Voter's Guide  

The Intelligent Person's Guide to Presidential Politics

Choosing among those who seek the presidency is not necessarily an easy task for the intelligent libertarian. Liberty's editors do their best to help.

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I Like Mike!

by Bill Bradford

I shall vote for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party's candidate for president, and I shall vote for him with more enthusiasm than I have felt for any Libertarian presidential candidate since 1988. Yes, I know that Badnarik has some negatives: he harbors a number of beliefs — the Federal Reserve System is privately owned, the federal income tax is not compulsory — that are not merely mistaken, but goofy, right-wing, and cranky. But Badnarik is a good and honest man, and an articulate spokesman for libertarian ideas.

I am sure this surprises no one. I have endorsed in these pages every LP nominee for president since 1988, and supported, voted for, and publicly endorsed every LP nominee since the party was founded.

Part of my reason is that I think that voting is, more than anything else, a form of public speech, and I want to make a statement that is as unequivocally libertarian as I can. But there is more to my support of Badnarik than that. While it may be argued that delegates at the LP convention made an uninformed and less than optimal decision when they gave the nomination to Badnarik, his personal virtues make him a better candidate than the party has nominated in the recent past. He is an energetic campaigner, a hard worker, and a straight-up guy. There's not a hint of self-aggrandizement in his campaign, and hardly any ego-tripping. His passion and sincerity and honesty are manifest.

If I believed that my vote and support actually might have some real effect on the outcome of the election, I would vote for John Kerry — not because I think he is a good man or would be a good president, but because I think governmental power and spending would grow more slowly if he were elected. Democratic presidencies in the last 35 years have been characterized by far less activist government than Republican presidencies. A Kerry presidency would likely provide even slower growth of government than the usual Democratic occupation of the Oval Office. The element of our national government least inclined to expand government spending is the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, and thanks to Republican gerrymandering in the states, the chance of a Democratic takeover of the House is virtually zero. Kerry has shown more fiscal restraint than most Democrats; with a Republican-controlled Congress, history suggests voting for Kerry would be the best bet for restraining the growth of government in the next four years.

I realize that Kerry is a power-lusting politician who changes his public positions with every hiccup in public opinion. But so was Bill Clinton, under whose regime government spending grew at the slowest rate since Eisenhower. And George W. Bush has a proven record of increasing government spending and power. Unlike Kerry, he has convictions, but so many of his convictions are manifestly wrong that it is difficult to make any sort of plausible case for his reelection. And there is also the issue of the war in Iraq. While both candidates support it, Kerry obviously has more wiggle-room than Bush, so he could extricate the United States from this quagmire more easily.

One final thing: I am squeamish about casting my vote for a scoundrel like Kerry or Bush. In 1968, I cast my first vote for president for Richard Nixon, who promised smaller government and had two hardcore libertarians, Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson, on his staff. Subsequent events proved that if ever there was a wasted vote, that was it.

I was much happier to be among the 3,676 Americans who voted for John Hospers in 1972 than I was to be among the 31,785,480 Americans who voted for Nixon in 1968. There is something repugnant about voting for a scoundrel, even if he is the lesser of two evils. I could hold my nose and do it if I thought it would make a difference. But any delusions of self-importance that I harbor lie in areas other than thinking that my vote or my support could affect the outcome of the election. The simple fact is that the likelihood that my support will affect the outcome of the election is nil.

So I shall make the most positive statement that I can: I shall vote for the only candidate who actually wants to increase liberty and reduce state power. I shall proudly cast my ballot for Michael Badnarik. And I think all Americans who value human liberty should do the same.

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Two Cheers for George Bush

by Steve Cox

Before we start arguing about the presidential election, we should all admit that this is a year of remarkably weak candidates. The weaknesses of Sen. Kerry and President Bush are obvious to everyone but their most fanatical supporters. (But no, that's wrong. Neither one of them has fanatical supporters. Each has fanatical allies, motivated by fanatical opposition to the other party.) The weaknesses of the Libertarian candidate and the various Green candidates would also be evident to all, if anyone but fanatical supporters paid any attention to them. I am a registered Libertarian. When the Libertarian Party finds a candidate who has the stature of such previous candidates as John Hospers, Ed Clark, and Ron Paul, I will joyously vote Libertarian. In the meantime, I don't plan to waste my vote. I will cheerfully, if not joyously, cast it for President Bush.

