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A Standard-Bearer, Not a “Spoiler”
Dissatisfaction with the two major political parties and their presidential candidates (two mediocre U.S. Senators) has prompted many Americans, of various political orientations, to seriously consider voting for a third-party candidate for U.S. President this year. People whose politics are far to the left – people who are more anti-business, anti-capitalist, than the Democrats and who consider Democrats to be too similar to Republicans in siding with “corporate” interests – can vote for either the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney (former Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia) or for Ralph Nader’s independent candidacy, or even for the Socialist Party’s candidate, Brian Moore. People whose politics are far to the right – people who consider Republicans to be too similar to Democrats in countenancing abortion or illegal immigration – can vote for the Constitution Party’s Chuck Baldwin. And people like me – those of us who value liberty as our highest political value, and who consider both of the candidates of the “Demopublican” and “Replicrat” parties, “McBama” and “O’Cain,” as I call them, to be unacceptable, as advocates of bigger government – can vote for the Libertarian Party (LP), the only political party committed to maximizing individual freedom and minimizing government, and for the LP’s candidate, Bob Barr. The Libertarian Party is arguably the most successful third party in modern American history. It not only has fielded a ticket in every presidential election since 1972, but it also typically fields slates of candidates for state and local offices, many of whom actually have been elected. This year, Barr is on the ballot in 46 states, with the LP challenging election laws to try to get him on the ballot in three other states, bringing his total to a possible 49 out of 50 states – the most of any third-party presidential candidate this year. (In comparison, the Green Party’s McKinney is on the ballot in the District of Columbia and 31 states – but not her home state of Georgia, where Barr is on the ballot. Nader, who got 2.7% of the vote nationally in 2000 and 0.37% in 2007, is on the ballot in 45 states and the District of Columbia. And the Constitution Party’s Baldwin is on the ballot in 37 states.) As a “small-l” libertarian (that is, someone who’s not a “capital-L” Libertarian Party member but who holds a political philosophy that is essentially libertarian), I frequently vote for Libertarian candidates when I find the major-party candidates unacceptable. This year, considering both candidates of the two major parties to be equally unpalatable, I’m voting for the Libertarian candidates, Bob Barr and his running mate, Wayne Allen Root. (“Barr-Root”—what a splendid ticket to root for!) As I frequently have argued here over the past several months, Barr is the only presidential candidate who is truly fit to be President of the United States. Many people share my views and my judgment of the presidential candidates, yet they hesitate to vote for Barr because they fear choosing the LP candidate would “waste” their vote or, even worse, that a vote for Barr would help elect Barack Obama. The worry is that Barr might be a “spoiler,” especially in such so-called “battleground” states as Ohio, where the split between Democrats and Republicans is likely to be close, and where Barr might siphon off a critical number of votes that otherwise would be cast for McCain and thus give the edge to Obama. I understand that concern, for as I have argued in my previous essay, “The Emperor Is Naked!” (Oct. 16), an Obama presidency truly would be disastrous for the United States. Thus, I understand and respect my Republican and libertarian friends who plan to vote for McCain, notwithstanding all his many faults (which I discussed in my March 4 essay, “R.I.P., GOP: The McCain Mutiny”), as the “lesser of two evils.” Nevertheless, in this essay I’ll directly address that rationale, arguing that it’s insufficient to justify a vote for McCain this year, from those of us who truly value individual freedom and limited government. The reason is that a McCain presidency would also be disastrous – equally disastrous as an Obama presidency, but perhaps in different ways – and that, in the long run, it’s best for the cause of freedom that people who support libertarian principles (whether or not they’re “capital-L” Libertarians) vote for the LP’s candidate this year. A vote for a political candidate who truly represents one’s views is not a “wasted” vote; rather, I’d argue, it’s truly a waste of one’s vote to vote for one “Demopublican” or “Replicrat” candidate simply because that candidate seems less evil than the other. The old adage – that the lesser of two evils is still evil – happens to be true. Moreover, throughout the long history of the United States’ national two-party political system, third parties have played the vital role of allowing citizens who are dissatisfied with both major parties a chance to truly express their views, by voting for a third-party candidate. And at critical moments during American history, when significant realignments occurred in the two major parties – such as the 1850s, when the Whig Party collapsed and was replaced by the Republican Party, or the period between the two world wars of the 20th century, when the Democratic Party underwent a major shift in the constituencies it represented – third parties helped reshape the majority two-party system (such as the Free Soil Party of the 1850s, which helped create the new Republican Party, or the Populist and Progressive parties of the late 1800s and early 1900s, which helped transform both major parties). The presidential election of 2008 is another critical transformational moment in American politics – one in which it’s more important than ever for “small-l” libertarians (and their allies among limited-government conservatives) to have their voices heard, by casting their votes for Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party.
