Walter Block’s recommendation for “The Distance” – Econlib

In his own The Wall Street Journal op-ed calling on libertarians (“we,” he writes) to vote for Donald Trump, Walter Block’s central argument is that Joe Biden is “more distant from us politically and economically than Mr. Trump” (“Libertarians Should Vote for Trump,” May 28, 2024). This argument is debatable.

Walter only aims his recommendation at libertarians in “swing districts,” which raises the first set of problems. First we need to identify the “transitional states,” which can be a combination of many and even then only known after the election. But I want to focus on the “distance” criterion implied by his “distance”. I will suggest that such a distance is not easy to make sense of and that the other obvious indicator does not point to Trump.

If the social world has only one dimension, that is, if there is only one political issue in one area (one axis), and if each voter has one point of preference (the “optimal point”) on that axis, we can (probably) find where “we” are compared to Trump and Biden, and rate who is closest to “us.” A very simple example of such an issue is the “tax” rate. We can conceptually determine Trump’s and Biden’s ideal tax rates and measure the distance between “our” ideal on the axis and theirs. However, even in a one-dimensional world, many problems are difficult to map to real numbers on an axis. For example, how can we compare Biden’s promise to implement three measures against the Second Amendment with the one positive step promised by Trump? Furthermore, the proposed work assumes that all libertarians share the same ideal point on the axis.

A real-world preferred environment is defined in more than one dimension. It is more than just a political issue. Not all voters, even libertarians, are voters who focus on the same narrow issue. Consider Block’s example of Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame, now serving life in prison. Block tells us that Trump has promised to commute Ulbricht’s sentence. If freeing Ulbricht were the only political issue, Trump would be closer than Biden to many libertarians. If international trade were the only issue, Biden despite his attempts at cheating would undoubtedly be closer to many libertarians. On many issues, libertarians will have different options and make different trade-offs. Bridging the gap between “us” and the presidential candidates is becoming impossible.

Furthermore, determining what a real politician’s preferences are compared to his strategic promises and how this will affect his political constraints is, to say the least, very difficult. The difficulty deepens, I might add, when we think of an inexperienced, elusive, irrational, and unpredictable candidate who often gets along only with workers and professionals.

Above all, we must not lose sight of a simple but often overlooked fact: the small chance that a single vote will be decisive, that it will “swing” or whatever. It has never happened in a presidential election and is unlikely to happen. A reasonable person will not vote with the intention of changing the outcome of an election. Even if it’s Block’s The WSJ piece persuaded 1,000 “swing” libertarians to vote for Trump, any one of them will know that his vote only reduces the imaginary 1,000-member party that decides to 999. He may prefer to spend his time milking cows or watching the New York skyline.

The best a rational voter can do is vote (or not vote or cast their vote) to express a moral opinion in favor of a candidate, if any, with whom they share important moral values. (See Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision [Cambridge University Press, 1993]For a free man, these values ​​will be the ones that will help to maintain a free society. Behavioral coherence may not seem easier to assess than distance, but at least it chases a real rabbit. This suggests that the best a liberal voter can do is to vote for the candidate, if any, who shows up. a moral character that best represents what a politician in a truly free society can be (while always being a self-centered person). We must leave room for reasonable compromises but, in the end, we may think about the necessary character of the royal president as we imitate the head of state in Anthony de Jasay’s “capitalist situation”. A less radical might look to the ethics defended by James Buchanan Why, Me, I’m Not A Ruler.

In this view, whoever is the candidate with the acceptable liberal character, if there is one, it is not Donald Trump.

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