A Pox on All the Houses...

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Except this year Libertarians must vote for Kerry to end Bush

We're coming up on a watershed presidential election, which will determine whether the country will continue with four more years of more—Bush, like the Battery Bunny, shows no signs of stopping his frenetic, good ol' boy, lunatic policies—or the Democratic alternative of John Kerry.  Make no mistake, the holder of the office of President of the United States will be either Bush or Kerry, a Republican or a Democrat.

No strong presidential third-party candidates exist, a la Ross Perot, and a vote for the Libertarian candidate this year does not make a positive statement.  (I'll analyze the Badnarik LP presidential candidacy at length below.)

So as Simon and Garfunkel tell us in Mrs. Robinson, "any way you look at it you lose."  The question of the hour, especially for liberty lovers, is "lose how much?"  As many of you, I've been following the Bushocracy persistently and watching the distressing pileup of:

• thousands of bodies in the misfocused military assault on and quagmire in Iraq
• hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed by the Justice Department's ongoing war on civil liberties
• millions of jobs lost to:
  - burgeoning federal regulatory burdens
  - runaway government spending drying up private capital
  - downsizing of the productive class via elite-corporate protectionism
• trillions of dollars of national debt added through rapid expansion of virtually every federal department

But I had previously thought any Democrat likely would be as bad or worse.

I was wrong—especially in terms of economic policy.  In working on my column on the national debt, I discovered the reckless government spending numbers lie squarely on the Republican side.  The fact that Republicans are known as free enterprisers is the cruelest Big Lie of the 20^th century and the smallest political Fig Leaf of the early 21^st.  The Republican Party is and from day one has been the party of unbridled state power.

Still I had been considering pulling the lever for the Libertarian Badnarik or writing in "none of the above."  That is, until I recently read a column by Edward Lazarus in the August 2004 issue of Playboy, entitled "Courting Disaster: What happens to the Supreme Court if George Bush remains president?"  It frightened me to my senses.

According to that column, three justices are likely to retire in the next four years: John Paul Stevens (84), Sandra Day O'Connor (74), and William Rehnquist (80).  If Bush remains president, he will certainly replace the retiring judges with state-supremacist judges who will rule against all remaining personal freedoms, particularly reproductive freedom, that hang by the slenderest of Constitutional and popular-consensual threads.

The inescapable conclusion: four more years of Bush will serve up the American people to the New Right Theotyranny on a silver platter—make that a pewter platter, because the government will be bankrupt and none of us is going to have any money either.

Ergo:

Since the advent of the imperial presidency and lap-dog Congresses, the office of president is in a class by itself.  Whoever wins the office dictates significant events in our lives, disproportionate to his "mandate."  (That was some mandate Dubya got in 2000, wasn't it?)  If we get Bush, we get tyranny.(1)  If we get Kerry, we get, at least, a breather.

Like the Republicans giving lip-service to free enterprise, Kerry and the Democrats give lip-service to Social Security, compulsory health care, and other antiquated sacred cows of Big Mama Government.  But like Clinton they fully realize "no one wants big government anymore."  No one will let them raise taxes.  If history is a guide, Kerry and Associates will be more free market than Ike (Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, 1952-1960).

There it is.

As a card-carrying Libertarian, I certainly advocate—all things being equal in the nonpresidential races—that you vote Libertarian to send a message.  The message being the future belongs to freedom and the principle of individual rights, and any politician who seriously desires to help the people will learn what freedom is and will fight to achieve it.

Even if Libertarian Michael Badnarik were the best candidate conceivable—say, a bit-less-voluble Aaron Russo with a well-funded, first-class, seasoned professional campaign organization—this would still be the year to "not waste your vote."(2)  Bush and Cheney represent Darth Vader and the Death Star, set smirkingly toward wiping out all hope of planetary reason and freedom in our time.

But Michael Badnarik, though apparently a man of some character and intellect, even wit, does not meet the threshold of being a good candidate.  Consider the following table(3), in which I rank my subjective merit of the former LP presidential candidates.

Obviously, the #1 ranking goes to Ed Clark in 1980, who received nearly twice the votes of the next highest campaign.  The other rankings reflect my own perceptions and biases as to quality of character and/or effectiveness of campaign.

Most of the above candidates had political experience, either running for office as libertarians or holding office.  Ron Paul has been a member of Congress for many years, Roger MacBride was a Republican elector in the state of Virginia who broke ranks and cast an electoral vote for John Hospers (contra Tricky Dick in 1972).

Michael Badnarik is a little-known jack-of-all-trades: self-described Constitutional scholar/teacher, computer consultant, Boy Scout leader, skydiving instructor, and so on.  With the exception of having an encyclopedic knowledge of the US Constitution, Michael shows little evidence of having understood, much less mastered, the libertarian "oeuvre" articulated by Rand, Rothbard, von Mises, and dozens of other founding authors.(4)

Or even the LP platform.  Though when asked by Fox News, following his nomination, his views on same-sex marriage, immigration, the economy, abortion, freedom of speech, the war in Iraq, etc., Michael responded in effect that he holds the Libertarian Party's official position on these issues.

Fundamentally, the reason he would not or could not elaborate and the reason he is not an effective candidate—apart from the fact he's never run for anything before and knows nothing about the national political process—is because he manifests what the philosophers term a concrete-bound approach to politics.

The "concrete" to which his conceptual faculty is most bound is the US Constitution.

And that's a problem because the Constitution as a concrete thing, at most a special tool, is not the principle or universal quality we advocate.  The universal principle or Big Idea that animates libertarians is freedom.  When one understands the nature of freedom/liberty, one can apply the reasoning of the nonaggression principle to any issue.

Just one example:

The reason the war on drugs is wrong is because it violates the nonaggression principle, because it deprives peaceful men and women of their natural rights, because it violates our freedom.  The war on drugs is not  fundamentally wrong for contradicting the words in a particular document.  And you can't make a universal passionate case for freedom by claiming you uphold the US Constitution.

As Lysander Spooner stated, "[The Constitution] has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it."(5)

When something violates our freedom, we fight to end the violation.  We can appeal effectively to the Constitution in such a fight, indeed, a change to the Constitution or its popular observance can be a solid measure of success.  But it isn't a primary.  And it certainly doesn't rise to the level of stirring most men into action.

By way of analogy, a noteworthy method of our colonial fathers for disputing "taxation without representation" was to throw tea into Boston Harbor.  A Badnarik approach of the day might have been to publicly declare the Stamp Act unconscionable and point out the British charter it abrogated.

The LP now needs tea throwers, certainly at top of ticket.

Badnarik's "eccentricities,"—including alleged refusal to file tax returns, noncompliance with driver's license rules, former proposals to demolish the UN building and require prisoners to remain bedridden so their muscles atrophy—are icing on the cake.  He's not the best guy, we blundered, he's crankish, nonprofessional, and there isn't enough time to polish him up and make him into a respectable tea thrower who can inspire freedom lovers.

Which is just as well, because this year—even if the perfect Libertarian candidate would have miraculously ridden into town on a white horse—we must hold our noses and take the only medicine truly available: cast a vote for the Democrat to give us the best chance to expunge this colossal barnacle on the ass of freedom currently occupying the Oval Office.

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