The Best Man – Barr None
Bob Barr is by far the best-qualified candidate for President of the United States. He’s also the best-qualified candidate the Libertarian Party has ever fielded since the LP’s creation in the early 1970s. Barr had a distinguished career as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing the 7th District of Georgia, from 1995 until 2003, serving as a senior member of the Judiciary Committee. He helped lead some of the most important oversight hearings in the House, on the Judiciary Committee, as Vice-Chairman of the Government Reform Committee; and he introduced the initial inquiry of impeachment of President Bill Clinton to the House of Representatives in 1997. It was Barr’s role in the Clinton impeachment that demonstrates his firm commitment to the rule of law. As he wrote in his book The Meaning of Is: The Squandered Impeachment and Wasted Legacy of William Jefferson Clinton (2004), Clinton’s perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky affair were violations of the law, of the sort that go directly to the character of the presidency. While just a small part of Clinton’s wrongdoing – especially in light of the abysmal record of the Clinton administration with regard to constitutional abuses and infringements of civil liberties (ably documented in Chapter 3 of Barr’s book) – these crimes by Clinton were sufficient basis for his impeachment. Indeed, as Barr observes in a recent interview in Reason magazine, “The impeachment of Bill Clinton . . . was a very appropriate exercise of legislative power. [I]n this country, Congress clearly has the constitutional power and the responsibility to assure itself on behalf of the American people that a president is operating within the bounds of the law, a responsibility that very, very few Congresses even understand anymore.” (“Bob Barr Talks,” Reason, November 2008, p. 31.) When Georgia Democrats redrew their state congressional map in 2002, they sliced up Barr’s district and left him scrambling to run in a different one. Ironically, it was the Libertarian Party – whom, Barr said, declared him “Public Enemy No. 1” because of his past support for the “War on Drugs” – that helped ensure Barr’s defeat in the Republican primary and thus ended his career as a Congressman. He then rebuilt his career as a lawyer, consultant, and political commentator, becoming a leading critic of the USA PATRIOT Act and the Bush administration’s post-9/11 abuses of civil liberties. Barr especially became a passionate defender of the right to privacy, which he proudly champions as “the right to be left alone,” as Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis called it in a famous 1928 dissenting opinion. Indeed, the Barr campaign proudly notes that, for his work on protecting Americans’ privacy and other civil liberties, legendary New York Times columnist William Safire has called Barr “Mr. Privacy.” Barr’s criticisms of the Bush administration led him to endorse Libertarian presidential nominee Michael Badnarik in 2004. In 2006 he officially joined the Libertarian Party – showing that, among his other virtues, Barr is a decent and benevolent man who bears no ill will toward the party that helped end his congressional career. In his Reason interview he says, “The fact that the Libertarian Party worked against me in 2002 caused me to look very hard at the Libertarian Party. Not as an adversary – not with any bitterness. I looked at the Libertarian Party because I believed there was something that they did and stood for . . . that maybe I should pay closer attention to . . . .” In fact, Barr credits the LP with helping him “see the light,” so to speak, with regard to the failure of governmental controls. As he noted in a June 10 op-ed, “Whether through the free market or simply allowing families to make their own decisions regarding the education of their children, libertarians have taught us that liberty does truly work. In stark contrast, when government attempts to solve our societal problems, it tends to create even more of them, often increasing the size and depth of the original problem.” He cites as a “perfect example” of this the federal War on Drugs, which he now acknowledges “has been a failure.” Indeed, Barr has moved from being a former anti-drug “warrior” to being one of the most effective champions of legalizing medical marijuana. Barr’s changed position on the federal War on Drugs underscores yet another of the man’s virtues: his willingness to admit when he’s been proven wrong, and to correct his errors. It’s a character trait that more politicians ought to have. Barr explains in his Reason interview: “What’s been very important to my epiphany in this area has been the fact that since 9/11, the speed and scope of the government’s assault on individual liberty has become so profound, so pervasive, and so rooted in this notion that the federal government, the executive branch in particular, has plenary power to do whatever it wants. That has caused me to go back and look very carefully at a number of areas in which previously I might’ve been prone to giver the government the benefit of the doubt. We cannot afford any longer to giver the government a benefit of the doubt in these areas. We have to go back and try to reclaim them for the individual in terms of liberty.”
