From a rational perspective, the logical choice is not voting. After all, the odds of your vote making a difference are infinitesimally small.
But that’s if you view voting as an “investment” choice – i.e., you taking time and effort to do X in hopes of getting Y in return.
The other view is that voting is a “consumption” choice – i.e., something we do for enjoyment, like eating a hamburger or going to a movie. You recognize your vote almost surely won’t matter, but you do it because it gives you pleasure to vote for someone (or, in my case, it gives you pleasure to vote against someone).
Now let’s consider libertarians, conservatives, and other advocates of small government. Regardless of whether they’re investment voters or consumption voters, what should they do this election?
You could take an online test and see which candidate matches your views.
Mike Godwin of Reason, however, says you should vote for Barack Obama. Though he starts out by suggesting that most of us should vote for the Libertarian candidate.
…if you’re a Libertarian who’s not in a swing state – you live in California, maybe, or Texas – there’s no compelling reason for you to cast your vote for anyone other than Gary Johnson.
But then he argues that voters in battleground states should prefer Obama over Romney.
…you should give some thought to voting for Obama as the lesser of the two big-government, Harvard-educated evils. …Romney seems perfectly capable of adopting a liberal government program when it suits him. While Romney officially opposes Obamacare, it’s scarcely different from the health-care reform Romney presided over in Massachusetts.
I suspect most supporters of limited government won’t disagree with his assertion that Romney is squishy, but then Godwin goes off the reservation.
…there actually is a libertarian argument for Obamacare. …a truly universal system is the best option for maximizing health-care efficiencies. And if we can preserve some aspects of competition among insurers (which Obamacare, mimicking the health-care plan proposed by the GOP to counter Bill Clinton’s efforts at health-care reform, attempts to do), that’s all to the good. But there’s an even stronger libertarian argument for Obamacare. Namely, it frees more Americans to take better jobs without worrying about losing the health care plan they had in their old jobs. Worker mobility is one of the things that reliably fuels free enterprise, and workers will be more mobile under Obamacare than they would be under Romney’s semi-dismantled version of it.
I obviously disagree, but Godwin isn’t being crazy. Indeed, he’s basically echoing the pro-mandate position that was advanced by my former colleagues at the Heritage Foundation.
This is a reasonable position if you start from the premise that there’s no way of unwinding most of the existing government policies that have prevented markets from operating in the healthcare sector. That’s not my view, so I’m merely saying Godwin has a legitimate point, not that he’s right.
Getting back to his pro-Obama argument, he closes with discussion of social issues.
…let me underscore three points where Obama is surely closer to libertarians than Romney is. One of these is abortion rights, self-evidently. …Another is immigration. …A third quasi-libertarian position is Obama’s late-arriving but still-welcome stance on gay marriage.
I don’t find these arguments compelling. Libertarians are not monolithically pro-life or pro-choice. But to the extent there’s unanimity, they agree that Roe v. Wade was a nonsensical decision and that the issue should be decided by state legislatures. Which sort of makes them allies with Republicans, even if they don’t necessarily agree with how states should handle the issue.
I’m also more skeptical of immigration amnesty than the average libertarian, largely because I agree with Milton Friedman about the risks of combining open borders with a welfare state.
And I also think marriage should be a private institution with no role for government, though if you read the details of the article, it appears that Godwin has the same perspective.
To summarize, I don’t find Godwin’s arguments convincing. If he really wanted to convince conservatives, libertarians, and other supporters of small government that Obama was the right choice, he should have argued that Romney would be another big-government statist like Bush. That’s a very compelling argument, as you can see from this list of Romney transgressions.
He even could have made the argument that keeping Obama for an additional four years would be the best way of laying the groundwork for a Reagan-style victory in 2016 with a presumably small-government advocate like Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, or Paul Ryan at the top of the ticket. That would have caught my attention since my first political decision was to favor Carter over Ford in 1976 in hopes of paving the way for Reagan in 1980.
By the way, I’m not saying it’s right or wrong to vote for Romney, Obama, or Johnson. My job is to focus on policy, not politics. But it is the silly season of politics, so I can’t resist making some observations.
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My only real hope for Romney is that, if elected, he is enough of a businessman and enough of a turnaround artist that he has to realistically curb his big government impulses when faced with the reality of our economic situation. Then, we have to hope that he has the spine hidden in there to enforce the necessary hard choices to get us started on a sane fiscal road.
