Tag Archive for: #libertarians

A Libertarian Case for Public Works

Libertarians are a diverse lot. Some are stone cold anarchists, prepping in remote hills for the day when governments fail and a blood dimmed tide is loosed upon the world. And then at the other extreme there are libertarian billionaires and their paid for intelligentsia, rationalizing everything from erasing national borders to legalizing opium.

It’s a strange mix. Some libertarians bristle at the suggestion they might support open borders, while staunchly defending the natural and inalienable right for people to choose to mainline heroin. Others would have that exactly the other way around. If there were a convention of libertarians, and someone asked the true libertarian to stand, they would all stand up, and not one of them would be fully in agreement with any other one.

This is the fractious gang that nonetheless at times will run third party candidates who manage to attract enough votes to swing elections in battleground districts. Despite convoluted denials, these close elections almost invariably tilt Left if a libertarian candidate runs a viable campaign. But it’s in the intellectual sphere where policies are imagined and policies are defended where libertarians have the most political influence.

Libertarian ideologues inform the well funded factions who justify neoliberal policies that import cheap labor and export jobs to nations where labor is cheaper still. From some of the most well heeled libertarian policy shops, bought by billionaires, libertarians strive for additional relevance by making common cause with progressives. Legalize drugs. Open the borders. Of course there is a climate crisis. And of course this attempt by libertarians to ingratiate themselves is used and abused by progressives, who know better than to ever trust a Social Darwinist!

If there is one broad area of agreement among libertarians, however, it might be regarding the general principle of limited government. And in the messy real world where politicians who actually get elected have to operate, the principle of limited government must find expression in policy. It’s boring to be a wonk. But unless you turn the destiny of your nation over to the murderous clarity of authoritarian warlords and dictators, it’s the wonks who design the policies that determine your future.

So in recognition of the role libertarians play in defining an ideological foundation that translates into policy, here is a libertarian case for public works. The goal of government spending on infrastructure is to help fund practical projects that yield long-term returns on investment in the form of a lower cost of living: water, energy and transportation infrastructure with proven value and durability. Up until a few decades ago, that goal was generally fulfilled. There may have been wasteful spending, but the projects delivered obvious public benefits that last for generations.

Today, unfortunately, the government is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidizing wind turbines, solar farms, battery farms, and surveillance infrastructure to “help” Americans conserve energy. The result of these programs will be to raise the cost-of-living. What America needs is to deregulate the energy sector, removing constraints on the development of practical, cost-competitive energy technologies, and without spending a single tax dollar, let private companies compete to sell abundant, affordable electricity and transportation fuel. But with water and transportation, however, it’s more complicated.

Even with deregulation, the inherent costs to design, build and upgrade the broad, smart-car enabled roads and freeways needed to bring America’s transportation infrastructure into the 21st century are higher than the average driver can afford. With water, particularly in the arid Southwest from Texas to California which nearly 100 million Americans call home, the costs can be even higher. Massive projects to transfer water between basins, recycle water, capture storm runoff, and desalinate water can only be built at costs that millions of ratepayers cannot afford. Policymakers have to make tough choices.

They can impose scarcity on the population, igniting general inflation that victimizes working families. They can make energy and water cost so much that small businesses fail, more manufacturing goes overseas, and only big corporations survive by passing on to customers the costs of excessive regulations and politically elevated costs for inputs. That is current policy. It consolidates wealth in the hands of an ascendant oligarchy, and is marketed to gullible Americans as a necessary sacrifice to cope with the climate crisis.

In this economic strategy, the government has to spend billions to subsidize low income households that cannot possibly afford to pay for their electricity, natural gas, or gasoline, or to drive on toll roads, or to purchase food that costs more because the irrigation water cost more. The government has to build housing because the regulatory environment, combined with the shortage of entitled land and available water has made housing unaffordable. These become permanent subsidies, costing hundreds of billions, if not, over time, trillions of dollars. They consume a growing share of state and federal budgets, requiring higher taxes and taking away funds from other spending options. But there is an alternative.

If the government instead subsidizes the capital cost of road improvements and water supply projects, the required investment by private sector partners is reduced proportionately. This reduces the amount ratepayers will have to spend for water and transportation, at the same time as it lowers the overall cost-of-living by reducing the costs for these basic inputs. Since even with water, more than half the price the ratepayers are charged is to amortize the capital investment, using general tax funds to lower the necessary amount that has to be recovered by the private utility will significantly lower the cost to the consumer.

This is the libertarian case for public works. It is based on the assumption that once a generation the government makes a significant investment in water and transportation infrastructure upgrades, building assets that can last 50 years or more before requiring significant retrofits, and that these costs, while seeming wasteful or extravagant in the moment, are far less than the cost of providing permanent subsidies to households that cannot possibly survive in a totally privatized system.

These assumptions are far from beyond debate. But this gives rise to additional nuances. To what extent can regulations be abolished to lower costs to the private sector? At some point, the private sector probably can deliver water and energy at a price that even low income households can afford. But what is sacrificed in order to achieve this? It ought to be credible to assert, for example, that anthropogenic CO2 will only assist humanity and ecosystems, by creating a slightly warmer world with air that fertilizes plants far more efficiently. But to suggest that industries in general can go back to polluting the air, water and land with the impunity that defined their emergence two centuries ago is absurd. Externalities exist, no matter where reasonable people draw that line, and managing them adds cost.

The 1950s and 1960s was the last golden age for public works in the United States. Resuming the momentum established by the great public works projects of the 1930s, we built dams and aqueducts, interstate freeways, and a power grid that delivered an oversupply of water, energy, and road capacity. But for the last half-century we have been coasting on those assets, and we have wrung as much conservation out of the system as can be achieved in a nation that continues to grow its population. It is time to build again.

Libertarians can play a powerful role in influencing America’s infrastructure strategy in the near future. They can support totally private solutions, but must recognize that will involves costs so high that it will require government subsidies to low and even middle income households that may last in perpetuity. Or they can support public investment to lower the percentage the private sector has to invest and recover when financing infrastructure, which will trigger one-time public investment, with the ripple effect of lower costs throughout the economy.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Will Libertarian Candidates Again Deny GOP the U.S. Senate?

The political reality in America today is that of a two party system. Embracing this reality means that if you want to change the political direction of the nation, you have to transform one of the two major parties. Denying this reality, by running as a 3rd party candidate, can also transform the political direction of the nation, but in precisely the opposite direction than where the 3rd party candidate supposedly wants to go. 3rd party candidates rarely win elections, but they’re very good at splitting the vote.

This is the only context in which the national Libertarian party, “The Party of Principle (TM),” is relevant in America today. This party, with their principled candidates, above all else, believes in limited government. Which is to say they oppose socialism. And voila, when you split the anti-socialist vote, the socialist wins.

It shouldn’t be necessary to defend Republicans vs Democrats. Right now, the fact that Republicans are NOT Democrats ought to be enough. Even if many Republicans are just RINOs, they generally vote with their party major issues, and in any case, when Republicans control the Senate or the House, they have control over the budget, the court appointees, the investigations, and overall, Republicans approve less damaging legislation than Democrats.

