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Should Libertarians Support Rand Paul? – A “No” Argument
For A “Yes” Argument, Click here.
Don’t Vote for Rand, or Anyone Else
TND Guest Contributor: James Ostrowski |
While I admire Rand Paul’s fight against illegal NSA spying and his occasional proposal for spending cuts, I do not support Rand Paul for president. However, I don’t support anyone else either. I am not a philosophical non-voter or philosophical abstainer from electoral politics. I am a pragmatist on strategy and tactics.
My problem with electoral politics is that it has rarely, if ever, advanced liberty in modern times. One of the few clear examples of an election advancing liberty was Jefferson’s election in 1800, which led to a reduction in the size of the federal government in his first term. There are hardly any clear examples after that time.
I did actively support Ron Paul’s campaigns. His runs for president served an important educational purpose, and helped grow the movement and increase the number of activists. I can’t support Rand on educational grounds, because his support for libertarian ideas is mixed, and he has described himself as a “constitutional conservative.” In my new book, I make a detailed argument against both conservatism and constitutionalism, so you can imagine how thrilled I would be about backing a constitutional conservative.
Rand has denied being a libertarian. Worse yet, he has described the term as an “albatross” around his neck. Yikes! As I argue in my book, I prefer the term “liberal” to “libertarian,” but Rand wasn’t playing a word game.
He was distancing himself from the concept of liberty as the highest political value, a good working definition of libertarian. That being the case, my concern is that Rand will become an albatross around the neck of the Liberty Movement.
The biggest reason not to get involved, or tangibly support his campaign, is that such efforts crowd out better ideas and approaches to increasing liberty. I have now written three books that propose detailed and workable direct-action strategies to achieve liberty. Every dollar, every hour, every calorie of energy we spend on electoral politics — which all evidence shows is almost certainly a waste of resources — is time, money, and energy that by the law of opportunity cost cannot be spent on direct-action approaches.
If the Liberty Movement is to prevail, our immediate focus must be a massive “jail break” from the K-12 government schools that manufacture good little progressives much faster than we can convert them to the cause of liberty. If you are serious about liberty in your lifetime, do something about this huge problem.
Start with your own kids or grandchildren, or nieces and nephews. If you do not have children, find a good private school or homeschool group and make a small donation, so they can draw more students away from the government’s daytime juvenile detention and propaganda centers.
There are numerous other examples of effective direct citizen action in my books. Or, if you just want to have fun and accomplish nothing, go to the next Rand Paul rally.
James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer and author from Buffalo, New York. He has written a number of scholarly articles on the law and subjects ranging from drug policy to the commerce clause of the US Constitution. He is the author of Political Class Dismissed (2004),Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids (2009), and Direct Citizen Action(2010). At present, he is an adjunct scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for LewRockwell.com. Follow @JimOstrowski.
This article was published at PanAm Post and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Source: http://thenewsdoctors.com/should-libertarians-support-rand-paul-a-no-argument/