At this point, some of my libertarian friends are shouting, "Wait! What do you mean by 'waste'? You don't even understand what it means to vote!" Their argument is this. The chances are minuscule that any individual vote will actually affect the outcome of the election. Under these circumstances, voting is simply an expression of one's political ideology, and it would be sheer waste for any libertarian to vote for a major-party candidate.

It's an interesting argument, although I'm not sure I grasp its metaphysics, especially the implication that nobody's vote matters in practical terms. I don't know how close the election will be, but I don't intend to surrender my chance of affecting it; and I know that if more people felt as I do, there would be a much greater chance that the result would be affected. I intend to vote for the least imperfect candidate who is actually able to win. In other words, I am going to cast my ballot for the scorned and derided Lesser of the Two Evils.

Scorn and deride all you want; "able to win" is still an important criterion. If it weren't, I'd vote for Milton Friedman, and a hundred million other voters would go out and vote for their own private idea of the perfect candidate. But that's not what elections have ever been like. They are contests between two or three people, not a hundred million; and since 1796, none of the live options has ever been ideal. Even Thomas Jefferson was far from a perfect libertarian candidate, but if I had to choose between Jefferson and his opponent Aaron Burr, I'd vote for Jefferson, every time. In 1940, the two meaningful candidates were Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, two very bad candidates, from a libertarian point of view. But the country would have been a lot better off if Willkie had won and Roosevelt had been denied a third term. You may think it's morally wrong to give your sanction to the Lesser of the Two Evils, but are you willing to accept the responsibility of helping the Greater of the Two Evils to win?

George Bush is a big-spending modern liberal. So is John Kerry. Yet there are two vital differences between them.

One is character. In the early seventies, Kerry functioned as a Communist stooge. He enjoyed the experience, and he has never gotten over it. He is a meddler and a blowhard, a self-anointed apostle of uplift for the unwashed masses. Like all such people, he is ambitious and grasping, with a mile-wide mean streak. Bush, by contrast, is simply a small-town Rotarian, a man of completely conventional ideas and motives, pleasant and friendly in a canine way. The most interesting thing about him is the fact that he is a reformed alcoholic who has managed not to become self-righteous about reform. Case closed on the question of character.

The other difference is party affiliation, and it is much more important. When you elect a president, especially a personally weak president, such as Bush is and Kerry would undoubtedly be, you are electing not just him but his party, with its million heads and tens of million claws.

Now, I would prefer to vote for a party that endorses and practices an isolationist foreign policy and a domestic policy devoted to shrinking the government's economic, social, moral, medical, and educational involvements. The Republican Party endorses smaller government but has recently done little, or worse than little, to transform its faith into works. The Democratic Party has, for the past three generations, struggled to attain precisely the opposite aims. This is the party that wants to nationalize health care. This is the party that vows to roll back Bush's tax cuts. This is the party that is so devoted to racial quotas that it rigorously imposes them even in the supposedly democratic selection of delegates to its own conventions. This is the party that uses Al Sharpton as one of its public faces. Even its antiwar positions amount to mere timeserving. It applauded President Clinton's multitude of wars, it insisted that President Bush (re)invade Haiti and called him a racist when he resisted doing so, and it has now selected a presidential candidate who is proud to say he voted for (as well as against) the war in Iraq and would be better than Bush at winning it.

No thanks. Of the two real alternatives, I prefer the party that isn't pledged to every crackpot political idea that is current in America today and hasn't compiled an excellent record of turning crackpot ideas into laws. It's not for nothing that the Republicans are called the stupid party and the Democrats are called the evil one. Satan knows how to get things done.

Therefore, I and my household, as the Bible says, are voting for the stupid party. And I will vote for it with a measure of pride, knowing that votes for Bush will be interpreted as rebukes to the vileness of the Democrats' four-year campaign to paint him as a fascist drug addict energized solely by a desire to rape the environment, enrich the Halliburton Corporation, and return African-Americans to slavery. Within living memory, there has never been a national political campaign so frothing with hate. Lyndon Johnson's henchmen, as politically debauched as they were, never led public chants of "Don't drink the Goldwater!"; yet we have seen the unreproved indecency of the Rev. Mr. Jackson's "Keep out the Bushes!" Even Joe McCarthy never pulled the stunt that Dan Rather tried to pull on Bush, waving palpably forged documents accusing a man of 30-year-old misdemeanors, then responding to criticism by saying that the story was true, whether the evidence was forged or not.

