Morlocks vs. Libertariansby
Vin Suprynowicz
Michael Badnarik’s campaign manager – City Councilman Fred Collins of Berkley, Mich. – set achievable goals for the 2004 Libertarian presidential campaign. He tells me he figures that if he can raise a few million dollars for TV ads, and place them only in the swing states, he can poll a couple of percentage points for Badnarik and the Libertarians in those states – and cost George Bush the election. But wouldn’t that be terrible? Wouldn’t that just deliver the country into the hands of big-spending liberal John Kerry and his trial-lawyer pals? Oh, please. This is the old "not-a-nickel’s-worth-of-difference-between-’em" shell game reduced to its most absurd. Yes, the foreign-policy deference of Mr. Kerry (and his collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party) to France and the U.N. is pathetic. Yes, left to their own devices (but there’s a substantial caveat, given the relentless inertial guidance systems of the Washington bureaucracy) the Kerry crew would probably accelerate job-destroying business and "environmental" regulation and freedom-destroying gun bans, while "taxing the rich" in ways unseen since Leningrad, 1921. Whereas Mr. Bush – freed to be as bold as he likes by Republican control of both houses of Congress – had worked over the past four years to restore our limited, constitutional government ... how? By setting the precedent that the New American Empire can and will invade and occupy any foreign country that he believes has "weapons of mass destruction"? (When do we go after Red China?) By bragging in his campaign literature that he rammed through the "Patriot Act," aiming to give John Ashcroft (surely the most freedom-loving attorney general since Mitchell Palmer) the never-to-sunset power to snoop us without warrants and hold us without trial? By wasting $10 billion on "upgrades" that render the dignity-destroying airport search scam not a whit more effective than it proved on Sept. 11? (One Texas airport manager has compared the whole exercise to "putting a steel door on a grass hut.") Have the Republicans even gotten around to keeping Ronald Reagan’s 1980 promise to close down the federal Departments of Energy and Education – let alone Agriculture, Health and Human Services? Are they waiting till they control the White House and every seat in Congress? Do you really think they’d do it, even then? Have they shut down the redistributionist Roosevelt-Johnson Ponzi schemes known as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Repealed the crushing slavery of the income tax? Repealed a single one of the thousands of unconstitutional federal infringements of the 2nd Amendment? Just the opposite. Bush lied to Congress about the astronomical cost of his new "free drugs for seniors" handout – "browbeating Congress into enacting the biggest expansion of the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society," reports Jim Bovard in his fine new book "The Bush Betrayal." He "signed the most exorbitant farm bill in history in 2002, bilking taxpayers for $180 billion to rain benefits on millionaire landowners and other deserving mendicants." Bush actually has the nerve to say he’s fighting the War on Terror by further bloating the AmeriCorps "paid volunteer" program, under which "AmeriCorps members busy themselves putting on puppet shows to persuade three-year-olds of the value of smoke alarms." The No Child Left Behind Act? "Perhaps Bush’s biggest domestic fraud," Mr. Bovard says, leading "many states to ‘dumb down’ academic standards, using bureaucratic racketeering to avoid harsh federal sanctions." Meantime, "Bush’s foreign policies are creating more terrorists than he is vanquishing," Mr. Bovard concludes. "Conservatism is dead in America," warns Bill Bonner. "It makes little difference whether (Bush) wins or loses. Neither party plans to cut spending, though it is debt that threatens the republic far more than terrorism. Neither party can face up to the $44 trillion ‘funding gap’ in federal finances, nor to the current account deficit, nor to the challenge of low-wage competitors in Asia." "America cannot continue to be the world’s only superpower, for Nature will not permit a monopoly for very long. And yet, no foreign nation is strong enough to offer a serious military challenge – at least not yet. So the U.S. of A. must ruin itself... and needs leadership that is up to the task. In Bush and Kerry, America seems to have found its Louis XVI... it’s Nicholas II, its Theodosius, Rome’s last emperor. In Bush and Kerry, America has found leaders worthy of a nation of happy hallucinators." And why would these freedom-betraying Republicans ever change, unless freedom-loving Americans finally wise up and reward their betrayal with defeat? LET’S LOOK AT ‘TAX REFORM’ Television ignored the tight and dramatic May 29 Libertarian national nominating convention, where Badnarik started out two votes behind brash Brooklyn film producer Aaron Russo on the first three-candidate ballot – winning the day in an actual live debate before the assembled delegates in which the candidates (hold onto your chairs) actually discussed the issues of the day! Yet the same networks that ignored the dramatic and real Libertarian balloting moan about the "stage managed" conventions of the two interchangeable branches of the Incumbent Republicrat Party – their nominations pre-sealed like matching cans of Spam, offering about as much drama as the Central Committee sessions that used to routinely re-nominate Joseph Stalin for the premiership of the Soviet Union – and then they cover them as "real news," anyway. The other parties of the right? The Libertarian Party has been around longer than any of them – since 1972. So why didn’t these other "conservatives" simply join the Libertarians? The answer – hidden behind pejoratives like "inflexible doctrinaires" – is that the Libertarian Party is too principled. Take "tax reform" – better dubbed "slavery reform." Either I am the sole owner of my mind and body and the labor through which I use them to generate wealth, or I am not. If someone else has a prior claim on