to implement and is therefore the logical first step. The primary Libertarian effort should now be to push for Approval voting. In fact, Libertarians would be better off not running any candidates at all until Approval voting is in place. They will then have a fair chance to win, and we will find out how faithful they are to their principles when it can mean the difference between winning and losing.

ElectionMethods.org

RussP.org