(“Bob Barr Talks,” Reason, November 2008, p. 30.) As someone with a principled commitment to individual freedom, limited government, and the rule of law, Bob Barr is unquestionably the only presidential candidate who takes seriously the Constitution of the United States and the limits it imposes on the national government, especially the office of the presidency. While virtually all Chief Executives since Calvin Coolidge have failed to observe the oath they took as presidents to “support and defend” the Constitution, Barr understands fully what that oath means (as his role in the Clinton impeachment demonstrates). He may lack executive office experience, having never been a governor, but Barr has something that’s arguably more important – and, again, something that none of the other presidential candidates has: a genuine appreciation for the importance of keeping presidential power within the limits imposed by the laws and the Constitution. It’s not just Barr’s experience, as a former member of Congress, that brings added credibility to his campaign, compared to his Libertarian Party predecessors. It’s also Barr’s pragmatic approach to reforming government and restoring it to its true principles. Barr understands that the transformation of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state, with the federal government intervening into virtually all aspects of Americans’ lives, cannot take place overnight: it would require gradual, incremental change, to bring about so important a sea change in the role of the federal government in American society. For example, although a convincing argument can be made that the Federal Reserve System helped create the financial crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, and indeed helped exacerbate and prolong the Great Depression, and that the Fed continues to do more harm than good through its manipulation of the nation’s money supply (as I noted in my previous entry, “The Myth of `Market Failure’” (Oct. 2)), the Fed is so integral a part of the nation’s financial markets that it could not be abolished overnight without disastrous consequences. But the Fed can be reformed, and the enormous unchecked powers it now wields, brought under some controls – and that’s the necessary first step to its eventual abolition. Some fanatical Libertarian Party members actually have qualms about Barr, because he’s not sufficiently “pure” in his libertarian principles – noting, for example, that he would not favor immediately killing institutions like the Fed – but Barr’s pragmatism, far from being a fault, is a real virtue, in broadening the appeal of the Libertarian approach to governmental reform. My friend and colleague Brad Smith (former FEC chairman and an election-law expert) noted this summer that “[t]he obstacles to Barr’s success – or that of any third party or independent candidate – are enormous”: campaign finance laws work against third parties, by limiting their ability to get seed money from large donors; ballot-access laws force minor parties to spend large sums just to get on the ballot, while the Democratic and Republican Parties typically get automatic access in all 50 states (even when they fail to comply with filing deadlines, as recently happened in Texas); and it’s virtually impossible for even the most credible third party candidates to get into public debates (as the presidential debate commission’s exclusion of Barr and Nader recently demonstrates). Still, Smith notes, “Barr may be the strongest Libertarian nominee ever,” with some polls earlier this year showing Barr drawing in the six percent range nationally. Smith concedes that third party support typically falls off close to election day, but thinks “in some crucial states, notably Georgia, which Barr represented for most of a decade in Congress, there is reason to believe he can hold most of his support, which has neared the ten percent level in some polls.” (Smith, “The Barr Factor,” on the Division of Labour blog, June 22.) The most successful Libertarian presidential candidate, Ed Clark in 1980, was a pragmatist who appealed to a broad range of Americans who were unhappy about the major parties’ support for bigger government (even in a campaign that included Ronald Reagan’s libertarian-sounding rhetoric). Clark won over one million votes – a bit over 1% of the national popular vote – a record that none of the Libertarian presidential candidates in the following eight elections failed to match. (That’s largely because, in my opinion, the LP has tended to be dominated by “purists” rather than pragmatists, who have chosen candidates who, at best, have failed to market themselves and LP principles as effectively as Clark did, and who, at worst, could be simply dismissed by voters as fanatical nuts.) Bob Barr’s campaign has a good chance of not only matching, but greatly exceeding (by doubling, tripling, perhaps even quadrupling) Clark’s record. By polling meaningful numbers, Barr’s campaign will “draw attention to the need for and benefits of limited government,” as Brad Smith concludes. Libertarians are hopeful that Barr, the LP’s best-known presidential candidate, will garner a record number of votes thanks to large numbers of Americans whose politics are essentially libertarian but who don’t identify themselves as “libertarian.” Indeed, it’s probable that a significant portion of the electorate call themselves “moderates” or “independents” because they identify themselves as “socially liberal” (“liberal” on so-called “social issues”) but “fiscally conservative” (“conservative” on so-called “economic issues”) and are equally alienated from the two major parties, neither of which represent their views. They’re really libertarians who have never heard of libertarianism or of the Libertarian Party, but they’ve been misled by propaganda coming from the two major parties and the so-called “mainstream” media, which sees American politics as falling along a left-vs.