Or don't you believe that CBS News is part of the Democratic campaign? The very basis of the Democratic Party, and of the institutional opposition to libertarian ideas in America, is the alliance of a partisan political elite with its front groups and minions in the media, the arts, the clergy, the foundations, the schools, the "civil rights" aristocracy, and the other parts of civil society that it has corrupted with its venom, obscurantism, and outright lies. If decency and candor are ever to be restored to our national political life, this unholy alliance, currently led by John Kerry, must be decisively rebuked. To give it an electoral victory, with the intention of expressing libertarian views, would be a tragically ironic mistake.

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In Defense of Flip-Flopping

by Sally McCarthy

In mid-August of 2004, the presidential election was John Kerry's to lose, and by mid-September it looks like he had done just that. In the end, Kerry's flaw was the same as Michael Dukakis' in the 1988 presidential campaign — he wound up looking effete. Dukakis couldn't get up the gumption to say he'd defend his wife Kitty from a hypothetical rapist, and Kerry went limp under the Swift Boat onslaught, a skirmish that should have been won simply by forcefully stating the truth. Appearing impotent is a fatal flaw in a presidential candidate, even more so when the country is at war.

Somewhere between 1974 and 2004 John Kerry lost his will to fight. Kerry should have claimed his status as a genuine war hero, and strongly defended his flip-flop to antiwar hero, an insightful stance taken some 30 years ahead of that war's architect and manager, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who finally, thoroughly denounced the Vietnam War in his book "Fog of War" and the documentary film that followed. A man who cannot forcefully argue that he was honorable to go to war, and honorable to question the necessity of war, and reject the horror of it and the atrocities that happen in all wars by every side including our own, is a man too cautious too stand for much of anything.

The media and the country were determined to revisit the Vietnam War, and John Kerry was in a perfect position to bring the issue to some degree of resolution. He could have reviewed what Robert McNamara said in "Fog of War" — that if we are to learn from our experience in Vietnam, we must first pinpoint our failures. As McNamara sees it, there were eleven major causes of our disaster in Vietnam:

1. We misjudged the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries and exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people.
4. We misjudged friend and foe alike, reflecting our profound ignorance of their culture, history, and politics.
5. We failed to recognize the limits of modern high-technology military equipment in confronting unconventional and highly-motivated people's movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to winning hearts and minds.
6. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion of the pros and cons of military involvement in Southeast Asia before we initiated the action.
7. A nation's deepest strength lies not in its military prowess, but in the unity of its people. Once unplanned events took us off course, we failed to explain what we were doing and why.
8. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose. Our judgment of what is in other people's interests should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums.
9. Other than threats to our own security, we should have international support for going to war.
10. We failed to recognize that there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions.
11. We failed to analyze and debate our actions, our objectives, risks and costs of alternative ways of dealing with them, and the necessity of changing course when failure was clear.

In conclusion, McNamara says that American leadership both overestimated the effect of South Vietnam's loss on the security of the West, and failed to adhere to the fundamental principle that if the South Vietnamese were to be saved, they had to win the war themselves.

The lessons of Vietnam should have been applied to the war in Iraq. Inexcusably, the Bush administration manipulated Americans into fearing that Iraq was on its way to developing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, giving us little choice but to support a preemptive attack. Though it is unclear whether Bush deceived the American people, or if he himself was misinformed, neither explanation is acceptable.

There is a case for suspecting that the administration deceived us into war. Paul O'Neill, in "The Price of Loyalty," states that from the first cabinet meeting there were those in the administration advocating the invasion of Iraq. "Fahrenheit 9/11" includes footage of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell saying in early 2001 that Saddam Hussein and his weapons were contained. Wesley Clark has said that high Pentagon officials were already advocating war with Iraq on 9/11.

And finally, there is the stupidity of the strategy. The Bush administration seems to have dotted every i and crossed every t in its plans to win the presidential election. Not so for Iraq. Administration officials recklessly ignored the Powell Doctrine about sending in ground troops only in overwhelming numbers, and conveniently forgot that a guerrilla war with American soldiers on the ground is a high-risk, low-return strategy. General Eisenhower warned never to get into a land war in Asia, a principle applicable to the Middle East. No strategy has become clear, either to win the war or get out of it. So far, there are 8,000 dead and wounded with no end in sight. More terrorists may have been created than killed.

