Last week on the “Clay and Buck Show” one of them said that people are “imbeciles” if they vote for Libertarian Party candidates this year. I think it was Thursday February 3rd during the 2nd or 3rd hour of their show.
And they’re saying the usual, “There’s so much at stake” with the November elections. You would have to vote for Republicans, especially this time around!
Riiiight. We should all vote for … the “Stupid Party.”
Like all those past times when the Republicans won victories and had majorities, 1994, 2000, 2010, 2014?
As Murray Rothbard observed,
…first, left-liberals, in power, make a Great Leap Forward toward collectivism; then, when, in the course of the political cycle, four or eight years later, conservatives come to power, they of course are horrified at the very idea of repealing anything; they simply slow down the rate of growth of statism, consolidating the previous gains of the Left, and providing a bit of R&R for the next liberal Great Leap Forward….
For instance, after the dreaded Jimmy Carter, in 1980 Reagan won the election by a landslide. And what did Reagan do?
Yes, in his first year as President, Reagan cut taxes. Sort of. And then in his second year he signed a very large tax increase bill that also added new regulations. The 1982 “Tax Equity” bill actually rescinded some of the tax cuts that would have occurred that were provided by the previous “tax cuts” bill.
As Sheldon Richman pointed out, regarding Reagan’s tax hikes and deceptions, the Reagan administration “imposed withholding on interest and dividends,” raised the gas tax, raised Social Security taxes, “shifted $120 billion over five years from visible personal income taxes to hidden business taxes. It lowered the rates, but it also repealed or reduced many deductions.”
Again, Mr. Libertarian, Murray Rothbard on Ronald Reagan’s “eight dreary, miserable, mind-numbing years” as President:
Reagan not only increased government spending by an enormous amount – so enormous that it would take a 40 percent cut to bring us back to Carter’s wild spending totals of 1980 – he even substantially increased the percentage of government spending to GNP. That’s a “revolution”?
Then when campaigning for President, Reagan’s VP George H.W. Bush promised, “No New Taxes,” and after Bush was elected in 1988 he raised taxes.
Then in 1991 warmonger Bush the elder started the first war in Iraq for no good reason, his U.S. military bombed and destroyed Iraqi civilian water and sewage treatment centers, and he imposed sanctions and no-fly zones on the Iraqis which caused them to have to use untreated water which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians by the mid-1990s, and hundreds of thousands more by the year 2000. There wouldn’t have been a 9/11 had the U.S. government and military not started those aggressions abroad. 9/11 was blowback.
And what was Bush the younger’s response to 9/11? More wars, more interventions, more invasions overseas. Statists never learn, unfortunately.
And after 9/11 the Republicans (aided and abetted by Democrats of course) gave us the Patriot Act, which set the table for persecuting and imprisoning dissenters and critics of the regime in Washington.
In their hysterical response to 9/11, Republicans gave us the DHS, TSA, Gitmo, the NDAA power to indefinitely detain Americans for any reason without charges or any due process whatsoever. (Note the experiences of those January 6th participants being persecuted and detained, which I warned over ten years ago would happen.)
Thanks, Republicans. The alternative in 1988 was Libertarian Party candidate Ron Paul, who would have ended foreign interventionism and closed down the foreign U.S. military bases located where they don’t belong, and brought the U.S. troops back to the U.S.
Ron Paul wouldn’t have started a war against Iraq in 1991 as Bush the elder did, obviously.
Ron Paul ran for President as a Republican in 2008, suggesting we apply the Golden Rule to U.S. foreign policy, which received “Booos” from the neanderthals in that debate audience.
Paul ran again in 2012. That last campaign was one in which Herman Cain gave his “9-9-9” plan: a 9% flat tax on individuals, 9% flat tax on businesses, and 9% consumption tax. Ron Paul’s response? “0-0-0.” Why? Because it’s immoral to steal, and government taxation is stealing.
As Murray Rothbard would say, taxation is theft. Taxation is theft because it is involuntary, and not based on a voluntary contract.
Unlike Republicans, the libertarian view is to repeal all forms of involuntary, coerced and compelled taxation-thefts and let people keep and do whatever they want with everything they earn or honestly acquire. Is that imbecilic? I think that Republicans’ love of the evil IRS is imbecilic.
Laurence Vance has many terrific articles online on tax policy. As Vance says, there is not much difference between most Republicans in Congress and the Bernie Sanders socialists. Vance explains the Republicans’ cluelessness on taxes, their love of government control of healthcare, and their low ranking in the Freedom Index. In 2013 Vance detailed the Republicans’ bloated budgets and their lies.
In 2018 after Republicans lost their majority in the House, Vance discussed what the Republicans could have done when they had majorities. Vance also noted how the Republicans make America socialist again, and tells us who the efficiency experts for the welfare state are: Republicans and conservatives, of course.
Perhaps instead of calling Libertarian voters “imbeciles,” talk radio conservatives might want to take a realistic view of what Republicans are and what they actually do.
And then the shyster Donald Trump came along. Oy vey.
Donald Trump’s cutting taxes and deregulation were great for the economy in the short term. The corporate tax cuts were made permanent, but the individual tax cuts were made to be only temporary. They will all have expired by 2025. So that was a shell game, in my view, a total scam. in which “Trump tax cuts” are really tax INCREASES! And in his refusal to cut spending in any meaningful way, Trump made skyrocketing budget deficits and the national debt even worse.
