In his Wall Street Journal In an opinion piece calling on libertarians (“us,” he writes) to vote for Donald Trump, Walter Block’s central argument is that Joe Biden “is much further from us on the political-economic spectrum than Mr. Trump” (“.Libertarians should vote for Trump», May 28, 2024). This argument is debatable.
Walter only addresses swing state libertarians, which raises a first series of problems. We first need to identify the “swing states”, which can be many combinations of them and which, in any case, are not known until after the election. But I want to focus on the criterion of “distance” implied by his “farthest from.” I will suggest that such distance is not easy to understand and that an obvious alternative criterion does not point to Trump.
If the social world has only one dimension, that is to say if there is only one political question along one dimension (an axis), and if each voter has a privileged point ( “sweet spot”) on this axis, we can (maybe) find where “we” are relative to Trump and Biden, and measure who is closest to “us.” The simplest example of such a problem is “the” tax rate. We could eventually determine Trump’s and Biden’s ideal tax rates and measure the distance between “our” own ideal point on the axis and theirs. Yet even in a one-dimensional world, many questions are difficult to translate into actual numbers on the axis. For example, how might we compare a promise by Biden to implement three measures against the Second Amendment with a favorable measure promised by Trump? Furthermore, the proposed exercise assumes that all libertarians share the same ideal point on the axis.
The real-world choice space is defined on more than one dimension. There is more than one political question. Not all voters, even libertarians, are voters who focus on the same narrow issue. Take the example of Block, Ross Ulbricht, of Silk Road fame, currently in prison for life. Block tells us that Trump has promised to commute Ulbricht’s sentence. If Ulbricht’s release were the only political issue, Trump would be closer than Biden to many libertarians. If international trade were the only issue, Biden, despite his attempted plagiarism, would no doubt be closer to many libertarians. On many issues, libertarians will have different preferences and make different compromises. Minimizing the distance between “us” and the presidential candidates becomes impossible.
Furthermore, it is very difficult to say the least to determine what a politician’s real preferences are in relation to his strategic promises and how these will be affected by the evolution of his political constraints. The difficulty increases, I might add, if we imagine an ignorant, inconsistent, narcissistic and unpredictable candidate who generally only gets along with vassals and servants.
Furthermore, we must not lose sight of a simple but often ignored reality: the low probability that an individual vote will be decisive, that it will “swing” anything. This has never happened in a presidential election and is unlikely to ever happen. A rational individual will not vote with the intention of changing the outcome of the election. Even if Block WSJ If this article persuaded 1,000 swing libertarians to vote for Trump, each of them will know that their vote only reduces the hypothetical decisive group of 1,000 members to 999. They may prefer to spend their time milking cows or looking at the New York skyline.
The best a rational voter can do is to vote (or not vote or cancel their ballot) in order to express a moral opinion in favor of the candidate, if there is one, with whom they share common ground. important moral values. (See Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and decision (Cambridge University Press, 1993).) For a libertarian, these values will be those conducive to maintaining a free society. Moral congruence may not seem any easier to assess than distance, but at least it’s chasing a real rabbit. This suggests that the best a libertarian voter can do is vote for the candidate, if there is one, who shows the moral character most representative of what a politician would be in a truly free society (while of course remaining a generally interested human being). We should leave some room for reasonable compromise but, ultimately, we can view the moral character required of a royal president as modeled on the ideal of the head of state in The “Capitalist State” by Anthony de Jasay. The less radical could be interested in the ethics defended by James Buchanan in Why am I not conservative too?.
From this perspective, whatever candidate has acceptable libertarian moral character, if there is one, it is not Donald Trump.
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A caveman politician with his distinguished admirers (By DALL-E, under the direction of Pierre Lemieux)
