Reasons to Vote Libertarian

Reason to vote libertarian in the next election

Who is this post for? This post is for those looking for a summary of the Libertarian views.

How can you help? Please use the comment form to add ideas as a comment so I can revise this post on the reason to vote Libertarian and improve its quality about what the issue is to Libertarians.

  • Maximize individual liberties and society as a whole will benefit. Do you not like to have your own personal freedom over someone telling you how you should like your life?

The libertarian party is not as formalized as the Republicans or Democrats. However, in their platform, there are some basic ideas that can be summarized. They can also be a list of reasons to vote libertarian in the next election, election 2020.

  • Low taxes or ideally no taxes. The US did not have an income tax for the first one-hundred and fifty years of its existence.  This is when the country got rich and great.
  • Taxes simply represent a penalty on productivity and hard work.
  • Anything the government bureaucracy can do, people can do more efficiently, why have a middle man? Why work half your day for the government?
  • There are a pro-life fraction in the Libertarian platform (Ron Paul).  They are called libertarians for life, however, they are split on this issue, at this point more are in the life camp but its too much gray area to tell as libertarians are not a structured as the other parties. The idea is if you take a life, you are denying that life liberty.
  • Free speech
  • They are the closest to the original founding father’s idea of the United States. Each person should fend for themselves with the idea of rugged individualism as a guiding principle.
  • Free speech including free Internet.
  • Free religion and reduced IRS monitoring of religious organizations.
  • No draft registration.
  • Gender free marriages.
  • Privatization of Social security and Medicare and Medicaid. These mandatory payments represent most of the budget and the deficit and the reason the US has any debt and not a surplus.
  • Mandatory payments in the future will drive the US to bankruptcy and out children will have to pay for the party bureaucrats of our generation are having (average US worker makes about 41k a year while the average government worker makes 71k a year).
  • Elimination of the social state.
  • Voluntary military with avoiding overseas conflicts and existing only for domestic defense. There is a big difference between the military and defense. Libertarians are not warmongers.
  • Hemp and other plant-related issues, Libertarians believe this is a personal choice.

The state should exist for the people, not the converse.  Libertarians have a small representation in the US as we have a two-party system and there is little room for minority representation, like in the European parliamentary system.

The government that governs least governs best.

Thomas Jefferson

Libertarians focus on minimal government involvement in people’s lives. This is based on the ideas of laissez-faire markets (Adam Smith), civil liberties, free movement of labor and capital across borders, including immigration and non-interventionism in foreign policy that respects freedom of trade and travel for all nations.

Why I am not a libertarian

I personally like the idea of Libertarian-ism however, the life issue is a critical issue for me. Libertarians are too lose on this issue and lose votes. Nothing is more important than defending the rights of the innocent.

Further, Plato talked about this same issue. In a state there is a balance between liberty and equality.  I the center is justice.  Liberty is not the ultimate good.  You can not and should not allow children to drink or have guns.  There is a balance of liberty that has to be maintained.

We live in a post enlightenment bias on the individual and some of our laws get out of whack.

Libertarian – Republican connection

Ironically although Libertarians are similar to Republicans, yet with two major differences.

  • GOP is an eternal overseas war party and the military welfare state. Republicans to not appreciate the drain on votes that would have ordinarily gone to the Republican party.
  • GOP is pro-life.

The last issue is the deal-breaker. The military is a large inefficient redistribution and redirection of income and production for a questionable constitutional stance, read Article 8 of the US constitution. However, that is nothing compared to the protection of a baby’s life, which is the most important.

There are about 1/4 million Libertarian voters in the USA that are registered. They usually get about 1/2 million votes or about .5% of the voters.

Please use the comment form below to describe why you will or will not be voting Libertarian in the next election.

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Comments

10 responses to “Reasons to Vote Libertarian”

  1. Oscar Wilson

    Perhaps we should support more people (like Ron Paul) who have Libertarian views to run for Repubilican political offices. I do not see a thrid party making any real differance in our political system. They do not have the money to do so.

    1. Mark Biernat

      That is always the problem with liberatians, they only take votes from the Republicans but never really have a chance to win. I guess like everyone else I am waiting for another Ronald Reagan.

  2. Ed

    As previous commenters have said, the libertarian party only takes away votes from the Republican Party. We need to as Rand Paul says, have the Republican Party move in a more libertarian way. Vote Libertarians in through the Republican party.

    1. Mark Biernat

      I am on the fence about this issues. I mean yes it would be good if the Libertarians in the GOP could change the party but that does not look like it will happen. I am not sure at this juncture which way to vote to be honest. I am not tending to think vote my ideals not party lines. I am closer to Libertarians for life.

  3. PlasticMoney888

    So called Liberal leaders in the US are intellectually dishonest.
    Why? There agenda is not liberal at all. How the hell can the term liberal includes so called progressives socialists, and even at times communists all lumped together. Libertarian are the real liberal or what we now need to call “Classical liberalism”

    Sorry but Liberty is not compatible with bigger and bigger Government. Libertarianism is the closest thing to what Liberty in America originally was supposed to be.

