Jacqueline Passey is. Well, not really about America so much as the prospect of turning the United States back onto the path of small government. She says this about the state of American political life:
I’ve given up on Libertarians or libertarians ever getting elected in sufficient numbers in the US to set policy. So, if we don’t want to be completely irrelevant and ignored, we have to find ways to work with people whose values and goals are very different from our own. We have to accept that they’re never going to pass laws or set policies that we like, but maybe we can persuade them to choose options that we dislike a little less.
And to a large degree, I think she’s sort of right (I also agree with her observation in comments than most LPers probably have aspergers). But, I don’t think it has much to do with electoral politics. There are a few reasons for this, and Jacqueline misses what I’d consider the two most major ones.
First of all, it’s entirely possible that one party or the other could attract sufficiently many libertarians to really change the outlook of the primary elections. As one emailer to the Instapundit said today: “I grow more and more convinced the Republican majority will end itself by 2006 if the Left will just shut up for five minutes.” And that’s exactly right. The conservative/libertarian alliance isn’t set in stone, and a lot of what the Republicans are doing these days really bothers libertarians. The unfortunate truth is that most of what the Democrats are doing bothers libertarians more.
If libertarians would quit the LP, get off their couches, pick a party to join, and start voting in primary elections I think it’s entirely possible that there are enough of us to affect at least local elections in the short-run and national elections in the long-run. Certain problems with this plan are obvious: libertarians, who mostly just want to be left alone, are hard to organize and many libertarians refuse to compromise to achieve second-best results. But I still think it’s entirely possible, especially with the younger part of the electorate that hasn’t gone insane yet. Even if this movement was sucessful, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference as far as the size of government is concerned.
The second issue that Jacqueline doesn’t cover in her post is that the vast majority of governess in America isn’t done by Congress, the President, the Judiciary or even state and local governments. The vast, vast majority of policy is made at the level of regulatory agencies. The SEC, OCC, FCC, BLM, DEA, ATF, EPA, DOT, FEC, and FDA are the ones I can think of in the five seconds it took me to type this sentence. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of federal and state regulatory agencies all making policy completely independent of elected officials. Each agency is guided by statutes handed down from Congress of course, but interpretation and implementation of those is largely left up to the regulatory agencies themselves.
No matter who is in power these agencies would be extremely difficult, if not practically impossible, to downsize or reform. Couple with this that government defines “cuts” as “reductions in growth” and that interest groups (as well as government itself) define success as the number of dollars that agencies recieve regardless of how those dollars are spent; reform becomes politically untennable.
Jacqueline’s solution is moving to Costa Rica never to return. Well, my Spanish is lousy and I like the US eve with all its flaws. I’ll be staying here trying to persuade folks to attempt the libertarian revolution through party take-over that I mentioned above. Why try if it’s worthless or ineffectual? Because I’m willing to take whatever precious little I can get.
