October, 2006

Coming in November: Majority Fools: Irrationality and the Limits of Democracy

On Tuesday, November 7th, American voters will go to the polls for the mid-term elections. On Monday, November 6th, George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, author of the forthcoming book The Myth of the Rational Voter, will argue that we can’t count on voters to make rational decisions in the lead essay of the November […]

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Soccer Moms and Xbox Dads

Don’t listen to Nick Gillespie: just because you’re libertarians doesn’t mean you have to think of yourselves as hopeless political nomads, consigned to spend the rest of your lives wandering the ideological wilderness.
Trust the marketplace! If David Boaz and David Kirby are right that libertarians represent 10-20% of the electorate, both parties will come calling, […]

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Don’t Wait for Inspiration, Do Something!

Nick writes, “What we’ve seen since the Republicans took control of Washington is appalling. What we’ve seen from the Democrats in this Cato Unbound debate (and on the campaign trail so far) is uninspiring. That suggests to me that libertarian voters will remain an underutilized resource in American politics.”
Isn’t that the story of modern-day politics? […]

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Best of the Blogs: Why Democrats Should Become More Libertarian

Michael Strong, CEO and Chief Visionary Officer of FLOW, argues that Democrats should embrace free-market policy initiatives if they really want to achieve traditional liberal aims.

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Libertarians Still Wandering the Wilderness

Harold Meyerson is right, I think, that many, perhaps most, libertarians are put off by the seeming, sometimes seething, intolerance at work in today’s Southern-dominated GOP. With every gay-bashing innuendo that a Republican lobs, they surely lose more libertarian votes. For the latest instance of this (and evidence that it’s not just white, Southern Republicans […]

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Best of the Blogs: Crashing the Democratic Gates

Logan Ferree of the Freedom Democrats blogs says, “I don’t believe that libertarians should just sit around and wait for the Democratic Party to make the first move. We live in a democracy, at least it still pretends to be one, and participation in the political parties is open to all. It is time to crash the Democratic gates.” Ferree sets out a plan. . . .

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Southern Conservatism, Libertarian Estrangement

The Davids, Boaz and Kirby, have produced an important work of political scholarship in their assessment of the libertarian vote in American politics. For my part, I’d like to look at the considerable shift towards the Democrats that they document among libertarian voters between 2000 and 2004, which exists at the presidential (19 points), congressional […]

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The Libertarian Vote

Speaking of the libertarian vote, Cato Institute executive vice president David Boaz with David Kirby, executive director of the America’s Future Foundation, have just published a new Cato study exploring just that:
We find 9 to 13 percent libertarians in the Gallup surveys, 14 percent in the Pew Research Center Typology Survey, and 13 percent […]

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Should Conservatives Vote Republican?

When this forum was planned a few months ago, Cato was well ahead of the curve in asking if libertarians should vote Democrat. But the way things have been going for the GOP, it won’t be long before Heritage corrupts another Cato idea by holding an online forum, “Should conservatives vote Republican?”
That, in its own […]

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How Should Libertarians Decide?

I’m not convinced the Republicans have dominated political discourse the way Kos says they have–yes, they’ve got super-slim majorities in Congress, and they’ve eked out a couple of narrow presidential wins the last two times around. But that’s not really dominance. Certainly nothing like the vast majorities Dems commanded not so long ago. So if […]

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The Internal Democratic Struggle

Why won’t Democrats stand for those civil liberties they believe in, like gay marriage and free speech? Because they are weak. The GOP has so utterly dominated the political discourse, via their partisan media machine, their think tanks, their leadership and training institutes, and their dominance of the federal and many state governments, that it’s […]

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Pander, Dammit!

We might end up on more fertile ground if the discussion shifts from “Should libertarians vote for Democrats” to whether they will vote for Democrats in the midterms (2008 is way too far off in the distance to prognosticate about).
I think Kos’ dismissive attitude toward actual libertarian ideas — “All those libertarians seeking some pandering, […]

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If You Want Government to Screw Things Up, Vote Republican

It seems to me that how libertarians vote will be dictated by which of two maxims guides their deliberations. If they believe that the government that governs best governs least, then both parties will, of course, disappoint them, but they could go either way if they decide to vote for the lesser evil as they […]

Read: If You Want Government to Screw Things Up, Vote Republican