-right, “liberal”-vs.-“conservative” spectrum. Libertarian political scientists for the past several decades (since the creation of the LP) have challenged this simplistic, one-dimensional view of politics as misleading, based on a false dichotomy. The real issue, many libertarians would argue, isn’t the policies of the “left” versus the “right,” but rather collectivism versus individualism. Libertarians see both the “left” and the “right” – and especially the extreme elements within both the two major parties – as collectivist; they recognize that America’s founding principle of individualism – that is, a system of limited government aimed at maximizing individual freedom and responsibility – has been undermined by the growth of Big Government since the beginning of the 20th century, and that only the Libertarian Party advocates a reversal of this trend and a return to America’s first principles, the principles of the American Revolution. The basic problem the LP has with marketing itself is that the “silent majority” of libertarians in the United States today fail to recognize their own principles and to see their principles in these terms. Barr knows how to effectively market the Libertarian message. As he explained in his interview in Reason magazine, “[I]n the heart of every American beats a libertarian about something. Every citizen in this country, I believe, has some area of their lives – whether it’s their personal behavior within their homes, whether it’s how to educate and discipline their children, whether it’s about how to run their business, their political thought, their religious practices – where they want to be left alone. The Libertarian Party, I think, needs to recognize that and appeal to that and draw that out from the American public and the American voters, rather than talk just generally about great philosophical principles.”
(“Bob Barr Talks,” Reason, November 2008, p. 34.)
Putting the Individual First – The American Way
The Libertarian Party presidential candidate – particularly if he is as good a candidate as Bob Barr – is especially attractive this year, when the candidates of the two major parties both hold essentially the same political philosophy, a philosophy that’s essentially anti-freedom, anti-capitalist, and anti-individualist. Both McCain and Obama are collectivists, as David Boaz (executive vice-president of the libertarian Cato Institute) noted in a perceptive op-ed earlier this year. Their fundamental political philosophy is essentially the same and essentially anti-American, for it values the (supposed) collective good of the nation over the freedom of each individual to pursue his or her own happiness, the true American dream and the leading principle on which America was founded. As Boaz observes, “Mssrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is `self-indulgence,’ that building a business is ‘chasing after our money culture,’ that working to provide a better life for our families is a `narrow concern.’” (“Our Collectivist Candidates,” May 28). In a similar vein, Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman has asked the question, “When did the idea of freedom become a political orphan?” (Sept. 7). Noting how Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention extolled “the cause of freedom,” Chapman observes that, in contrast, this year’s Republican convention emphasized such themes as “Serving a Cause Greater Than Self” and “Putting Country First.” “What was missing? Only what used to be held up as the central ideal of the party. The heirs of Goldwater couldn’t spare a day for freedom.” The Democrats, of course, were just as bad, with such themes as “One Nation” and with their candidate identifying “mutual responsibility” – “the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper” – as the “essence of America’s promise.” Chapman concludes, “Forty-four years after Goldwater’s declaration, it’s clear that collectivism, not individualism, is the reigning creed of Republicans as well as Democrats. . . . You will scour the presidential nominees’ acceptance speeches in vain for any hint that your life is rightfully your own, to be lived in accordance with your beliefs and desires and no one else’s.” Those of us who still value individual freedom as our highest political value – who recognize that America’s uniqueness is that this nation was founded on the principle of putting the individual first – have only one presidential candidate (and one political party) who shares these values: Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party. By voting for the LP standard-bearers, the Barr-Root ticket, we’re telling our fellow citizens – and especially the two major parties – that we do put the individual first and that we reject all politicians who fail to do so.