This is reality. This is politics in America. Consider the Republican leaders with national stature today, then compare them to Democrat leaders with comparable visibility and influence. Maybe some of these Republicans are rough around the edges, or don’t agree with you or with each other on every issue. So what? Which gang do you want running the country? If you’re a populist conservative, or even if you’re a libertarian, it ought to be an easy choice.

The ability of Libertarian candidates to get Democrats elected is vast. From who occupies the White House all the way down to control of state legislatures, the deeper you dig, the more you find. The last two presidential elections both offer compelling evidence of libertarian impact.

In the 2016 election, the Libertarian Party candidate for President, Gary Johnson, attracted just over 4.5 million votes. The Leftist equivalent, Green candidate Jill Stein, received only 1.5 million votes. Despite being a deeply flawed candidate, Gary Johnson moved the national popular vote from a toss-up to a clear Clinton edge. In the Electoral College, Johnson’s influence was even greater.

At the state level in 2016, Gary Johnson very nearly handed crucial states to Clinton. In Pennsylvania, where Trump’s margin was a 1.3 percentage points, Johnson got 2.4 percent. In Wisconsin, where Trump won by 0.6 percentage points, Johnson got 3.7 percent. In Michigan, where Trump won by a razor thin 0.3 percentage points, Johnson got 3.6 percent.

Not only did Gary Johnson very nearly leave the “Blue Wall” intact for Democrats in 2016, he also took states out of play that might have been toss-ups. In Colorado, for example, Trump lost by 3.6 percentage points, but Gary Johnson got 4.7 percent. In Nevada, Trump lost by 2.7 percentage points and Johnson got 3.1 percent.

In the 2020 election, it is possible that Jo Jorgensen, the libertarian candidate, threw the election to Biden. In the six states where Trump was reported to have lost by the thinnest margins, the impact of the Libertarian candidate either flipped the election to Biden or very nearly did. Notably, the Green Party candidate was not present on the ballot in any of these states except for Michigan, where he only won 0.2 percent of the vote. If the voters who’d opted for Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgenson had chosen Trump instead, Trump would have won Georgia with 50.5 percent of the vote, Arizona with 50.6 percent, and Wisconsin with 50.1 percent, and he would have been reelected.

You don’t have to be a MAGA zealot, or an “election denier,” to remain unconvinced that a Biden presidency is better for the average American than a reelected Trump.

Libertarians frequently argue that they also take votes away from Democrat candidates, or they attract votes from people who would not have otherwise participated. Maybe the 2020 election was impacted more by other factors – Mark Zuckerberg’s $400 million comes to mind, as does the mass censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, to only name two – and so maybe we should lay off Libertarians. Or maybe not. In close races, Libertarian candidates get Democrats elected.

Will Libertarians Again Deny Republicans Control of the U.S. Senate?

Which brings us to how libertarians affect which party controls the U.S. Senate. In Georgia, in November, 2020, the candidacy of Libertarian candidate Shane Hazel threw the battle between Republican David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff into a runoff. It might be true that Perdue could have won his runoff if various external events hadn’t affected turnout on January 5, or of course, if he’d been a better candidate, but that’s beside the point. If Hazel hadn’t been a spoiler in November, there would have been no runoff for Perdue to lose.

Perdue only needed an additional 0.3 percentage points to win on November 3, 2020. To secure victory if Hazel had not been on the ballot, only one in seven of Hazel’s voters would have had to decide instead to vote for Perdue. Read Hazel’s 2020 candidate survey on Ballotpedia, or watch his podcast. This man did not take votes away from Democrats.

The battle for the U.S. Senate in 2022, according to the Cook Political Report, includes eight races that are currently listed as “toss ups.” Of those eight, there are six states with Libertarian candidates also in the race. They are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Only one of those states, Pennsylvania, has a Green Party candidate also running.

The race in Arizona, currently rated a toss-up by Cook, bears a closer look. The libertarian candidate, Marc Victor, raised over $60,000 in individual contributions. These are through June 2022 and don’t reflect contributions since then, which may be substantial. The next report to the Federal Election Commission isn’t due until September 30. But $60,000 is just enough money to hire a campaign attorney and campaign treasurer, gain the endorsement of the Libertarian party, and end up on the Arizona state ballot as a spoiler.

Most interesting is who has supported Victor in his senate campaign. Through June of this year he has only attracted 21 donations, every one of them from California. Of those 21 donations, 16 came from donors with the same surname, presumably from the same family. The patriarch of this family is Ron Conway, Sr., a venture capitalist now who lists his address in Belvedere, one of the wealthiest cities in America.

Why would wealthy and politically savvy individuals offer financial support to an obscure candidate in another state, who has no chance of winning his race? There is only one reason that makes sense. To take votes away from the Republican candidate, and keep the U.S. Senate in the hands of Democrats. When the November 2022 election is done, it will be interesting, and telling, to see how much money pours into the hands of Libertarian candidates for U.S. Senate and House seats. For Democrat and Never Trump mega-donors, it will be smart money spent.

Libertarian candidates have various motives. Some are running on principle, some to acquire celebrity status, and some who are so disillusioned with the Republican party that they’re running as spoilers to hasten its destruction. There is a lot that Republican candidates could be doing better. Offering a compelling and coherent vision of America’s future, instead of merely identifying the spectacular failures of the Democrats, would be a good start.

But the disunity, imperfections and failures of Republicans don’t justify their destruction. Overall, the ideological bias of Republican candidates and voters leans in the direction Libertarians also lean. The more powerful the Libertarian party becomes, the more certain it is that they will turn America over to Democrats, rendering the majority sentiments of Americans politically irrelevant. That’s life in a two party system.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Is a Conservative Libertarian Alliance Possible?

In a recent column on American Greatness entitled “The Choice Facing Libertarians,” I argued that libertarians ought to stop supporting third-party candidates and join our side in an effort to stand up to the Left. In response, writing for Reason, this was the substance of libertarian author Steven Greenhut’s rebuttal. He claimed that while conservatives and libertarians have been allies on many issues in the past, “now we’re like residents of different planets.”

Maybe. A lot of the issues that joined conservatives and libertarians in the past have not gone away. As Greenhut acknowledged, during the Cold War, conservatives and libertarians agreed on the dangers of Soviet expansionism. They differed on how much that justified empowering the American security agencies. They agreed to fight progressive assaults on property rights, but disagreed on some major details, such as making asset forfeiture a tool in the war on drugs.

How much has changed? Where there was the Soviet Union, now there is China. Where there was cocaine and crack, how there’s methamphetamine and fentanyl. These problems, which Greenhut cites as examples, are bigger threats today than they were a generation ago.

It is impossible to explore the growing rift between populist conservatives and libertarians without discussing Trump’s role. Are libertarians, like Never Trumpers, putting Trump’s rhetoric and style in front of his policies? Have they examined Trump’s policies in their entirety, or selectively chosen what they see as his major transgressions because they don’t like him? To explore that question, it’s worth examining Trump’s record on the areas of traditional agreement between libertarians and conservatives. With respect to foreign policy, one of the authors Greenhut references is Libertarian National Committee Executive Director Wes Benedict, who in a 2018 position paper accuses Trump of “reckless military aggressiveness.”

But how did that pan out? Trump started no new wars. He withdrew troops from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Germany, and challenged other NATO nations to contribute more to their own defense. He deescalated tensions with North Korea. He avoided needless confrontations Xi Jinping at the same time as he strengthened alliances with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, and he directed the U.S. military to invest in strategic deterrence instead of maintaining expensive tactical deployments all over the world.