some portion of my labor, then I am a slave. Whether I "only" have to work the first four months of the year to pay "my" taxes is irrelevant. If someone can enter your house without your permission and use a whip to drive you into the fields to harvest his crop, you are a slave. The fact that you remain "free" to gather round the campfire at night and sing a few spirituals is irrelevant to your underlying condition. The only "reform" the slave cares about is the one that tells him, "You’re now free to go where you please, and sell your labor for whatever price you can get, and keep it all (or spend it) as you see fit." Libertarians understand and (mostly) embrace this principle. Yes, some minarchist Libertarians would settle for getting us back to the indirect excises intended by the Founders of 1787 – arguing it’s a more achievable goal and would "sure be better than what we’ve got." But at heart, any true Libertarian realizes that taxation is slavery. Meantime, what of these other "conservatives" of the right? Their "tax reform" schemes reveal that all they really intend is to "improve the efficiencies of collection," in ways which are "revenue neutral" (not reducing Massa’s total cotton crop), shifting the well-funded levers of state power into new hands (theirs) – usually in order to "make this a Christian nation" by more rigorously arresting and imprisoning those who exercise their God-given freedom to engage in self-medication, birth control (yes, there were places in this country where they tried to jail people for distributing birth control information to married couples, less than 50 years ago), and/or fornication. Yes, the urge is always there to bend and modify the principle of self-ownership, in order to seem more "mainstream" – more "reasonable." But unless you have actual principles, define them clearly, and stand by them in the face of all the sirens’ seductive cries, you will surely lose your way in the discount market for souls which constitutes modern American politics. If you agree I own my body, how can you justify funding a police and court apparatus that seeks to jail me for deciding which plant extracts or vaccines I want to ingest (or not) in the privacy of my home, or who I invite to share my bed, or whether and how I choose to reproduce or school my children? Should I really prefer this new and improved form of police state, on the grounds it goes to church and wears bow ties and tweed jackets? Come November, I and perhaps 2 percent of the populace will cast our lonely votes for Michael Badnarik, a come-from behind Cinderella Libertarian candidate who – if he had his way – would end the insane war on drugs; end the income tax; restore our God-given and constitutionally guaranteed firearms rights; protect the rights of all Americans to medical privacy; end the noxious daily trampling of our Bill of Rights in the nation’s airports; pull us out of the deadly, illegal, and unconstitutional war in Iraq (and less dramatic ongoing "wars" of occupation in 135 other purportedly sovereign nations), and put the U.S. military back to work tracking down the real culprits of Sept. 11. "At which point, if we can find them, you think it would be OK to just kill them?" I asked the candidate. "Sure," Mr. Badnarik replied. Sounds about right to me. I will cast that vote on Nov. 2, and get my ass whupped (politically speaking), and go to bed proud and justified. Whereas 95 percent of Americans (they must start to feel like the Eloi, shuffling in to the sound of the Morlocks’ dinner bell in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine) will vote for one of two interchangeable Skull & Bonesmen without any discernible political principles, who (no matter which wins) will proceed to raise our (net) taxes, take away more of our freedoms, and continue frittering away whatever remains of America’s reputation for decency by continuing the violent military occupation of scores of foreign countries that have never attacked or declared war upon us. All because Americans don’t want to "throw away their vote" – and register their disapproval with that state of affairs – by voting for a guy who would make them feel decent and clean, but who will almost certainly lose. And that gets us down to the final point. ‘THROWING AWAY YOUR VOTE’ A close election might conceivably be decided by one vote in the Electoral College, or in the Congress. But it will not be decided – no presidential election has ever been decided, nationally or even in a single "battleground" state – by a single popular vote. Therefore, statistically, your individual vote already "doesn’t count." If you died on your way to the polls, it could not possibly affect who gets elected president. Get over it. And if you don’t live in Ohio or Florida or Nevada or one of the other dozen or so "battleground" states, your whole state has already been "assigned" to the red or blue column, your entire state doesn’t count – you could convince a thousand friends to write in Ron Paul or Mahatma Gandhi; no one would even notice. Yet people keep telling me that unless they vote for Bush or Kerry for Tweedle-Dumb or Tweedle-Brie – their "vote won’t count"? Pretend with me that you’re an old German on your deathbed today. Would you rather tell your grandchildren, "I voted for the Nazis because they seemed better than the Communists and no other party could win"? Wouldn’t you rather be able to rise up and say, "I publicly denounced the Nazis and the Communists. We were a minority – 1 or 2 percent – but we stood up for the truth and we were right! We proved not all Germans were mindless torchbearers for tyranny! We were ridiculed, we were beaten and jailed, but we saved this nation’s soul. Now children, go and live your lives in a way to make me proud"? Wouldn’t you? Because I don’t get it: Let’s say you flip a coin and manage to vote for "the winner," on Nov. 2. What do you win? October 14, 2004 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of the books Send in the Waco Killers and The Ballad of Carl Drega. His novel, The Black Arrow is due out in 2005. Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com |