The Lesser of Two Evils – Still Evil!
As I noted at the beginning of this essay, I can understand and respect the position of those Republican and libertarian voters who plan to vote for the John McCain as “the lesser of two evils,” compared to Barack Obama. I’ve similarly voted in the past, in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential election, when I voted for George W. Bush – saying, at the time, that I was so voting not so much because he was the lesser of two evils but rather because his Democratic opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry, respectively, were “the evil of two lessers.” That rationale, unfortunately, doesn’t hold this year because both McCain and Obama are “evil,” and equally so, though for slightly different reasons. Thus, the old adage is true this year: the lesser of two evils is still evil! In terms of their essential political philosophies, “McBama” and “O’Cain” are virtually indistinguishable – as David Boaz observed in his op-ed on “Our Collectivist Candidates.” A similar observation was made by Robert Bidinotto, who in a recent posting on his blog nicely summarized McCain’s weaknesses as a candidate – and the reasons why we can anticipate a McCain defeat in November: “Lacking any philosophy, McCain has been running instead on his personality and image as a populist reformer fighting vague `corruption,’ rather than as a principled defender of individual rights and the Constitution (which he is not) fighting our gargantuan interventionist government. Incapable of running a campaign that clearly distinguished himself from Obama on philosophical grounds – where Obama is most vulnerable – he has shrunk his campaign to a paltry personal competition about `character’ and `leadership,’ where his advantages, though real, are much less obvious.
“From a policy standpoint, his proposals and positions except for foreign policy and oil exploration, are barely distinguishable from Obama’s. Regarding the most pressing issue to voters – the economy and the financial bailout – McCain has returned to form as a Teddy Roosevelt progressive: an anti-corporate, anti-profit-motive, economic interventionist. He’s also been busily reinforcing his persona as a `maverick Republican’ – which, in his definition, means a pragmatic compromiser who eager `reaches across the aisle’ and shakes hands with Obama and congressional Democrats to forge a `bipartisan consensus’ to expand government’s role in the economy. His recent proposal to admit the likes of Democrat regulator Andrew Cuomo into his own administration as a regulator only underscores his economic ignorance and his distance from traditional GOP principles.”