How is any of this reckless or unrealistic? Apart from some bellicose rhetoric and missteps that he corrected, such as hiring, then firing, David Bolton, what would a different president have done in order to be more palatable to libertarians?

With respect to the war on drugs, Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, did step up the war on drugs. But Sessions didn’t last very long, and by the second half of Trump’s presidency he accomplished something no president had ever done, he deescalated the war on drugs with the First Step Act. Why don’t libertarians give Trump credit for this? He overruled much of his party and offended much of his base to make this legislation happen, and it was the right thing to do.

It’s easy to get any productive dialog derailed on this issue, because libertarians get stereotyped by conservatives as pro-drug, anything goes libertines. But libertarians make a solid argument – the war on drugs has damaged civil liberties and helped create a monstrous security state – that requires a serious response. Conversely, however, when conservatives bring up the harm drugs inflict on individuals and on society, they are stereotyped by libertarians as authoritarian collectivists. What is required is finding the balance between repression and tolerance. Repression is terrible. Prisons are filled with nonviolent drug offenders and police are prioritizing drug crimes that you could argue aren’t crimes at all. But when taken to extremes, tolerance is also terrible.

There are nearly a half-million heroin and fentanyl addicts in the United States. After tripling in less than twenty years, for the last few years drug overdose deaths in the U.S., mostly from opiates, have leveled off at around 70,000 per year. This is an astonishing statistic. Every year, more opioid deaths than battlefield casualties during the entire Vietnam war. The toll on society is equally devastating.

In cities across America, especially in blue states, heroin and methamphetamine addicts have taken over entire neighborhoods. They are joined by drunks, the mentally ill, predators and thieves, the willful homeless, and – in far fewer percentages than is typically reported – sober, hardworking people who are genuinely down on their luck.

Libertarians claim that the “quality of life offenses” these homeless inflict on working people whose towns and cities have been overran are of “secondary” concern. The right to a safe, pleasant neighborhood is secondary to the fundamental human right to live a life of perpetual intoxication and pitch their tent on any public space.

To test their commitment to this legal theory, libertarians are invited to imagine themselves living in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, or the Tenderloin in San Francisco, or any number of places from Austin to Seattle, where drug addicts own the sidewalks and alleys. They are invited to step over the syringes and shit as they make their way to work in the morning, and navigate through an unavoidable gauntlet of stoned zombies on the way home. Libertarians are further encouraged to imagine this scenario includes their own hard won home equity being underwater thanks to the invasion, making it financially impossible for them to sell out and flee the chaos.

Live the nightmare, and then reconsider the question: Now how “secondary” is this right to do something, anything, to cope with “quality of life offenses?” Suddenly the “collectivist” compromises necessary to solve this problem become more palatable.

Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, possibly the only writer in America today who has been able to elicit any shred of empathy from progressives for poor white people, delivered a talk at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington in 2019 entitled “Beyond Libertarianism.” In his talk, Vance argued that social problems are often the result of political choices. His examples tap the same issues that Trump rode into the White House in 2016.

Vance describes the opioid epidemic as a political problem, saying “We allowed our regulatory state to approve these drugs and to do nothing when it was clear that these substances were starting to affect our communities.”

On the economy, Vance said, “We made the choice that we to be able to buy cheaper consumer goods at Walmart instead of have access to good jobs, and maybe that was a defensible choice—I don’t think it was—but it was a choice, and we have to stop pretending that it wasn’t.”

One of Vance’s main points was that the vast majority of conservatives, at least until Trump came along, had “outsourced” their economic thinking to libertarians. But he’s calling for balance, asking “the question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish those things?”

In a rebuttal to Vance’s 2019 talk, Steven Horwitz published an essay entitled “Why Libertarians Distrust Political Power.” Horwitz is a professor of economics at Ball State University in Indiana. He is also the director of the Koch funded Institute for the Study of Political Economy.

Horwitz labels Vance’s positions as “nationalist conservatism.” This is somewhat presumptuous, since the movement catalyzed by Trump is still very much in flux, but it beats “white nationalism,” and isn’t any less descriptive than “conservative populism,” so as a placeholder it will do.

The heart of Horwitz’s rebuttal appears to be that even though obvious social problems in need of remedies mean that we ought to do something, does not mean we can do anything. He cites historic political impotence in the face of Vance’s examples; drug addiction, suicide, pornography and the opioid epidemic, and claims that Vance “does not offer is any argument for bridging that gap between ought and can.”

There is a fundamental problem with Horwitz’s argument, however, which is that he is cherry picking. It is easy enough to cite examples, often of debatable merit, where government ineptitude caused problems, or took existing problems and made them worse. But where is Horwitz going with this argument? He ignores countless examples where government action did solve problems, and he doesn’t confront the consequences of his reasoning. What is government for? What is the purpose of a nation? Aren’t the realities of language and culture, the basics of what define a nation, ultimately social phenomenon?

Libertarians are right to promote limited government. As a guiding principle, it is one of the most important, along with the right to personal liberty and private property ownership. But libertarians, and conservatives, need to recognize that in our 21st century global economy, private corporate power can eclipse state power. Preserving the right of Americans to enjoy their personal liberty and independently build private wealth depends on preserving a balance of power between global corporate interests and the federal government.

The political threat that faces Americans today is a growing alliance between government and corporate power. Conservatives see this with increasing clarity, and are searching for political and philosophical answers that will build a movement to counter the relentless centralization of authority. It is a cause to which libertarians could make vital contributions, if they would recognize that inefficiency, corruption and centralization can come as quickly from corporate sources as it can from state sources.

It isn’t enough to sit back and take ideological pot shots at nationalist conservatives. Libertarians need to recognize the heretical fact that sometimes big government programs are in the national interest – the wildly successful Apollo Project with its myriad commercial spinoffs is as good an example as any. They need to reject their anarchist fringe, for which the logical endpoint of their philosophy is a nation fragmented into private fiefdoms protected by private warlords. They need to question ideology that doesn’t match reality. They need to engage in exploratory investigations instead of confirmation research, and question the paid for ideas coming out of their well funded think tanks.

With the challenges Americans face today, it isn’t enough for libertarians to say government cannot do anything as well as the private sector can, and let it go at that. They need to present a coherent policy agenda. America’s major cities are becoming ungovernable. What’s your solution? America needs infrastructure for the 21st century. What’s your solution?

Finally, libertarians ought to take a very hard look at the political advances progressives are making, with the full support of multinational corporations and the government bureaucracies. How is this less of a threat than conservatives? How will the progressive policy bludgeons of climate change mitigation and institutionalized anti-racism, both to be implemented as national emergencies, impact personal liberty and private wealth?

An alliance between conservatives and libertarians is possible. But conservative populism, both as an ideological movement and as a practical political agenda, will evolve with or without the libertarians.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Libertarians and Public Infrastructure

Shane Hazel is the most famous libertarian in America. Now known as “The man who cost Republicans the U.S. Senate,” Hazel achieved his instant national fame, or infamy, depending on who you ask, by running as a Libertarian last November against David Perdue and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia’s U.S. Senate race. Hazel earned 2.3 percent of the vote, which threw into a runoff the race that Perdue had come within 0.3 percent of winning. Perdue lost the runoff, and the rest is history.