A president who leads his country into war on bad information does not deserve reelection. Because John Kerry did not take us into the Iraq war and probably wouldn't have, I will vote for him. By appointing strong advisors and an able cabinet, he can provide sorely needed checks and balances on a government that in every area has marched too far to the right.

A commander in chief has as much duty to avoid war as a ship's captain does to avoid a shipwreck. Now, with a war on terrorism that requires strategic thinking and the wisdom of Solomon, we have a government that is squandering blood and treasure on an ill-planned and unnecessary venture in Iraq. The ship of state sails through choppy waters; it needs a captain and crew able to navigate through the difficult obstacles ahead. Hopefully, John Kerry has the wisdom to choose intelligent and nuanced advisors who know there is a time for war and a time for peace.

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The Case Against Voting

by Doug Casey

Once again we find ourselves in the midst of the quadrennial American circus, when shameless power-mongers come out to blather moronic and vacuous platitudes in hopes of getting Boobus americanus to "get out and vote," granting politicians life-and-death power over the citizenry for the next four years. Regrettably, they won't be disappointed.

But one can hope they will be. I think back to the '60s, when the wistful saying "Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came" was popular. It was a noble sentiment. In that vein, I also like "Suppose they gave a tax, and nobody paid" around April 15. And "Suppose they gave an election, and nobody voted" now.

You've heard all the reasons why you should vote. Most of them are humbug at best, and some — like "It doesn't matter how you vote. Just vote!" — are simply idiotic. Voting today has nothing to do with the "civic duties" you learned about in grade school. Your fellow citizens aren't Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper lookalikes earnestly trying to do the right thing. Well over 50% of U.S. citizens are now net tax recipients, and they've trundled down to the polls in their tank tops and shower slippers only to help ensure they stay on the gravy train.

It's sickening to hear thoughtful non-voters, who can sense in their gut something is terminally wrong with the process, make lame excuses because they feel guilty for not participating. I would, therefore, like to give you five reasons why you shouldn't vote.

1. Voting in a political election is unethical. The political process is one of institutionalized coercion and force; if you disapprove of these things, then you shouldn't participate in them, even indirectly. As Mao, a leading expert on the subject, famously said: "The power of government grows out of the barrel of a gun."
   
   Sure, if government limited itself only to defending its subjects from domestic and foreign aggression, and adjudicating disputes, you could argue there is nothing unethical in voting for who plays the night watchman. But the fact is that elections have long been, as Mencken observed, nothing but advance auctions on stolen goods.
   
   If you want something, vote in the marketplace with the dollars you've earned.
   
   
2. Voting compromises your privacy. It just gets your name in another government computer bank — one that they can use to call you up for jury duty and other forms of involuntary servitude. The less the government knows about you, even in small ways, the better off you are.
   
   
3. Voting is a degrading experience. Voting (and even registering to vote) often involves spending considerable time standing in line, hanging around government offices, filling out forms, and dealing with petty bureaucrats. Most people can find more enjoyable and productive things to do with their time.
   
   
4. Voting just encourages the kind of person that runs for office. People don't actually vote for a candidate; they vote against the other candidate. But that's not how the guy who gets the vote sees it; he thinks it's another mandate for him to rule. It's ridiculous to justify voting as an endorsement of the lesser of two evils.
   
   In 1980, as luck would have it, I did an hour alone on "The Phil Donahue Show" on the very day before the elections. The audience had been very much on my side up until the point where Phil accused me of voting for Mr. Reagan, and I had to explain why I wasn't. Unfortunately, telling them they shouldn't vote was just more than they could handle, so they didn't let me get past this fourth point. The prospect of their stoning me precluded my explaining the fifth, and possibly most practical, reason not to vote.
   
   
5. Your vote doesn't count. Politicians and political hacks like to say every vote counts, but statistically, one vote in scores of millions makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on the beach. That's completely apart from the fact that, as voters in Chicago in 1960 and Florida in 2000 can tell you, when it actually is close, things can be rigged. And, anyway, officials manifestly do what they want — not what you want — once they're in office.

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