The biggest problem we’ll have is that at this point, any real hope of true recovery is only going to come after much more and worse pain than what we’ve already been through. People my age are pretty much going to have to understand that we’re going to have to sacrifice ourselves and our futures in order to have any chance of saving anything for our children.
As to Obamacare being libertarian – how? There’s no sane way. Obamacare will cost you as an individual or individual family so much that any perceived “freedom” or “liberty” you might have after it’s done with you won’t be worth anything. Prosperity helps ensure your freedom and liberty and Obamacare is a massive propsperity drain. We might all be equal, but’s equally miserable. That’s a freedom I can live without.
The best libertarian argument for 4 more years of Barack Obama would be if one were convinced that the GOP would hold the House and take the Senate (the latter seems unlikely now.) In that case, one could make a strong argument that a GOP Congress would resist spending from Obama, but that a GOP Congress plus Romney would be George W. Bush all over again.
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I watched Johnson answer questions on Wilcow(Blaze TV) He did not strike me as a small government guy. He dearly loves the EPA and the National Park Service.
Funny, a non-libertarian trying to tell libertarians how to vote… I fail to see the relevance in Godwin’s piece, or why he should write for Reason for that matter.
And BTW, read the article I attached in my previous post. Unlike political rambling which may be a minor consumption good (per Mr. Mitchell), it may be the best financial piece of advice you got in decades.
So while there may not be a libertarian argument for voting for Obama, there is a “liberating” argument for it. Liberating yourself from work that is ; and living on the work of others — for the short period of time that they keep working that is.
Indeed ObamaCare frees you to take up a different job, including, primarily, the most attractive job of all.
But unlike what the article suggests, ObamaCare will not destroy itself by reducing the incentive to work. It will rather destroy the American economy, by becoming a significant and irreversible step towards flattening effort-reward curves and disincentivising the atypically (by world standards) vibrant American Economy.
ObamaCare, all by itself, will be a monstrous enough cost (you will see in a few years just how much it will really cost — once people figure out its true redistribution potential) and, more importantly, a strong enough incentive to withdraw from the workforce (partially or totally) that, ObamaCare, all by itself, will likely be sufficient to put the American economy into an irreversible two percent low growth trendline to decline. As monstrous as the cost of Obamacare will prove to be, the main economic clobbering effect will be in its workforce withdrawal and decreased GDP production incentives.
And, unfortunately, human nature teaches us that this will only be the beginning. The stagnation, misery and disenchantment that protracted slow growth rates will cause a once happy and optimistic American public, will (predictably) prompt voters to reach out for even more “help” at the polls and thus create an even stronger permanent collectivist electoral majority. This is already all well underway. The spineless Romney (both as Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate) represents the rational political recognition that resistance to mandatory collectivism has become futile. The turning point , the American entrance to this vicious cycle was four years ago, when Americans forewent the last escape chance to freedom and chose the vortex of decline – by electing Obama to correct the effects of Bush’s collectivist-interventionist policies. That was the definitive turn towards a suicidal trajectory.
I generally agree with Mr. Mitchell’s ideas, but I do not share his prediction that electing Obama is likely to pave the way for an eventual awakening four years down the line. Or let me just say that I find that scenario highly improbable. Reversals, or even mere corrections on the road to sefdom are not the consistent, or even prevalent reactions – as multiple experiences from many European nations suggest, the guiding light to where America is irreversibly headed. While very steep turns on the road to serfdom have caused scant backlashes and corrections, typically politicians (in their own self-interest) adapt the pace of descent into mandatory collectivism to being no faster than what the electorate can digest.
In other words, the 2020 Liberal will not say “I regret voting for ObamaCare, look what it’s done to the economy”, rather he will be saying, “With the economy in such a stagnant shape, thank heavens we at least have Obamacare! And we need more programs like that given the dismal way things are”. Politicians will jump at the new opportunity to further clobber American incentives to produce while personally becoming famous and powerful. It need not even involve corruption. Amongst three hundred million Americans, some competent people who truly believe in the delusion of mandatory collectivism as a path to prosperity will be found. The American public will bring out these people and elect them into office, just as it did in the last election. It is his positive feedback the central element that makes the road to serfdom as irresistible as the light is to the moth.
