As will I and I'm on Cruz-control!
Jesus Christ: You can’t impeach Him and He ain’t gonna resign.
Posted on 04/18/2015 4:39:28 AM PDT by Kaslin
Rand Paul’s entry into the presidential race raises an interesting question: Just how many people consider themselves “libertarian” and what is the potential voting strength of this segment of the population?
Paul Krugman weighed in early with the brash claim that "there basically aren't any libertarians." But as David Henderson reminds us, once again Krugman’s opinions are nowhere near factual reality.
Gallup, which has been polling on the issue for quite some time, finds that 38 percent of the public identifies as “conservative” and 24 percent as “liberal” in the latest poll
Gallup doesn’t ask people if they are libertarian, but fortunately other polls have asked that question in various ways. In 2006 the Cato Institute commissioned Zogby International to ask 596 voters this question: “Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?” Fully 59 percent of the respondents said “yes.”
Then Zogby asked the same question of the same number of voters, but this time they added the “L” label: “Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian?” David Boaz recounts the results:
The addition of the word “libertarian” clearly made the question more challenging. What surprised us was how small the drop-off was. A healthy 44 percent of respondents answered “yes” to that question, accepting a self-description as “libertarian.”
If that result is anywhere close to accurate it means that libertarians out number both conservative and liberals among the electorate. Or perhaps more precisely, more people seem to lean libertarian than lean conservative or liberal.
So why don’t we see more elections in which a libertarian candidate is opposed by an anti-libertarian (someone who advocates more government both in the boardroom and the bedroom)? In other words, why aren’t more candidates consistently in favor of more government across the board, or less government across the board?
Think of the process of producing votes as analogous to a business producing a good or service. Just as a firm needs both capital and labor, so do political candidates. Then we can apply the:
Goodman/Porter Theorem on Political Coalitions
: Candidates who are capital-intensive will seek labor-intensive supporters to add to their coalition; candidates that are labor-intensive will do the opposite.
This follows from the law of diminishing returns. The more capital you have, the less valuable one more unit of it is. Similarly, for labor.
Suppose that we start out with a Republican candidate who is supported with heavy capital contributions from the business community (because of her generally free enterprise positions) and a Democratic candidate who has a lot of support from labor (because of his support for various kinds of government intervention). Although, unions do give a lot of money to Democrats, they also provide a lot of boots on the ground, which I will call “labor.” So initially, the Republican is relatively capital intensive and the Democrat is relatively labor intensive. At this point a unit of labor is far more valuable to the Republican and a unit of capital is far more valuable to the Democrat.
Where can the Republican get labor? From social conservatives. Where can the Democrat get capital? From wealthy liberals who care about social issues (and the environment) and from The New York Times and other media outlets who believe in laissez faire in the market for ideas – no matter how regulated the market for goods and services is. I am counting newspapers editorials and biased reporting as a capital contribution – the alternative to paid advertising.
This theorem seem to fit the facts reasonably well. At least better than alternative explanations which assume that the process is basically irrational.
Political scientist Hans Noel argues that parties have, in a sense, been captured by ideologues who have persuaded those who pay close attention to politics to adopt “conservative” or “liberal” ideologies. Johnathan Bernstein at Bloomberg argues that:
[L]ooking for ideologies among voters is sort of pointless. People have impulses on various issues, but it is the parties that organize those impulses into something resembling overall world views. The parties do this by teaching their adherents which positions they should take on all those subjects the rank-and-file voter doesn’t care about much.
In other words, parties have ideologies, but not people? I don’t think so.
Back to our original question. Just how many libertarians are there? Krugman is joined by polling expert Nathan Cohn and by columnist Nate Silver in the belief that they are few and far between. But that depends crucially on how you define libertarian and how you word the questions put to votes. Political scientist John Sides, for example, thinks that a libertarian is someone who wants government to provide “fewer services.” But who wants fewer services? That’s not the public policy option. The question is: do you want more services plus higher taxes to pay for them or do you want fewer services and a tax cut?
In Krugman’s view of the world, the choice being a libertarian and not being one is a choice between “social insurance” and “no social insurance”? But what does “no social insurance” mean? Abolish Social Security? Abolish Medicare?
