We Shouldn't Let The Libertarians Off The Hook - They Failed Too

Let’s talk for a minute about an under-criticized player in this election – Gary Johnson and the Libertarian party.

Many people, including me, talked early in this election cycle of their being a real path forward for a third-party candidate to be on the debate stage this year, for a different voice to be part of the conversation given the terrible candidates the major parties put up.

CNN and other news outlets reported on May 26, 2016, that Donald Trump had secured enough delegates to lock up the nomination.  Folks like me remained optimistic that something, anything, would change this tragic trajectory, but a more fatalistic person might have assumed that, hey, this is the hand we’re dealt.

The Libertarian nominating convention began the next day.  So our most viable third party entered into the process of choosing its candidate knowing the electoral disaster that awaited us.  In response, after a truly weird convention, they gave us Gary Johnson and William Weld.

On the surface, this seemed fine.  Why not put up these guys – Republican governors of liberal-leaning states with decent records of fiscal conservatism.  No one knew them, but there was still lots of time before the election.

At FreedomFest in Las Vegas this year, Gary Johnson said “I believe if we get on the debate stage, we win.”  OK!  That’s an obtainable vision.  Get 15% of America to say they will support you in a poll, get on the stage, and be a voice for free enterprise, for personal responsibility, for a government that maybe doesn’t try to solve every problem.

More than half the country hates both candidates!  How hard could getting on that stage be?

Well three debates have come and gone and neither Gary Johnson nor William Weld have appeared on stage to promote ideas that support smaller government.  The Libertarian ticket is stuck around 9% - a respectable showing in a normal year, but this year, we can only view that as underperforming against expectations.

We should put blame on Johnson himself (and on Weld, for being a less than perfect surrogate for his own ticket at times).  We also need to dump significant blame on the Libertarian party apparatus itself.  The Libertarian Party doesn’t get to call itself an alternative if it isn’t willing to do the hard work of getting its candidate a seat at the table in a year like this.

Elections take money.  I get that.  I also know there is a lot of money sitting on the sidelines this year.  Johnson and the party needed to get out there and bring that money to the table.  The pitch might not have been “we are going to win.”  I think a perfectly acceptable pitch might have been that if our principles of liberty are to survive to fight on, we need at least someone out there giving them voice.

Evan McMullin, a man with fewer credentials and literally no party apparatus behind him beyond his own sheer will, is threatening first place in a state – Utah – on a platform of principled, free-market conservatism.  He is saying the things one might expect a Libertarian candidate might (though certainly he is more conservative than libertarian), and he is saying them in a more articulate way.  That suggests to me that people are hungry for a principled alternative – and are willing to vote for that alternative even if it means being viewed as “throwing a vote away.”  

I picked up a Gary Johnson bumper sticker at FreedomFest.  I never put it on the car, though, after watching him make one miscue after another.  I can forgive an “Aleppo moment” easily but I can’t forgive someone not building out the structure to take advantage of such a ripe opportunity to spread the little-l libertarian message of smaller government and free people.

There is a whole generation out there that longs for this message but simply doesn’t hear it articulated.  Millennials are ripe for the libertarian message, but instead they are treated to the false belief that there is a binary choice between big-government progressivism or say-anything totalitarianism.

Gary Johnson is not a perfect candidate.  He would not be a perfect president.  But he could be a great alternative to the mutant Trump-Clinton hydra that threatens our country today.  At a time when America wants and needs a viable third way, the most obvious choice failed us.  The libertarian moment was here, but Johnson and the party ignored the bus as it went by.

Two good sentences

It's early yet, but my Reader has featured two excellent sentences.

From Bobulate:

‘I’m adding a meeting’ should really be ‘I’m subtracting an hour from your life.

And from Marginal Revolution, in a post entitled "Why don't people rock the boat in early online dating encounters?":

...What we learned from this little experiment is that when people are free to choose what type of discussions they want to have, they often gravitate toward an equilibrium that is easy to maintain but one that no one really enjoys or benefits from.

I like smart words in the morning.

Marriage Penalties for Healthcare

Getting married? Already married? Obama has a wedding present for you as part of his healthcare plan - stiff penalties for dual-income households. Steve Moore reports in yesterday's Political Diary how mandatory coverages will cost married couples (and that's not rich married couples - it's all of them):

Take two low-wage workers who are considering marriage. In 2016, if each
has an income $11,800, they would each have to pay $248 as singles for
government-approved health insurance. Married, their joint income climbs to
$23,600 and they would have to pay $1,109 -- a ding of more than $600
annually.