In defeat, Hazel scored a remarkable victory. He served notice to Republicans that if their congressional voting record is comparable to liberal democrats, and Perdue’s was, they’ll get knocked off by a third party candidate that promises to uphold the U.S. Constitution. That’s a tough lesson.

If your preference is to reform the Republican party from the inside, thus preserving its viability against an even more dangerous Democratic party, it’s hard to accept the decision by Libertarians to run candidates in close races. Hazel appeared to rub it in when Reason quoted him saying “Give me your tears. They are delicious.” In response, in several recent articles I referenced Hazel, in unflattering terms, as a prime example of how Libertarians are enabling Democrat victories.

These criticisms, directed at Libertarians in general, and Hazel in particular, earned me an invitation from Hazel to appear on his podcast. We spoke a few days later, on February 25. During an 81 minute back-and-forth, two things became clear to me. First, for all his apparent bombast, Hazel is a sincere man, whose political activism is inspired by deeply held beliefs. To make this observation has consequences. Hazel cannot be dismissed merely as a spoiler. He has serious intentions and a productive way forward is to have a serious conversation.

The second take-away from talking at length with Hazel was that although we shared something very fundamental in common – love for our country and respect for its constitution – on matters of policy there areas of agreement, such as 2nd amendment rights, but also areas where a lot of further discussion is warranted.

One of those areas, which in the online discussion with Hazel I described “as a flashpoint philosophically because what would it mean if we didn’t have them,” is the existence of public utilities. This is a good place to start an ongoing debate with Libertarians, because brings the issue of public and private space into sharp relief and offers concrete examples.

California’s water project, one of the biggest water infrastructure projects ever built, is a timely example. Built primarily back in the 1950s and 1960s at a cost, in 2021 dollars, that is unimaginably cheap, this complex of dams and aqueducts moves millions of acre feet from snow watered reservoirs in Northern California to cities and farms in Southern California. Without the California Water Project, the urban megapolises of the San Francisco Bay Area and all of coastal Southern California including Los Angeles and San Diego would not exist, nor would millions of acres of farmland in the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys.

Notwithstanding that many critics of California’s contemporary politics would be thrilled if the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles did not exist, the California Water Project is a massive public work, which, like America’s interstate highway system, and most major airports, was constructed with taxpayer funding and enables millions of people to fly, drive, and drink water. Are public works the best way for a society to sustain urban civilization?

To explore this question, set aside the notion that urban civilization is unsustainable. It’s here. While one model of the future might see a benefit in existing cities becoming less densely populated instead of even more densely populated, short of apocalyptic disaster scenarios, cities will remain, and the millions that live in them will require energy, water, and transportation conduits.

In California, attempts to expand water infrastructure, or even maintain what we’ve got, are met with opposition from two sources: powerful environmentalist pressure groups, and anti-tax activists, many of them libertarians.

The Battle for Desalination

Taking water from the ocean and turning it into fresh water is a proven way to guarantee an uninterruptible supply of water in an arid region. From Saudi Arabia and Israel to Singapore and Australia, desalination plants around the world are already producing billions of tons of fresh water every year. California’s southern coastal cities, situated in drought prone areas, could benefit from desalination plants.

In a rare display of political courage and common sense, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been working to finally grant permits to construct a second major seawater desalination plant on the Southern California Coast.

Concerns about desalination along with the responses could occupy volumes, and have. But the notion that there is any sort of consensus among environmentalists that seawater desalination is a bad choice is false. Every option to supply the resources required to sustain urban civilization is fraught with tradeoffs. With Californians possibly facing yet another drought, desalination offers a way to take pressure off countless stressed ecosystems upstream.

Economic arguments offer a more credible case against desalination, but can fail to acknowledge the variability of the market price for water. In drought years, municipal water purchasers and farmers with perennial crops have paid well over the price for desalinated fresh water, which for San Diego’s Carlsbad plant comes in at around $2,000 per acre foot. To be sure, this price is well in excess of the wholesale price for water in wet years, which can drop well under $500 per acre foot. But for an urban area such as Los Angeles, situated on an arid desert located 500 miles or more from its sources of water, adding the expensive but certain option of desalinated water to a portfolio of water procurements is a prudent bet.

Water supply resiliency is not merely dependent on weather. Even if a Sierra snowpack reliably forms winter after winter for the next several decades, residents of the Los Angeles Basin still depend on three aging canals, precarious ribbons that each stretch for hundreds of miles. Earthquakes, terrorism, or other disasters could shut them down indefinitely. In an average year, 2.6 million acre feet of water is imported by the water districts serving the residents and businesses in California’s Southland counties. The 701 mile long California Aqueduct, mainly conveying water from the Sacramento River, contributes 1.4 million acre feet. The 242 mile long Colorado River Aqueduct adds another 1.0 million acre feet. Finally, the Owens River on the east side of the Sierras contributes 250,000 acre feet via the 419 mile long Los Angeles Aqueduct.

A Libertarian Makes the Case for Desalination

In a recent book “Winning the Water Wars,” published in 2020 by the Pacific Research Institute, author Steven Greenhut concludes the solution to California’s water challenges is to pursue an all-of-the-above strategy that embraces abundance, or as he puts it “feeding more water into the plumbing.” He writes: “In addition to building more surface and groundwater storage facilities, California can deal with its water problems by building ocean desalination plants and increasing its commitment to wastewater reuse and other innovations.” If Greenhut, who talked with countless experts while researching his book, and who is a confirmed libertarian, can support the economics of public and private investment in desalination, anyone can.

A series of California Policy Center reports in 2018 expand on the concept of water abundance. Part two of the report, “How to Make California’s Southland Water Independent for $30 Billion,” surveys existing investments in desalination and wastewater reuse and comes up with the following capital budget: $7.5 billion to build the treatment plants to annually recover and perpetually reuse the 1.0 million acre feet of wastewater that currently is still treated and released into the Pacific Ocean. Another $15 billion to build desalination plants with a combined capacity of another 1.0 million acre feet per year. And $7.5 billion to upgrade and optimize the capacity to capture runoff, mitigate the capacious aquifers beneath the City of Los Angeles, and use them all for water storage.

This is the sort of water project that should be animating California’s politicians. There are 5.1 million households in the three counties that would benefit from this scheme – Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside. A $30 billion capital improvement bond would cost each household $384 per year. If revenue bonds were to pass half the cost to ratepayers – a reasonable burden that would bring even desalinated water down to an affordable consumer price – the general obligation bonds would only add new taxes of $192 to each household. Debt like this is referred to as “good debt,” because it yields tangible and lasting benefits to taxpayers. “Bad debt,” by contrast, is the $100 billion or so that would be necessary to complete California’s proposed “bullet train,” a nearly useless make-work project that will be obsolete before it’s even done.

Is There a Practical Alternative to Public Utilities and Public Works?

Opponents to public works correctly point out that the use of eminent domain to acquire the right-of-way for power lines, aqueducts, and freeway corridors is a violation of property rights. But these objections, to be constructive, have to answer the inevitable question they raise: How are we going to build power lines, aqueducts, and freeway corridors, if we don’t authorize the government to implement eminent domain to compel recalcitrant property owners to sell?

