Walter Block’s “Distance” recommendation – Econlib

In his Wall Street Journal calling on libertarians (“we,” he writes) to vote for Donald Trump, Walter Block’s central argument is that Joe Biden “is much further away from us on the political-economic spectrum than Mr. Trump” (“Libertarians should vote for Trump”, May 28, 2024). This argument is debatable.

With his recommendation, Walter only refers to libertarians in swing states, which entails a first set of problems. We must first identify the swing states, which can be many combinations and which in any case will not be known until after the elections. But I want to focus on the ‘distance’ criterion implied by his ‘further from’. I will suggest that such distance is not easy to understand and that an obvious alternative criterion does not point in Trump’s direction.

If the social world has only one dimension, that is, if there is only one political issue along one dimension (one axis), and if each voter has one preference point (“ideal point”) on that axis, we can (perhaps) Discover where ‘us’ is compared to Trump and Biden, and measures who is closer to ‘us’. The simplest example of such a problem is ‘the’ tax rate. It is possible that we can determine Trump’s and Biden’s ideal tax rates and measure the distance between “our” own ideal point on the axis and theirs. But even in a one-dimensional world, many issues are difficult to map onto the axis in real numbers. For example, how can we compare a promise by Biden to implement three measures against the Second Amendment with one beneficial measure promised by Trump? Furthermore, the proposed exercise assumes that all libertarians share the same ideal point on the axis.

The real world’s choice space is defined on more than one dimension. There is more than one political problem. Not all voters, even libertarians, are single-issue voters. Take Block’s example of Ross Ulbricht, of Silk Road fame, who is now in prison for life. Block tells us that Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s sentence. If Ulbricht’s liberation were the only political issue, Trump would be closer to many libertarians than Biden. If international trade were the only issue, Biden would probably be closer to many libertarians, despite his attempt at plagiarism. On many issues, libertarians will have different preferences and make different trade-offs. Minimizing the distance between ‘us’ and the presidential candidates becomes impossible.

Moreover, it is very difficult, to say the least, to determine what a politician’s actual preferences are compared to his strategic promises and how the latter will be affected by his evolving political constraints. The difficulty increases, I would add, if we imagine an ignorant, incoherent, narcissistic, and unpredictable candidate who can usually deal only with vassals and minions.

In addition, we should not lose sight of a simple but often ignored reality: the small chance that an individual vote will be decisive, that it will ‘swing’ everything. It has never happened in a presidential election and is unlikely ever to happen. A rational individual would not vote with the intention of changing the election outcome. Even as Block WJ piece has convinced 1,000 “swing” libertarians to vote for Trump, each of them will know that his vote will only reduce the supposedly decisive group of 1,000 members to 999. He would rather spend his time milking the cows or looking at the New York skyline.

The best a rational voter can do is vote (or not vote or spoil his ballot) to express a moral opinion in favor of the candidate, if there is one, with whom he shares important moral values. (See Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and decision [Cambridge University Press, 1993].) For a libertarian, these values ​​will be conducive to maintaining a free society. Moral congruence may not seem any easier to assess than distancing, but at least it’s chasing a real rabbit. This suggests that the best thing a libertarian voter can do is vote for the candidate, if there is one, who shows up the moral character most representative of what a politician in a truly free society would be (while of course remaining a generally selfish human being). We should leave some room for reasonable compromise, but if we cross the line, we can think of the requisite moral character of a royal president, as modeled on the ideal of the head of state in Anthony de Jasay’s “capitalist state.” The less radical might look at the ethics defended by James Buchanan in Why I’m not a conservative either.

In this perspective, whoever is a candidate of acceptable libertarian moral character, if there is one, it is not Donald Trump.

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