(“The Sense-of-Life Campaign,” posted Sept. 25 on The Bidinotto Blog.) As I noted in my essay on McCain earlier this year (“R.I.P., GOP: The McCain Mutiny” (Mar. 4), his nomination as the Republican Party’s standard-bearer this year has exacerbated the harm that George W. Bush’s presidency has done to the Party and its adherence to limited-government conservative principles. A McCain presidency would take the GOP even further from its limited-government roots. That’s because McCain’s politics are those of a moderate – he’s a “maverick authoritarian,” as Reason magazine labeled him in an insightful profile earlier this year – and moreover, the few genuinely “conservative” principles that McCain does have are the wrong type of conservative principles: not the principles of limited-government conservatism, but rather the principles of the “Big Government” conservatives, the neo-cons and the so-called “compassionate conservatives,” who’ve dominated the Bush administration. In this sense, at least, the Democrats are correct in their criticism that a McCain administration would be, in effect, a third Bush term – and that it would be disastrous for the country (though not in the way Democrats assert). Most of the worst mistakes of the Bush presidency have been policies implemented with bipartisan, “Demopublican/Replicrat” support: including the Medicare prescription-drug program, the greatest expansion of the welfare state since Nixon’s presidency; the misguided “No Child Left Behind” law, which has increased the federal government’s unconstitutional control over education in the United States; the mushrooming of federal spending, including such outrageous pork-laden legislation as the “farm bill” of Mr. Bush’s first term, the “energy bill” of his second term (with its ethanol mandates), and federal assumption of the costs of rebuilding New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. To these we must add the recently-enacted $700 billion Wall Street bailout. McCain as president – especially with Democrats still in control of Congress – will not stop this massive growth in the national regulatory/welfare state. Indeed, on many of the critical issues likely to face the country over the next four years – including federal control of the banking industry, the federal “war on fossil fuels” (prompted by radical environmentalist hysteria over the myth that man-made carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming), and continued U.S. military involvement in the Middle East and other places around the world – McCain is likely to “cut deals” with the Democrats resulting in policies not unlike those we might expect from an Obama administration. That’s why I concluded in my March essay on McCain: “If Republicans want their party to truly offer an alternative to the socialist, welfare-state policies of the Democrats – if they think in terms of the long-run best interests of both the GOP and the United States – then they must not support McCain’s candidacy for the president. In other words, in the best interests of both the party and the nation, Republicans should abandon their own presidential nominee.” Limited-government conservatives and even some libertarians who plan to vote for McCain, despite all his faults, because they so fear an Obama presidency, might cite a handful of issues on which McCain truly has differentiated his position from that of Obama and the Democrats. These include income taxes and appointments to the Supreme Court and other federal courts. As to the former, McCain has promised to hold the line on tax increases – in stark contrast to the massive increases in capital-gains taxes and rates on upper-income Americans that Obama plans (with his scheme to redistribute income, or to “spread the wealth,” as Obama conceded – in a rare moment of honesty – in response to “Joe the Plumber”). Because Congress writes the tax laws, however, there is little that McCain could do to thwart Democrat majorities in Congress and the bad bills (tax laws and other legislation) they’re likely to pass, other than to exercise the presidential veto power. As for judicial appointments, McCain continues to chant the usual conservative mantra of appointing judges who “will not legislate from the bench,” in other words, judicial-restraint conservatives. Such judges indeed may be marginally better than left-liberal judicial activists, but neither kind of judge is what is most needed on the federal bench today: judges who are not “activist,” in the bad sense of the term, but who nevertheless are active in enforcing the limits the Constitution puts on the powers of government. (As I’ve written in support of my theory of a “contextualist” theory of constitutional interpretation, both sides in the modern debate over the Constitution – both left-liberal activists and conservative “restraint” judges – err in failing to protect individual rights as fully as the Constitution mandates.) McCain’s choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate neither hurts nor helps his presidential candidacy. Democrats and their allies in the national news media like to portray Governor Palin as unqualified (“not ready”) to be president, because of her lack of experience and knowledge. They should follow the adage about people who live in glass houses not throwing stones, because Palin – by all objective measures – is far better qualified to be president than Barack Obama. As a governor, she has actual experience in exercising the powers of government – actual experience as Chief Executive, the most important presidential responsibility – in stark contrast to Obama’s experience as a “community organizer” (which at best is irrelevant to the kind of executive experience needed in a president and at worst ought to disqualify Obama because of what it shows about his lack of commitment to the rule of law, as I argued in my previous essay). Sarah Palin has helped energize the Republican base and thus shore up conservative support for McCain; that’s because she’s better qualified in many respects than McCain himself. This is true on particular issues, such as energy policy: unlike McCain, Palin supports oil drilling in the Arctic, because she hasn’t been suckered in by radical environmentalists and the “global warming” myth. It’s also true generally because Palin’s limited-government conservative instincts are sound. Unfortunately for Republicans, however, Palin is in the second place on the ticket; that puts Republicans who are more enthusiastic about Palin than McCain in the uncomfortable position of secretly hoping for McCain’s death or disability, after his inauguration, so that a true limited-government conservative could become president. The problem with the “lesser of two evils” rationale for voting for McCain is that there’s little reason to believe that McCain, the man who takes pride in being a “maverick” (in other words, a bipartisan deal-maker), will stand his ground against Democrat majorities in Congress by exercising his veto power or by using his discretionary power as president to do things displeasing to Congressional leaders. Rather, I think we can expect that, if McCain does win the election, he would be a lame-duck president starting the day of his inauguration – and Hillary Clinton would become, in effect, a shadow President, as de facto leader of the Democratic Party in Congress. (If there’s one silver lining to the dark cloud of an Obama presidency, it’s that it would give Mrs. Clinton the obscurity she so richly deserves, as just another Democratic U.S. Senator.)