Principled opposition to eminent domain, and principled opposition to using public funds, makes sense if it the process is abused. Somewhere between an aqueduct that must exist to prevent millions of people from dying of thirst, and a clear abuse of power taking the form of acquiring and demolishing an established residential neighborhood to enable private, subsidized developers to come in and build high rises, a line is crossed. But the challenge should be finding that line, not condemning any form of eminent domain, or any publicly funded infrastructure.

Establishing adequate infrastructure to support urban civilization should rely on private interests when possible, although it is important to recognize that corruption and waste can also infect a private corporation. Instead of fighting public matching funds on principle, since these funds are necessary in order to make infrastructure investments financially viable for private civil engineering firms, why not fight the regulatory burdens, the environmentalist pressure groups, and the litigators, who are a big reason why these projects cost so much?

The biggest impediment to Californians achieving water abundance, along with energy abundance and abundant, affordable housing, are “environmentalist” pressure groups that purport to speak for everyone who cares about the environment. These groups have tied infrastructure development and housing development in California up in knots for decades. They should be getting no help from libertarian tax-fighting groups, but they are.

There are 40 million Californians now living in a state with public infrastructure sufficient for a state of 20 million people. They are living off assets that were constructed two generations ago, and attempts to expand or upgrade the conveyances that make urban life possible are met with blistering opposition from environmentalists, abetted by libertarian tax fighters. Resilience is gone from the system, and the only solution policymakers can offer is rationing of everything, monitored by big tech. That is the toxic byproduct of this ideological purity. The cure is worse than the disease.

What Californians have been living with for decades is coming to America.  It is accurate to say that most Republicans have been complicit in the rollout of endless new regulations and unsustainable public boondoggles. The solution, however, cannot simply be neglect. A policy agenda that walks away from public works because they violate libertarian principles must offer a viable alternative. Shane Hazel, as his political aspirations migrate from U.S. Senator to Governor of Georgia, is invited to present alternatives. Specificity is encouraged.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Choice Facing Libertarians

If you want to find a Libertarian party organization that has achieved relevance, look no further than Georgia. That’s where Shane Hazel, running for the U.S. Senate as a Libertarian, garnered 2.3 percent of the vote in November. Hazel’s showing may have been insignificant, but the Republican candidate, David Perdue, only needed 0.3 percent more votes to have avoided a runoff, where he lost.

America’s political system today, with rare exceptions, is a two party system. All that Perdue needed was for one in seven of Hazel’s voters to choose him instead, and the GOP would still control the U.S. Senate. In a two party system, it doesn’t take much to be relevant. Hazel now intends to run as a Libertarian for governor in Georgia in 2022.

Libertarians, to their credit, do not operate with the same level of lies and hatred as leftist Democrats. They also tend to be more willing to stand on principle, although this may be more a function of their status as spoilers. The actual challenge of governing requires compromises.

On the Libertarian Party of Georgia’s website there is a chart entitled “Common Sense on the Issues” that thoughtfully outlines their positions on issues. It compares them to Democrats and Republicans, showing areas of agreement and disagreement. This chart bears examination, both for its assumptions as well as for what it leaves out.

Libertarians object to the Left’s positions on regulations, “UN led US military actions,” eminent domain for private gain, taxpayer funding of government charities, and higher taxes. Libertarians object to the Right’s positions on “government regulated morality,” nation building, the war on drugs, the surveillance state, taxpayer funding of faith-based charities, stricter immigration laws, and corporate welfare.

Most of this sounds pretty good. Maybe we should all be libertarians. But this chart underscores the luxury libertarians have that governing parties do not have. It’s all theoretical. A look at the center of the chart, “libertarian positions,” makes this clear.

Libertarian Principles – A Reality Check

These core positions of Georgia’s Libertarian Party are as follows: “government should just defend our rights,” the U.S. should “stop nation building” and instead pursue “peace through trade and diplomacy,” end the “war on drugs,” legalize marijuana, champion civil liberties, “protect personal privacy, support small business, entrepreneurship and free markets,” and offer an “easier pathway to citizenship.”

In every one of these cases, there is a monstrous gap between writing a principled bullet point, and operating in the real world. It may be useful to contrast how differently Republicans vs Democrats handle some of these issues. And even more to the point, it might be useful to contrast how Trump attempted to handle these issues, since he encountered opposition from members of his own party. “Defending our rights” would be a good place to start.

During the summer of 2020, did Democrats defend the rights of property owners and business people, as mobs funded by Democratic donors rampaged through American cities? Did Democrats defend freedom of speech, as leftist communications monopolies silenced thousands of online accounts? Are Democrats defending the 2nd amendment, now that they’re in control in Washington DC? And what about the property rights of people who want to build homes, or harvest timber, or drill for natural gas, or operate a manufacturing plant, as the “green new deal” rolls out, thanks to Democrats?

As for “nation building,” at what point did President Trump do anything apart from trying to extricate the U.S. from “nation building?” How many new wars did Trump start? And what exactly does “peace through trade and diplomacy” mean? How long can the U.S. continue to sustain a $400 billion dollar per year trade deficit with China, a powerful rising nation? How long can the U.S. continue to sell trade secrets in exchange for what limited access its companies do have to Chinese markets? China is a nationalist superpower. For the CCP, the libertarian “principle of nonaggression” is a joke.

And what about ending the the “war on drugs.” Hardly anyone still thinks people in jail for possession of marijuana (and nothing more) should stay in jail. Trump worked hard to fix that, unlike most Democrats or Republicans. But when it comes to the war on drugs, we aren’t just talking about marijuana, which like alcohol, destroys lives but isn’t worth an ongoing prohibition. What about fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamine? Have libertarians seen the consequences of tolerating use of these drugs? Tens of thousands of overdose deaths every year, ruinous addictions, and entire cities given over to lawless filth? This is no exaggeration. How do you cope with hard drugs? How do you cope with homeless drug addicts? It’s fine to say the cure of criminalization is worse than the disease of drug use. But answer the tough questions. How do we help addicts? How do we take back our cities?

This challenge feeds into the next libertarian plank, “protect personal privacy.” Who would argue with this? But as with everything in governance, there are infinite examples of nuance. Where does the right to privacy collide with the need to prevent terrorism? Where does the right to privacy collide with the need to get a feces encrusted, rat infested “private” tent encampment moved off of public property? And then there’s “support small business.” During the pandemic, which U.S. States shut down every small business while keeping the big box stores open? Which states stayed mostly open? Weren’t the states ran by Republicans more likely to support small businesses? And now, with Biden’s Democrats in charge, what does support small business really mean? That if you can check off the right race and gender boxes, you can get into the front of the line for government handouts?

Finally, there’s “free markets,” covered earlier, and an “easier pathway to citizenship.” What does citizenship mean to a libertarian? You have to start with that basic question, because whether they deserve it or not, libertarians are stereotyped as being for open borders. So if that’s false, what criteria should be set for admission to the U.S. and attaining citizenship? This is a messy question, but if you’re going to govern, you have to answer it. Will libertarians support more border security? Will they support merit based immigration, so people who can support themselves without government assistance get priority?