Middle-class workers could get hit even harder. According to the
Congressional Budget Office, a single individual earning $35,400 -- three times
the poverty rate -- would be obligated to pay $3,611 for mandatory health
insurance. But two such individuals, if married, would lose their eligibility
for government subsidies and their mandatory health insurance payments would
rise to $13,100 -- a whopping $5,878 annual marriage penalty.

That's not how I want to spend my family budget.

New discovery

I just read kottke.org for the first time. It's really pleasant in its zaniness and has given me a renewed perspective on blogging. If I was completely non-ideological, or perhaps just more prolific with actually blogging, this is exactly what kind of blog I'd like to have. Let's see what effect that line of thinking has.

A lack of personal responsibility

If ever you have wondered if American has become an entitlement society, this headline should clear things up for you: Jobless NYC woman sues college for $70K in tuition. Apparently she hasn't gotten the career advice she expected and has no job.

Does she sue the skillet manufacturer when her stir-fry burns? The book publisher when she can't bring herself to finish a book? Or in this case, perhaps the paper company that makes her resume paper is to blame. Take them out too!

We have fallen into the misleading notion that the equality pronounced in the Declaration of Independence is a guarenteed equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. Life's tough and sometimes it isn't fair, but that doesn't mean we need to waste society's time in trying to force false equity.

This woman showed enough personal responsibility to get through college. Now its time to take a look around, realize you aren't the only one having trouble finding a job in a down economy, and take personal responsibility for fixing it - and stop casing blame where none is due.

The freedoms you will lose (yes, you)

This Fortune article is the single best piece I've read on the healthcare bills coming out of Congress. The article identifies "five freedoms" you will lose if the current legislations becomes law. This isn't think tank propaganda. This is a major business publication taking an honest look at the bill.

[T]he Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.

I didn't know a lot of the things cited in this article and I consider myself fairly well informed on the healthcare debate. I wonder if our legislators have any idea this stuff is in there? Given the hesitation to pass anything, they must have at least an inkling.

Obama says you'll be able to keep your current plan if you like it, but you won't - it just may take a year or two before you're kicked off. He says he's not going to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, but I think forcing young people to pay for coverage they don't need qualifies as a tax increase.

Read this article and see what's going on. If you aren't alarmed by the end of it, then read it again because you missed something.

That's a lot of zeros

He noticed that his debt exceeded the world GDP while making a routine balance inquiry on his online Bank of America account.

Most amusing story I read today. Perhaps he bought all of us "free" health care?

The Healthcare Fight

Could breast cancer survivors be a strong and as-yet-untapped ally in the fight to stop socialized medicine?

Some of those solutions are already the order of the day in that single-payer paradise, Britain, whose National Health Service doesn't even provide for annual screening mammograms -- something U.S. physicians strongly recommend to detect and treat breast cancer before it becomes virulent. The National Health Service allows mammograms only every three years, and then only for women between 50 and 70. The service's guidelines recognize that risk rises with age, but women over 70 must nevertheless explicitly ask to continue having the triennial scans -- a not-so-subtle way of discouraging the screening.

Early screening, of course, has saved millions of lives and will continue to do so until it isn't allowed. Why would we want to give that up? And don't expect this to be limited to necessary exams for women, either.

This comes from a L.A. Times opinion piece that provides a very good articulation of what "comparative effectiveness research" really means and the possible implications of proposed legislation. Read it and know what we're looking at.

Good to know that we have a president who will offer us the moon and the stars - but not a hip replacement for his grandmother.

But he's "Progressive"!

"Although Republicans portray it as yet another example of Obama's socialist tendencies, his G.M. plan reveals him to be deeply conservative. He can imagine a world in which the internal combustion engine is obsolete but not one in which G.M. is" -- Reason Magazine's Jacob Sullum

I liked this quote. It underscores a theme I like to occasionally hit at on this blog - the false claim in the current liberal mentality they their ideas are progressive. Progressive, to me, means moving forward to a better reality. To the New Left, progress is moving toward a stronger, more all-encompassing government and getting rid of those conservative, out-dated ideas of individual liberty, personal property, and self-determination.

That's not progress. In fact, it harkens not to the bold experiment that is America, but to the Dark Ages when centralized powers dictated how lives were to be led.

When conservatives call it a Fair Tax, it's no good...

But when liberals call it a Value-Added Tax then it's ok? Hey, a VAT is so European! How could it not be good!?

I'm willing to listen if a VAT will replace the income tax entirely - including a repeal of the 16th amendment, but not if it's lumped on top. That's not reform, it's just double taxation.