his The Wall Street Journal In an op-ed urging libertarians (“we,” he writes) to vote for Donald Trump, Walter Block’s central argument is that Joe Biden is “much further from us on political and economic grounds than Trump is” (“Libertarians should vote for Trump(May 28, 2024) This argument is debatable.
Walter only encourages libertarians to support “battleground states,” which raises the first set of problems. First, we need to identify the “battleground states,” which could be a combination of multiple states and will only be known after the election. But I want to focus on the measure of “distance” implied by his word “further.” I want to suggest that such distance is hard to understand, and that no obvious alternative measure points to Trump.
If the social world had only one dimension, i.e., if there was only one political issue along one dimension (one axis) and each voter had one preference point (the “ideal point”) on that axis, then we could (presumably) find out where “we” are compared to Trump and Biden, and measure who is closer to “us.” The simplest example of such a problem is “tax rates.” It is conceivable to determine Trump’s and Biden’s ideal tax rates and measure the distance between “our” ideal point on the axis and theirs. But even in a one-dimensional world, many issues are difficult to map to real numbers on the axis. For example, how can we compare Biden’s promise to take three measures that go against the Second Amendment to the Constitution with the one preferred measure promised by Trump? Furthermore, the proposed exercise assumes that all libertarians share the same ideal point on the axis.
Real-world choice spaces are defined by multiple dimensions. There are multiple political issues. Not all voters, even libertarians, are single-issue voters focused on the same narrow issues. Consider the example of Brock of Ross Ulbricht, of Silk Road fame, who is currently serving a life sentence. Brock says that Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s sentence. If Ulbricht’s release were the only political issue, Trump would be closer to many libertarians than Biden. If international trade were the only issue, Biden would undoubtedly be closer to many libertarians, despite his attempts at plagiarism. On many issues, libertarians have different preferences and make different tradeoffs. It becomes impossible to minimize the distance between “us” and the presidential candidates.
Moreover, judging what a politician’s real preferences are compared to his strategic commitments and how the latter are affected by his changing political constraints is extremely difficult, to say the least. The difficulty is compounded when we imagine a candidate who is ignorant, incoherent, egocentric, unpredictable, and who usually only gets along well with vassals and minions.
Additionally, we must not lose sight of a simple but often ignored reality. The chances that an individual’s vote will have a decisive effect and “sway” anything are extremely low.That has never happened in a presidential election, and it is unlikely to happen again. No rational person would vote with the intent of changing the outcome of an election. Even if Brock The Wall Street Journal Even if this article persuades 1,000 “swing” libertarians to vote for Trump, not a single one of them will know that their vote reduces the hypothetical 1,000-person deciding group to 999 people who might prefer to spend their time milking cows or admiring the New York skyline.
The best that rational voters can do is to express their moral opinion by voting in support of a candidate who shares important moral values with them (or by not voting or by discarding their ballot). (Jeffrey Brennan and Lauren Lomaski, Democracy and decision-making (Cambridge University Press, 1993). For libertarians, these values are what help maintain a free society. Moral agreement may seem less easy to evaluate than issue distance, but at least it’s a real rabbit chase. This suggests that the best a libertarian voter can do is to vote for the candidate, if there is one. The most typical moral character of politicians in a truly free society (While remaining generally self-interested, of course.) We should be open to some compromise, but at the limit, the moral character required of a royal president could be thought of as modelled on the ideal of a British head of state. Anthony de Jasay’s “The Capitalist State.” Those who are not so extreme, James Buchanan Why I’m Not a Conservative.
From this perspective, if there is any candidate with acceptable liberal moral character, it is not Donald Trump.
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Primitive politicians and their famous fans (by DALL-E, under the direction of Pierre Lemieux)