Libertarians Must Recognize How They’re Being Used

Support for individual liberty and economic freedom isn’t helpful if it splits into pieces the voters who favor those ideals. The only individual liberties that Democrats still seriously care about is legalized drugs. They are overtly against economic freedom. The Democratic party is controlled from above by global corporations and billionaires, and from below by militant collectivists, “anti-racists,” and climate change zealots. Democrat voters will never be seduced into supporting Libertarian candidates at nearly the rate as Republican voters.

This is why a Libertarian candidate enabled the Democrats to take control of the U.S. Senate last month, and this is why Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian presidential candidate, quite possibly delivered the presidency to Joe Biden. But it isn’t merely as spoilers in close elections between Republicans and Democrats where libertarians have become tools of America’s corporate establishment.

Across a host of vital issues, libertarians exert just enough influence to be useful when it suits the Left, while they are otherwise ignored and irrelevant. Libertarian mega-donors fund think tanks and political action committees to pump out countless studies, write op-eds, publish newsletters; they hire lobbyists and support candidates. Here’s an example of how all this work just plays into the hands of the Left:

What Libertarian Think Tanks Are Doing to America

Destroying Suburbs: Libertarians are having a decisive influence on densifying America’s cities through “infill,” but are ineffective when it comes to preventing taxpayer-supported subsidies for the new construction, or enabling development via urban expansion onto open land.

Preventing Needed Infrastructure: Libertarians successfully oppose government-funded infrastructure projects “on principle,” which stops new freeways from being built but does not stop construction of subsidized light rail or high-speed rail; or stops new dams and desalination plants but does not stop water rationing and mandatory purchases of new “water conserving” appliances that cost a lot, don’t work very well, and break down often.

Enabling Lawlessness and Corruption: Libertarians successfully oppose laws that might get drug addicts, psychopaths, and vagrants off American streets, but cannot prevent compassion brigades from providing them free amenities which only attracts more of these unfortunates, nor can they prevent opportunistic developers from coming in to build tax-subsidized “supportive housing” for them at a cost of over a half-million per unit.

Expanding the Welfare State: Libertarians support “free movement of peoples” on principle, but have no impact whatsoever on the growing welfare state that is a magnet for economic migrants to come to the United States.

Killing American Jobs: Libertarians support “free trade” without first insisting on reciprocity.

Supporting Censorship: Libertarians have stood on the sidelines as left-wing billionaires in the Silicon Valley used their online communications monopolies to manipulate what information Americans had access to in order to destroy a sitting president. Because “on principle” these companies are privately owned.

There is a common thread to all of these policy outcomes: multinational corporations, international banks, and billionaire investors do well. Ordinary Americans do not. Libertarians have not adequately confronted the fact that their economic “principles” are put to good use when they serve the agenda of corporate globalists, but are indeed irrelevant when they do not.

Don’t Destroy the Republican Party, Fix It

If Libertarians, from Georgia to California, are serious about what they believe, they’ll value the results that come from hard work and compromise. It is easy to be a spoiler. It is easy to build a website, have meetings, and even run candidates for office. Because by comparison, reforming an established political party is very, very difficult. But that is the task at hand. It is the only way to win.

Obviously the Republican party has let a lot of people down. Obviously the Republican party does not live up to the pure ideals of libertarians, and it never will. But the allegation that Republicans are no better than Democrats, when it comes to individual liberty and economic freedom, is a preposterous delusion. It isn’t even close.

Instead of running for governor as a Libertarian, which guarantees that the next governor of Georgia will be a Democrat, Shane Hazel is invited to run in Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Doing that might not be nearly as much fun. He would probably lose, although he’d likely attract a higher percentage of votes than he would attract running in the general election as a Libertarian. And in losing, if that ended up happening, Hazel would still have accomplishments to build on: He would have held the incumbent accountable. He would have served notice to the Georgia GOP: If you don’t support more libertarian principles, we will primary your candidates. He would inspire and attract other libertarians to join and influence the GOP, and he would inspire GOP voters to reemphasize libertarian principles. He would have needed to think more comprehensively about how his ideals translate into actual policies. And last but not least, he would demonstrate to himself and voters around the nation that he is a serious human being, instead of a troll who finds concern about what he’s done to be “delicious.”

There is a war for the future of America being waged right now, and so far, Libertarians are not helping. They need to recognize the threat of tyranny, whether it’s a softer “Brave New World” style tyranny or a harder “1984” version of tyranny, is coming from the Left, far more than it’s coming from the Right. This is an existential battle. Siphoning off voters from the side that’s fighting the hardest to preserve individual liberty and economic freedom is not principled. It is nihilism.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Why Libertarians Are Unwitting Enablers of Socialism

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
John Rogers, “Ephemera 2009,” Kung Fu Monkey

Libertarians are handing America over to socialists. That’s not what they want, but that’s what’s happening. How can this be? After all, if you want limited government, you’re a libertarian. So where’s the problem?

The problem, as John Rogers alludes to in his unforgettable quote, is with the “real world.” In the real world, America is a two party system, and if a strong libertarian candidate shows up, they take votes away from other candidates who also – despite all their other impurities – oppose socialist candidates.

When the anti-socialist vote is split, the socialist wins.

In the real world, we have nations so that people with a common culture and heritage can govern themselves. This necessitates the existence of governments, laws, regulations, taxes, public spending, and a host of other nasty things. To oppose overreaching laws, bad regulations, high taxes, excess spending, wasteful spending, or inappropriate spending, is the duty of any fiscal conservative. But the role of government is to protect a national culture, not to just get out of the way so corporate multinationals can commoditize the world.

This ought to be embarrassingly self-evident, but libertarians don’t seem to understand the implications of these real world constraints on their ideals.

Thank God the libertarian presidential candidate in 2016 was a befuddled stoner. And pray to God their presidential candidate in 2020 is equally problematic.

Libertarian Influence is Harming America

The Libertarian Party hasn’t yet swung an American presidential election, but their influence is felt everywhere. And while their overall message – limited government – is far better than its opposite, but in its extreme that message can also cause grievous harm. One glaring example concerns the interdependent politics of immigration and welfare.

Libertarians, along with plenty of Republicans, are fond of quoting Milton Friedman, who once said “You can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” Yet libertarians, if they are true to their principles, favor open borders. All the while, they insist that of course they’re also opposed to state welfare.

How many Republicans in the House of Representatives, influenced by libertarian donors, have to-date resisted legislation that would enforce America’s borders, whether through sanctioning employers who hire undocumented workers, or by funding more effective border security?

Other glaring examples include opposition to the war on drugs, where libertarians tend to think it’s just fine to let an entire generation of Americans marinate themselves in a pharmacological stupor, and foreign policy, where wishful thinking libertarians reject the reality of rising nations filling the vacuum wherever Americans withdraw.

When it comes to trade, powerful libertarian donors have actually worked to destroy Republican incumbents who recognize that selling America to the Chinese because that’s “free trade” is a recipe for national destruction, and if tariffs are the only way to get their attention, so be it.

And shall any of these issues be discussed openly on the most powerful means of communication ever known, the internet? Well, maybe. But not too openly. Progressives run the companies that monopolize the online platforms for search and social media, they exercise blatant censorship of views that threaten the progressive narrative, and libertarians applaud.