    “Progressive” is nothing but a nice hijacked word. Careful of the real agenda.

    They do progressively and magically know what to do for us while we inferiors are too appreciate their infinite wisdom. The devastating results have been obvious throughout history but they unfortunately have managed via the educational system to maintain this Utopian Dream alive and it persist in the minds of their ill-educated brainwashed and brain-Dead collectivist sheeps.

    Modern “liberalism” is an authoritarian collectivist ideology that is much closer to fascism and totally different from classical liberalism.

    Take note that I am no Neoconservatism.

    1. Mark Biernat

      What you write is correct. In Europe liberal is known as libertarian and small government, while in the USA liberal has been coded as ‘advanced’ or in the words of George Clooney (like the actor but in terms understanding politics George Looney) ‘progressive’. When the USA began it was a liberal nation because the the ethos was about rebelling against centralization and authority of government. A very clear message, a government interferes with the free action of individuals is a corruption of the natural social interaction of men. This was right from the enlightenment philosophers like John Locke, who saw laws as the definition of property rights.

  4. PlasticMoney888

    “Liberty is not the ultimate good.” ?
     
    We can only lose liberty to some one or a group taking it away from us.

    Not allowing children to drink or have guns is no different than protecting them from skating on thin ice. It’ s part of a natural loving and responsible educational process. Drinking or using guns at such a age would soon deprive them of there own liberty.

    Even in the worst scenario if they did drink or had guns would they not deprive you of your own liberty? So the principle that one man’ s liberty ends where another man’ s liberty begins would apply.

    Liberty is to the mind what oxygen is to our body.

    It’ s the difference between existing in submission and “living”

    Liberty is essential to a healthy and happy life.
    Let’ s decriminalize freedom and stop excessive pills consumption. Ha ha ha ……..

    1. Mark Biernat

      I think the main ideas on the table in political thought are justice, liberty and equality. Justice would be the ultimate good, which you can never have too much of. Mortimer j. Adler in his book ‘Six Great Ideas’ (Google books has most of this online) in part three called: ‘Ideas we can act on’ convinced me that although liberty is one of the highest goods it is not the unlimited ultimate good as there are social externalities that need to be considered when living with people. Even in my little condo complex there are social rules. In the USA you can not play loud music at 2 am or your dog must be on a lease or you can not smoke in a movie theater or companies can not dump unlimited pollution in the rivers or you must disclose about asbestos if you are trying to sell a home.

      Liberty is associated with wisdom and moral virtue. Adam Smith argued this, that when people act on their enlightened self interest society as a whole is better off. I am clearly in the camp of small government, from the local level to the highest it gets my blood burning when I see such waste and unproductive abuses of other peoples dollars. Further there are moral issues that the government abuses. Yet from an abstract philosophical vantage point I would have to agree with Adler that freedom needs moral people or else social disorder could also creep in. In an ideal world freedom could be the ultimate good. However, people use their free will and freedoms in wrong ways.

      John Locke argues that much of our conduct could not be regulated as it is beyond civil law and more moral law.

      In theory with a just government, an individual who is moral will suffer from no lack of freedom as his actions will not go outside the boarders of morality and governments would not create a law to restrict good moral action.

      Yet governments always do. In the reality if the modern world, governments are not transparent nor just. Further there humans will rarely agree about good moral action. So I tend to argue and vote for increasing personal liberties. Yet philosophically justice is the greater good. You can never have too much justice.

  5. PlasticMoney888

    Interesting thank you Mark.

    “If you cannot play loud music at 2 am or your dog must be on a lease or you can not smoke in a movie theater or companies cannot dump unlimited pollution in the rivers or you must disclose about asbestos if you are trying to sell a home.
    This is not incompatible with liberty. Doing any of those thing would deprive others from there liberties. I look at it more as a protection of liberty than an obstruction of it. We are free but not free to take other’s liberty since that would be a contradiction and we would soon lose our own.
    In a libertarian Government freedom does not mean I can dump my garbage on your loan or pollute a river since that would be taking someone else liberty to enjoy his property or enjoy that river. In this way preventing pollution is protecting liberty. . (Very different than the growing self-serving, anti-pollution bureaucracy and irrational regulators that we have to day)
    For Libertarians the role of Government is almost only to protect our individual liberty.
    When we vote for a Government whose policies are not conductive to freedom we are voting for our oppressors and the democratic process is reverse. It serves power instead of free citizens.
    At an extreme voting for a prison guard won’t give you freedom but its democratic.

    1. Mark Biernat

      In a theoretical Platonic sense ‘Justice’ is the ultimate good, but we both live in the real world and know that really ‘liberty’ should be the goal, the ideal and the aim, as the ridiculous actions of government time and time again have enslaved people since man became organized in social political groups.

      I mean in what world has government’s subtractions from humanity in terms of opportunity cost to tyranny ever exceed governments additions? It would be the exception not the rule if you aggregate the history of government. So maybe I can argue for justice but for me that is almost synonymous with liberty.

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