The question should be: Do you want to participate in a Ponzi scheme in which you have no court-enforced right to any future benefits or would you like private ownership of your retirement benefits, fully protected by the laws of contract?aa
That is a lie, most historians do not describe Jefferson as a “libertarian” something which didn’t even exist at the time, the European left had not started it yet.
That includes an awful lot of people who aren't libertarians.
"Fiscally conservative" means supporting balanced budgets.
That doesn't have much to do with what real, hardcore libertarians believe.
“Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?”
Which is the definition of libertarian.
Libertarianism makes small, limited government and low taxes, impossible.
Immigrants and broken people living in Sodom and Gomorrah, do not vote for the conservative goals of limited government and low taxes.
A rhetorical fig-leaf for moral-statists who happen to also prefer economic liberty.
Thats why we have a representative type government or are supposed to have one...to give voice to reason and general consensus
No, in the United States we have government to secure our unalienable Rights, among these Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
“You can potentially invest six percent of your salary for 50 years and then die and receive nothing.”
You are UNDERstating the case! That is the part that is deducted from your pay if you are a W-2 employee. In reality it is just a bookkeeping scam to make you believe your employer pays the other half. In fact if your employer raised your pay by the amount that he pays and them deducted it all from your paycheck nothing would change. So you have to call it twelve percent to be real and yes, you could pay it for fifty years and if you die and leave no dependents who are able to draw from your account it may as well have all been flushed. Those who live to be ninety or older benefit greatly while those who die relatively young are royally shafted. Such are the ways of socialism. Of course all are screwed by inflation, the method of calculating the CPI has been adjusted to keep down the cost of SS, otherwise it would be dead already. The dollars I draw now are worth about one nickel out of the first dollars I paid in. I was born in 1944 and if we had 1950 prices my wife and I could live on just my SS check, buy a new Ford sedan every two MONTHS, burn the two month old one and STILL have an income to live very well indeed. Our combined income for two years now is more than my father earned in his entire working lifetime and we scrape by.
As will I and I'm on Cruz-control!
Jesus Christ: You can’t impeach Him and He ain’t gonna resign.
The freedom to eat what one chooses causes health problems in many people’s lives and leads them to start looking around for government charity to rescue them. Is a Diet Police a conservative idea?
Which is why libertarianism is dominant ideology in the county and the Libertarian party holds a majority in Congress...oh wait.
I guess they must all be too high to vote or something? Or maybe, just maybe, they don’t outnumber conservatives or liberals.
Now, once we get that government charity out of the way, as far as I'm concerned, you can eat whatever, drink whatever, smoke whatever and do whatever. If you run into trouble and cannot take care of yourself or your children ... [shrug]. Talk to your local church or neighborhood benevolent association. It's not my problem.
Fiscal Conservatism FIRST
then Social Liberalism ... but people need to have a sense of personal responsibility.
Within our current social climate and expectations, I say that social conservatism and fiscal conservatism need to be connected: because right now people do not have a sense of personal responsibility and they expect government to put a gun to my head and force me to pay for their stuff.
once we get that government charity out of the way, as far as I'm concerned, you can eat whatever
So that's a (provisional and temporary) yes to a Diet Police?
Libertarians are all jerks.
So according to you, we should have no moral or as few as possible standards to build our society and culture on, raise our children...
Anybody can do whatever they want as long as it doesn't affect me...?
So I don't need to pay for taking care of drug addicts, cure sexual diseases, rehab abusive alcoholics, protect young girls in the sex trade...
Live and let live...?
A rhetorical fig-leaf for moral-statists who happen to also prefer economic liberty.
So according to you, we should have no moral or as few as possible standards to build our society and culture on, raise our children...
Trying to compel moral behavior at the point of a gun does nothing to advance morality but does have disastrous side effects.
So I don't need to pay for taking care of drug addicts, cure sexual diseases,
Government, not drug use or sex, makes you do that.
rehab abusive alcoholics,
So you want to bring back Prohibition?
protect young girls in the sex trade...
By driving the sex trade into the black market we lose the ability to regulate it with age limits.
Abortion. Euthanasia. Drug use. Prostitution.
Is there one of the above that libertarianism isn’t okay with?
As for abortion, while the Libertarian Party (which the political philosophy of libertarianism predates by centuries) says abortion is likewise none of government's business, many libertarians, such as Libertarians for Life, recognize that unborn human beings are persons and have the same right to life as born persons.
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