The Unwitting Libertarian Support for Unpleasant, Unaffordable Housing

Moving beyond the obvious, it is in the area of housing and infrastructure where libertarians also exert a destructive influence. The influence of libertarians in these areas is harder to immediately see, but it is causing, if anything, even greater long term damage to America.

It seems counter-intuitive to suggest that libertarians are against a free market where land developers can easily navigate their way through a streamlined, discounted permitting process so more homes can go onto the market which will lower prices. And indeed, libertarians are calling for those sorts of reforms. But these libertarians are ignoring the most critical variable – expanding the footprint of cities.

Instead of recognizing that housing cannot possibly become affordable unless new construction spreads outside the boundaries of existing urban centers, libertarians are, by default, joining with progressives who want to stack and pack all new residences into already established neighborhoods. The implications of this policy are cruel and far reaching.

Not only is it much harder, if not impossible, to increase the supply of homes enough to lower prices if the only new homes allowed have to be built inside existing cities, but when that happens the quality of life in these cities is tragically diminished. In Oregon, new legislation now permits multi-family dwellings to be constructed in any residential neighborhood, regardless of current zoning laws, in any city of more than 25,000 residents. Similar legislation is pending in California.

It may not be a “libertarian” concept to have zoning laws, but they exist for a good reason. People invest their life savings into a home purchase, relying on zoning laws to ensure the neighborhood where they expect to spend the rest of their lives is going to stay reasonably intact. Clearly this can’t always be the case, sometimes neighborhoods get in the path of dense urbanization, but it is a principle worth defending.

This nuance – how cities are permitted to increase their population – is far more profound than it may appear at first glance. As America’s population grows from an estimated 334 million in 2020 to an estimated 417 million by 2060, the progressive vision is to cram nearly all of those 83 million new Americans into existing cities. They want to do this despite the fact that the lower 48 states in America are only 3.7 percent urbanized, and despite the fact that such a policy will make a detached single family home with a yard unattainable to all but the most affluent Americans.

The libertarian position on urban containment is similar to their position on immigration. Just as they effectively support immigration but ineffectively oppose the welfare state, they effectively support making it easier to get permits to build homes but ineffectively oppose urban containment. The problem, again, is that accomplishing one out of two is not sufficient.

The de facto result is libertarians are offering substantial support to the progressive goal of turning American cities and suburbs into socially engineered, unaffordable, extremely high-density warrens.

Libertarians Prevent Vital Enabling Infrastructure

In a perfect libertarian world, every time you set foot off your personal property onto so-called public space, a meter starts running. The principle at work here is that you only pay at the rate you consume, rewarding the private interests who constructed – presumably at lower cost – social amenities such as roads.

Unfortunately, this sort of thinking plays into the hands of progressives who want to monitor and ration everything, at the same time as it benefits the high-tech companies and manufacturing corporations who sell “connected” appliances that are overly complex, high maintenance, expensive, and rarely perform as well as legacy products. But start the meter. Let the market work.

If forcing consumers to pay the government and their private partners for every vehicle mile traveled were the only innovation where progressives and libertarians affect infrastructure, that would be bad enough. But libertarians often oppose new roads from even getting built, regardless of the funding model. Instead of just letting the government blast new interstate highways and connector roads into rural areas where spacious new cities could be built, some libertarians have begun to reflexively oppose these projects because they don’t want taxpayers to “subsidize the automobile.”

And yes, in the drive to no longer “subsidize the automobile,” there is a whiff of “climate change” hysteria beginning to emanate from more than a few establishment libertarian think tanks.

What libertarians ought to be doing with respect to roads and other enabling infrastructure is fighting to reduce the regulations and environmental legislation that, at the least, has more than doubled the price and more than quadrupled the time it takes to build public infrastructure. Instead they fight against any new infrastructure that might consume public funds, playing into the hands of the progressive environmentalists who don’t want to build any new infrastructure, anywhere.

Libertarians have become pawns of the progressive left in America, and in an ironic twist, both of them have been coopted by globalist corporate interests. When everything is privatized, rationed and metered, corporate rent seekers gain new revenue streams.

When progressives put punitive regulations onto virtually all forms of land and resource development, existing holders of those resources enjoy artificial asset appreciation at the same time as emerging competitors lack the financial depth to survive.

In cities densified by urban containment, land values and rent soar to stratospheric levels, driving out independent businesses and turning every commercial district into a generic multinational corporate slurb.

And of course, when progressives cheer as hordes of unskilled immigrants pour across the U.S. border, libertarian donors applaud the free movement of people and goods – while paying impotent lip service to welfare reform.

The Libertarian Party has never been a serious contender in American politics. But their influence should not be underestimated, nor their role in tilting the political balance in favor of the progressive agenda across a host of important national issues.

The value of libertarianism is to remind us that the private sector performs most functions in a society more efficiently than the government, while preserving more individual freedom. But that’s as far as it goes. The real world is complicated, and culture is not a commodity.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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How Libertarian Voters Will Help Elect Democratic Socialists

With one of the most critical midterm elections in American history just weeks away, libertarians continue to wallow in denial. Their core membership is comprised of an incoherent, eclectic mixture of hedonists, social darwinists, hyper-intellectuals, and anarchists. They have no coherent political platform, and to the extent libertarians have an ideology, it is one that is as out of touch with reality as the ideology cherished by their supposed polar opposites, the Marxists.

There is one thing libertarians can do, however. They can turn America over to Marxists, or more accurately, to their socialist oligarch puppeteers.

In the 2016 election, the Libertarian Party candidate for President, Gary Johnson, attracted just over 4.5 million votes. The Leftist equivalent, Green candidate Jill Stein, received only 1.5 million votes demonstrating the superior understanding the Left has of political mechanics. Despite being a deeply flawed candidate, this Libertarian moved the national popular vote from a toss-up to a clear Clinton edge. In the Electoral College, Johnson’s influence was even greater.

At the state level in 2016, Gary Johnson very nearly handed crucial states to Clinton. In Pennsylvania, where Trump’s margin was a 1.3 percentage points, Johnson got 2.4 percent. In Wisconsin, where Trump won by 0.6 percentage points, Johnson got 3.7 percent. In Michigan, where Trump won by a razor thin 0.3 percentage points, Johnson got 3.6 percent.

Not only did Gary Johnson very nearly leave the “Blue Wall” intact for Democrats, he also took states out of play that might have been toss-ups. In Colorado, for example, Trump lost by 3.6 percentage points, but Gary Johnson got 4.7 percent. In Nevada, Trump lost by 2.7 percentage points and Johnson got 3.1 percent.

What about “purple states”? Florida went for Republican Trump in 2016 by a margin of 1.4 points, but Johnson got 2.2 percent. By 2020, assuming the biased media can continue to brainwash hundreds of thousands of recent Puerto Rican refugees into thinking Trump deliberately neglected their hurricane relief, Trump will need that 2.2 percent.

Thank God Johnson was an avowed pothead who, at least back in 2016, couldn’t find Aleppo on a map.

The stakes in 2018 could hardly be higher, but Libertarian Party candidates don’t seem to care. In states where the races for U.S. Senate are too close to call, and in similar cliffhanger congressional races across the nation, Libertarian candidates are running. None of them have the slightest chance of winning, but dozens of them are capable enough to attract two-percent or more. If more than a few of them do, Republicans will lose control of Congress.