And Trump’s response to Covid was horrible. Despite his promising to “Drain the Swamp,” Trump’s deference to the Swamp Creatures in Covid encouraged the lockdown-mask-house-arrest fascism that occurred throughout the country. He knew he should have fired the very Swampy Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. And Trump himself knew early on that Covid was mainly a cold or flu with a very low fatality rate. In fact, Fauci knew early on that Covid-19 would have a flu-like fatality rate!
Then Trump pushes “Operation Warp Speed” to rush experimental deadly “vaccines” that are not vaccines but gene therapy drug treatments, in which the injected nevertheless get infected with Covid and continue spreading the virus onto others. More recently Trump boasted of getting “boosted” with that crap. He might as well say, “We are all shills for Big Pharma now.”
And Trump fraudulently presented himself as the one to “Drain the Swamp,” which was the main reason why the establishment, the leftists, academia, corporate media, and the national security statists hated him and tried to impeach him on made-up charges, why Covid was exploited to incite fear and panic toward imposing mail-in cheating to steal the 2020 election, and why the FBI Gestapo instigated the “insurrection” to frame him.
But Trump did not “drain the Swamp.” He had four years to drain the Swamp, and what did he do? His whole administration was a police lineup of Swamp Creatures, police statists, national security apparatchiks, neocons, interventionists, warmongers, crony corporatists…Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, James Comey, Chris Wray, Steve Mnuchin, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Reince Priebus, Rick Perry, Elaine Chao…and…Mike Pence! And more! The list goes on and on.
So for the 2020 election Trump ran for reelection after nearly a year of Covid lockdowns and suffocating mask mandates that he didn’t do anything to stop, but also running on a short-term economic boom.
And this is where I have criticism of the Libertarian Party, but not for the same reasons that “Clay and Buck” have in their viewing libertarian voters as “imbeciles.”
No, my criticism of the Libertarian Party in the 2020 elections are of their own idiocy and elitism. As I wrote in this post, in the states that allowed Libertarian Party primaries in 2020, Jacob Hornberger was the big winner, getting 9,035 votes and 7 state wins against Jo Jorgensen’s 5,034 votes and 2 state wins. Yet, the LP convention attendees decided to nevertheless give Jorgensen the nomination for President. Mainly based on gender identity and “woke” reasons, obviously, but also maybe based on Hornberger’s constant criticism of the CIA. Some people believe the LP is infiltrated by the CIA, just as are the Republican and Democrat parties.
So in that case, it is the Libertarian Party apparatchik conventioneers who are the “imbeciles,” not the actual LP voters in the primaries.
But when it comes to Libertarian vs. Republican parties in elections, the ones who actually walk the walk on “free markets,” “individual liberty,” and “private property” are the Libertarians (usually), not the Republicans. Note the articles I cited above by Laurence Vance on the welfare/warfare statist, tax-n-spend Republicans.
One example I like to mention is the 2002 gubernatorial election in Massachusetts. It was Libertarian Carla Howell who campaigned on a platform of small government and free markets. But it was statist Republican Willard Romney who was elected.
And what did statist Republican Gov. Romney do? He raised corporate taxes, and raised fees by a lot as well. And then…he imposed RomneyCare on the people of Massachusetts, which was a model for ObamaCare! Thanks, Republicans.
And thanks to the predictable failures of RomneyCare, health care costs went up, not down. And RomneyCare also adversely affected some hospitals’ care for the poor, and killed some 18,000 Massachusetts jobs. Ultimately Massachusetts bureaucrats imposed health care price controls.
Meanwhile, the 2002 LP candidate for governor Carla Howell was at the same time pushing an initiative petition to repeal the state’s income tax, a ballot question that received 45%. So we know where she’s coming from. And her health care policy would probably have gone in the opposite direction, away from government control and toward the direction of the people’s control over their own health care. But no, we can’t have that. Libertarians are “imbeciles,” according to Clay and Buck (and many other Republicans and conservatives who ultimately love government control, that’s for sure).
And currently, the LP candidate for governor of New Hampshire is Karlyn Borysenko, who happens to be more critical of woke-ism than most Republicans. She is the author of the new book, Actively Unwoke: The Ultimate Guide for Fighting Back Against the Woke Insanity in Your Life, and see her Substack, Actively Unwoke. For instance, here she writes how Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin did NOT ban “critical race theory” in the schools. Here is her Twitter.
Now, I don’t know Borysenko’s views on LGBT and transgender stuff, but the Republican incumbent governor she is running against, Chris Sununu signed a bill into law banning discrimination based on gender identity, and banning “conversion therapy” as well. Sununu also imposed Covid fascism stay-at-home orders, business closures and mask mandates.
So, Sununu doesn’t believe in freedom of movement, private property rights, freedom of thought and conscience and freedom of association. A typical Republican, in other words, just like Democrats.
Worse, while Sununu didn’t arrest people outside his house for protesting his fascist policies, the FBI did subsequently go after some of them for alleged Bitcoin-related “crimes.” (So much for New Hampshire being the “Live Free Or Die” state, oh well.)
But many people will nevertheless vote for Sununu again, because he has that “R” after his name. After all, only “imbeciles” would vote for libertarians. And it will probably be the same thing in the other states, more rearranging of deck chairs with Republicans.