Real Change – A Libertarian Administration
Change seems to be the hot political buzzword in 2008, with the candidates of both major parties promising “change.” But only Bob Barr, as President of the United States, would bring real change to Washington, D.C. – arguably, the greatest change, the most significant transformation of federal government programs and policies, since the “revolution of 1800” ushered in Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, which marked a repudiation of the paternalistic policies of the Federalist administrations of the 1790s and a return to the “first principles” of the Constitution and of the American Revolution. These are the principles of maximizing individual freedom and of minimizing the power of government – the principles of “free government,” that is, government limited by the constraints the Constitution puts on its powers – principles that only Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party hold, in modern American politics. A Barr administration would help usher in the kind of revolutionary change that limited-government conservatives and libertarians hoped would have come with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 or with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. In both instances, those of us who value maximizing freedom and limiting governmental power were greatly disappointed: the so-called “Reagan Revolution” failed to take place, as the Reagan administration failed to eliminate any federal programs but merely slowed the rate of growth in federal spending; similarly, despite a few early successes in implementing the promises of the 1994 “Contract with America,” the Republican majorities squandered the opportunity to bring real change to Washington and started to govern just like Democrats, which explains why they deservedly lost control of Congress in the 2006 election. What kind of change would a Libertarian administration, with Bob Barr as President, bring to Washington? Simply put, it would mean reversing the course this country has been on for the past century or so, as the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state has grown larger and larger, bringing the United States to the brink of bankruptcy, both financially and morally. Put another way, it would mean a serious effort to downsize the federal government, reducing it to its legitimate functions under the Constitution, while simultaneously returning to the American people more control over their own lives. Barr has pledged to create a presidential commission that would critically examine every single department, every single program and policy, of the federal government, judging each against the standard of the U.S. Constitution and the limited functions it grants the national government. Every program that fails to meet that standard would be marked for elimination. Some could be immediately abolished, by President Barr recommending that Congress repeal the laws that created them (or even more simply, by failing to request appropriations for unconstitutional programs); these include, as Barr suggested in his recent Reason interview, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy (except for its limited function in assuring the security of atomic materials, which would be transferred to the Department of Defense), and the Department of Commerce (except for its few legitimate functions, such as the Patent and Trademark Office, transferred to another Cabinet agency). Most unconstitutional programs, however, would have to be reformed, phasing them out over a long period of time. (These include such programs as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, on which millions of Americans have become dependent. Such programs could – and should – be privatized and eventually eliminated altogether, for they fail to meet the test of constitutionality, but it will probably take just as long to dismantle such “welfare state” programs as it did to create them – that is, several decades, if not generations.) Some other specific changes Bob Barr would bring to the national government, as outlined in the “Barr for President” campaign brochures:
As president, Barr would have vetoed the $700 billion Wall Street bailout bill that recently passed Congress, as he unequivocally stated in a talk he gave at Capital University earlier this month. He’d reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose shaky mortgages helped create the financial crisis, by privatizing them, requiring them to operate under the same market rules that other private mortgage companies must follow. He’d reform some SEC rules but otherwise leave the financial market free to make the adjustments it needs to recover from the distortions that bad governmental policies forced on credit markets. (For more on this, see my previous entry, “The Myth of `Market Failure’,” Oct. 2.) In sum, a Barr administration – like Thomas Jefferson’s two centuries ago – would restore the government of the United States to its founding principles, by reinvigorating the rule of law (and particularly, the limits the Constitution imposes on the national government’s powers). By thus fostering “liberty under law,” it would help finally to complete the unfinished American Revolution and its promise of individual freedom for all Americans.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Monday, October 27, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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