Libertarians may wish to reflect on a couple of salient points as early voting begins, and obscenely well-funded Democratic political machines across America begin “assisting” millions of people with their absentee ballots.

First—and sorry to have to state the obvious—America is not a parliamentary system. Even if Libertarian Party candidates attracted five percent of the vote, that would not translate into 22 seats in the House of Representatives. These votes for Libertarian candidates will do only one thing: help Democrats win.

We need to quit indulging the preposterous talking point that Libertarian Party candidates siphon as many votes from away from Democrat candidates as they do from Republican candidates. No, they don’t. Libertarians, for all their incoherence, agree on one thing: smaller government. And Democrats, for all their incoherence, also agree on one thing: much bigger government. Get real.

Whatever may be the flaws of the Republican candidates and elected officials out there (and there are many), Libertarians need to grow up, and recognize a painful fact. The lesser of two evils is the lesser of two evils. The real world isn’t perfect. You take what you can get, because if you walk away, you’ll get something worse.

Perhaps one may excuse some stubborn Libertarian voters for being too naïvely principled to recognize that the establishment Democrat platform—import welfare recipients, export jobs, expand government, cede national sovereignty—is so horrific that even a blatantly imperfect Republican coalition is vastly preferable. But libertarian (small and large-L) donors, especially the big ones—and you know who you are—are not naïve. To support Libertarian candidates with big money, or to withhold that money from Republicans at a time like this, is the same as writing checks to Democrats.

After this November, should Republicans lose control of Congress, there will be a time of reckoning and realignment. For now, libertarians, and their donors, need to understand the consequences of their choices. A vote for a Libertarian is a vote for oligarchic socialism.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Libertarian God Kings Throw in With With Democratic Socialists

The well-heeled, much-feared Koch network announced from its biannual meeting in Colorado Springs this week that it would withhold support from Republican candidates in three of the eight closest races for U.S. Senate. The news, reported in Politico and elsewhere, probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Libertarians, who value their utopian principles more than they value saving the political culture that indulges their fantasies, are very likely going to be the voting bloc that turns control of Congress over to Democrats in November. Why should the über Libertarian God-Kings, billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, fail to act in accordance with these same fantasies?

And it is fantasy. You can’t shrink government if “free trade” has gutted the nation of jobs at the same time as “open borders” has flooded the nation with destitute immigrants.

That’s the logic that libertarians, funded by the Koch organizations, refuse to admit.

Enemy of Your Enemy is Not Your Friend

Instead, America’s libertarians trumpet a classical liberal dogma, repeating the same phrases almost mindlessly, their vacuity only matched by their certainty. Like glassy-eyed cult members, they seem to think the ideas they regurgitate constitute the only true path. Contrary opinions and cold facts, no matter how supported by evidence and reason, bounce off them like balloons on Mars.

In the case of the Kochs, maybe the agenda of free trade and open borders doesn’t have to connect with principles. It just helps if it looks that way. Because it might also have to do with keeping the Kochs’ foreign-based industries profitable, and it might also have to do with increasing the supply of labor in the United States in order to keep down wages.

And who knows, maybe the Kochs’ war on candidates who are too Trump-like may have to do as well with resurrecting the Koch image, so savaged by the Left. But what they’re forgetting is this: If your enemy (Democratic Socialists) have an enemy (Trump) that is suddenly your enemy too, that doesn’t make them your friend. It just makes them your enemy who is also the enemy of your other enemy. When your enemy, with your help, is done with your other enemy, don’t expect peace. Expect more war.

Was that too deep and convoluted? Sorry. Let’s express this concept in more immediate, concrete terms: the libertarian war on Trump is going to hand America back to the Democrats.

What Would Libertarians Prefer?

While the Kochs pull the plug on Republican Senate candidates Kevin Cramer in North Dakota, Dean Heller in Nevada, and Mike Braun in Indiana—presumably for some heresy or another against sacred libertarian “principles”—it is worth asking: How do the Kochs propose we should conduct our trade and immigration policies?

What is the ideal immigration policy according to the Kochs? Open borders? Nearly open borders, which is what we have now? Some other reform—and if so, what? Merit-based legal immigration as the president proposes, or something else? Let’s hear it.

What is the ideal trade policy according to the Kochs? Shall we just allow other nations to cheat, consistently imposing tariffs far greater than our own, and call it “free trade,” all while convincing ourselves there is no downside to allowing foreign investors to buy up American assets in order to balance the current account? How shall the Kochs propose we formulate our trade policies? Stay the course? Or what?

Perhaps the Kochs will please excuse those of us still clinging to the troglodytic notion that it’s bad, not good, for America to continue to import welfare recipients at the same time as it exports jobs. Is it even possible to reason with these God-Kings of Libertarian Land?

Maybe some of us aren’t placated by the fact that the current account is balanced by selling America’s domestic assets to foreigners. Particularly when these foreign investments tend to be concentrated either in real estate—which serves no economic purpose other than further to inflate the bubbly real estate portfolios of investment banks and public employee pension funds while turning ordinary Americans into either renters or mortgage slaves—or in strategic technology companies, at least those companies whose intellectual property they didn’t already steal.

“Starting a trade war.” No. Incorrect. We’ve been in one for years. Their tariffs are bigger than our tariffs. So to get their attention we raise our tariffs. Got a better idea? Let’s have it.

And maybe some of us simply don’t believe the utopian idea that we can import millions of people from medieval, hostile cultures, and magically turn them all into engineering Ph.D.’s who dabble in libertarian philosophy in their spare time. Maybe we recognize it as hubris reminiscent of the neoconservative fantasy that propelled America into Iraq in 2003. That fantasy held that all we had to do was topple a dictator, and everyone living there would suddenly become Jeffersonian Democrats, attending PTA meetings, having bake sales, and voting for safe, sane, moderate, vanilla candidates in an “American-style” democracy.

Oops. How did that turn out? But never mind. Let’s import millions of more refugees, while doctors from South Korea and engineers from Ukraine wait years for their legal visas. How’s that catchy phrase go? “Bomb ’em and bring ’em.” Brilliant.

Policies That Would Ensure Decline

Then there’s the federal budget deficit, and there’s welfare, both anathema to libertarians. They claim the trade deficit enables the budget deficit by giving foreign exporters with trade surpluses incentives to buy T-bills. And they claim that welfare is the problem, not immigrants who “do the jobs Americans won’t do.” But what if these libertarians are looking at a horse, and thinking it’s a cart? What if reducing the trade deficit would force establishment politicians to reduce the budget deficit since there would be fewer buyers of T-bills? What if eliminating illegal immigration would force establishment politicians to reduce welfare benefits since there would suddenly be more available jobs?

Globalism has its place, but America can’t help the world’s less fortunate if it’s culturally disintegrated and economically destitute. Compassionate nationalism depends on a coherent, prosperous nation.

The irony of the Kochs’ failed logic, and by extension, the entire libertarian movement’s failed logic, would be amusing if it weren’t so dangerous. Open borders and weak trade policies guarantee American decline. They guarantee social chaos and economic stagnation, to which the only possible response will be a government that is bigger than ever. Those wicked socialists, the supposed nemesis of the libertarian ideologues, must be laughing especially hard these days.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.