The siren of immediate redistribution is so irresistible that it tramples the rationality high growth trendlines, truly, the only way to sustained prosperity. A low growth trendline perpetually compounds until it engulfs everyone, no matter how many government support programs one votes for himself. It is only a matter of when do you finally cry uncle.
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But, in summary, don’t sweat about it. If you have been productive during past times when American incentives were truly different than the rest of the world, you can now ride the delusional wave of HopNChange for a few happy years of decline. Chances are that there is still some momentum for a few years to steal other people’s wallets, primarily the very HopNChangers who will presumably continue to work a little longer in this new era of hope. But do make plans for an exit strategy — a life boat.
So, sit back, relax, and DON’T you dare take away my ObamaCare. I’ve already made life plans based on its enactment. Once I taste freedom — freedom from work that is – freedom to live consuming the efforts of oher people — I’ll vote for Mr. Obama. Not in this election, but the next!
Apart from a few years of happy decline (for some of us — those of us who have seen and lived in the classic European movie of HopNChange and thus have no delusional hope of what’s about to happen to America – and are well prepared) there is also a silver lining of Hope: While America declines, hopefully, the world at large gets a refresher on an age old lesson: That mandatory collectivism does not work and that past unprecedented American success, had nothing to do with race and genes; that it was simply the freedom to simultaneously explore many competing avenues and the unadulterated effort-reward curves that are so characteristic of what goes under the general term of capitalism. With that gone, America’s economic fortunes will follow. It is already well underway and it is only a matter of time — a short time — until past momentum comes to a halt. But, as I said, there are still a few happy years left to live, mostly on the working backs of HopNChangers. Enjoy! Don’t let this last opportunity to a few years of more happiness slip away!
George Orwell expressed a fear in the book 1984 that leaders would gain so much influence they could: “announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.” Previously he wrote: “This prospect frightens me much more than bombs”.
We seem to have reached that point. Obama claimed at the Democratic National Convention on Sept. 6th, 2012: “I’ll use the money we’re no longer spending on war to pay down our debt”.
Yet the White House site contains his 2013 budget proposal with a table showing his planned national debt at the end of each year through 2022. It adds at least $900 billion to the debt every year, $9.6 trillion over a decade.
If a CEO lied about his company’s finances to get people to buy stock, the public would cry “fraud! send him to jail!”. Should we trust someone to run our government that we wouldn’t trust to run a company? This isn’t a one time gaffe, he has repeated it from the State of the Union in January, through dozens of speeches into October and a campaign commercial.
In fiscal year 2012 the government borrowed $1276 billion. He implies lower war spending will save so much money the government won’t need to keep borrowing. Yet his proposal only cuts $82.3 billion per year by 2014 for war spending compared to 2012. Simple arithmetic (almost as simple as adding “2 + 2” to get the right answer), shows that is ridiculously far from saving enough money to pay down the debt. The president has been insulting the intelligence of the American public trying to get away with this.
It is shocking that only a few in the media even bothered to comment on this as: “the biggest lie of Campaign 2012”. More at http://PoliticsDebunked.com including a longer version of this amusing cartoon&video mashup of Obama’s lie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zJbYNDRn_Y
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Ron Ford: I don’t think Dan Mitchell is oblivious to the harm that Obama has caused (and potentially will cause) this nation’s economy. Mitchell states that he disagrees with the “libertarians should support Obama” position; he’s just offering it for discussion.
Wanting Obama’s madness to end does not mean we should be naive to the tremendous shortcomings of the Republicans. In many ways (some described on this blog) the Republicans helped dig this hole we are in.
I’m going to vote for Romney. I want Obama out. But if Romney ushers in another round of big-government, economically liberal, protectionist Republican nonsense (AKA, compassionate conservatism), the economy will groan and moan to a halt, once again. Academics and media types will blame all of this Republican statism on the free market, capitalism, and free trade. After that, Americans will look to a new Obama to help reign in the “greed” and help us heal.
So there is definitely a potential downside to electing statist Republicans like Romney. We roll the dice and we take our chances…
You and Godwin are smoking Marijuana, “and” mainlining heroin “and” popping Quarter size LSD caps “and” are encapsulated in some kind of surreal Mobius fantasy world or a masturbatory circle jerk.
Many in the public make the supremely accurate observation that America will cease to exist, including most of our Freedoms under Socialist / Marxist Obama.
*Right at this moment I am trying to resist the strong effort to unsubscribe permanently from your mental madness.*