Dr. Donald W. Miller today announced the creation of a new website for the organization “Libertarians for Trump” (LFT). The website is located at http://libertariansfortrump.org/
As stated on the website, Miller, a retired cardiac specialist, co-founded the group, along with economics professor Walter Block and retired economics professor Ralph Raico, in order “to advance Libertarian values and discussions in the 2016 Election.” It states that Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is “the best candidate . . . to advance the non aggression principle.” The logic behind this assertion is outlined as follows:
- Trump is the most libertarian on foreign policy;
- he is the least likely to get us into World War III; and
- Imperialism, foreign aggression, are more of a threat to liberty than are violations of economic or personal liberty rights.
Block announced the creation of the LFT in a March 15 article at LewRockwell.com. At the time, he asked supporters of the group to e-mail him and said he would release the names of supporters once they numbered 100. However, in a March 29 article at LewRockwell.com, Block explained:
Initially, I had hoped that 100 people would sign up; then, I thought, I’d send their names to the Trump campaign, and be done with this effort of mine. But this initiative grew like topsy. It is now far greater than I ever imagined it would be. By my estimate, almost 400 people have already signed up for LFT and another dozen or so are trickling in every day. I’m too busy to count them since I’m still coping with dozens of sign up letters coming in pretty regularly. However, in future, if you want to sign up for LFT, please no longer use my own e-mail address; instead, access this one: [email protected]
Block describes the reaction from libertarians as “overwhelmingly positive,” but has encountered some who are afraid to publicly express their support for Trump out of fear of being “drummed out of our precious libertarian movement.”
There has also been some objections to the concept expressed to Block. He cites opposition from those who consider voting a form of aggression, those who only support candidates taking purist libertarian stances, and from those who believe Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders takes a better approach. Block counters those views in the March 29 article.
However, regarding the Libertarian Party, Block makes clear:
My colleagues and I at LFT have decided that the sole purpose of this organization is to help Mr. Donald Trump attain the Republican Party’s nomination for president. When and if that occurs, we plan to disband LFT. We confine ourselves toward working toward the day when Mr. Trump receives the nomination of the Republican Party for president — and nothing else.
The website uses the slogan, “More Freedom, More Prosperity, Less Government, Limited Aggression.”
There are many divides among libertarians, but that’s not particularly relevant to Raimondo, who abandoned libertarianism in favor of paleoconservatism a long time ago.
I would agree with Raimondo that while Trump is indeed a false prophet, they do have their uses. Besides, it’s wasn’t Bush II himself who stocked his White House full of neocons, that was Dick Cheney who did so and if Bush II has any regrets about his time in the White House the biggest would be making that scumbag Vice President. Indeed there is a difference between “rooting for ” and endorsing and no doubt Raimondo would be rooting for Bernie too if he was actually willing to attack Clinton’s foreign policy vulnerabilities.
Bottom line is the divide among libertarians is between those persons who put their main focus on foreign policy and those who put it on drugs and sex.
Raimondo provides a more logically coherent argument than Welch. Welch and most of the commenters on this thread miss the forest for the trees. As Raimondo states:
“Our job here at Antiwar.com is to do outreach to constituencies that, for one reason or another, are open to the idea that America should not and cannot be the policeman of the world. To ignore – or, worse, deride – a candidate who is giving voice to this concept would be sheer stupidity. Such a candidate’s supporters may not be consistent in their beliefs: our job is to convince them.”
>Matt Welch thoroughly destroys the idiotic “Libertarians for Trump” argument here:
Raimondo replies:
Is Trump the Peace Candidate?
Or is he a “false prophet of anti-interventionism,” as some libertarians claim?
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/04/14/trump-peace-candidate/
If Trump is an Ayn Rand character he’s either Peter Keating or Cuffy Meigs. Or maybe both.
On an Ayn Rand related topic one commenter at SelfAdoraiton makes the observation that Donald Trump has five children and eight grandchildren which is not directly comparable to the protagonist in The Fountainhead or Ayn Rand’s advocacy of legalized abortion.
http://selfadoration.com/waiting-for-yaronbrook-of-the-aynrand-inst-to-come-clean-about-the-plannedparenthood-videos/8369
I recently came across a number of articles that compare Donald Trump to villains in Ayn Rand’s novels. I tweeted a few and come this morning I found that @DTLibertarians has blocked my handle.
I would have thought that Libertarians for Trump would have posted some rebuttal if the articles were weak.
https://twitter.com/ilovegrover/status/720163482830659584
Matt Welch thoroughly destroys the idiotic “Libertarians for Trump” argument here:
http://reason.com/archives/2016/04/12/trump-is-not-the-peace-candida
Jacob Witmer seems to have covered most of the reasons why Libertarians for Trump is roughly the equivalent of Jews for Eichmann.
Well, this confirms it. It’s no hoax.
I’ll now be interested to see if CAH has any opinions on this LfT, specifically Block’s participation.
Being newer to the party, I understand that I have much to learn.
That being said, Trump is more of a party unto himself. What comes out of his mouth may as well be coming out of his ass too since it is all BS.
Trump is for Trump, period. Every time he really steps in it he well send out some kind of quasi apology or explanation that is obviously written by someone else. And yes, he thinks we should just go in with our superior firepower and take out whole sections of the Middle East then come home and build something else with his name on it. I don’t know if that is before or after he deports all the Muslims and Latino/Latinas and makes Mexico build a wall so that the Sinaloa cartel can have a monopoly on drug and human smuggling since they are the ones with the expert Engineers trained in Germany.
Somewhere in that busy schedule of his he will also find time to shoot all of the families of all of the terrorists. Thus “Making America Great Again” or in my opinion, making America the most hated country on the planet.
The founding principle of NAP I have learned and as far as I am concerned, his aggression plans go way beyond any that Bush Jr. had. But he wants to use nukes, only a few of them. At least Ted Cruz just wants to Carpet Bomb ISIS until the sand is on fire. Trump wants it to glow. Maybe they could make it glow in his name.
“Jacob C. Witmer
April 14, 2016 at 20:09
More or less, this is just ‘Libertarians for (Whoever’s most popular)’ …much like Gary Johnson’s recent pro-Bernie comment on Stossel’s recent libertarian debate.”
A few Libertarians have endorsed Bernie Sanders, including Steve Kubby, and IPR’s very own Warren Redlich.
@Jacob C. Witmer: Actually, Trump attempted to acquire Vera Coking’s home by eminent domain, but Coking was able to successfully prevent the taking in the New Jersey state courts — a few years before the Supreme Court’s Kelo v. New London decision.
“What’s NEXT, Libertarians for Putin?”
Actually, Dave, Trump’s friendly attitude toward Vlad Putin is probably the main reason Walter Block formed “Libertarians” for Trump. Rothbard always took a pro-Russian attitude, defending Lenin’s foreign policy and blaming US “imperialism” for the Cold War. So LFT is as close as you can get to “Libertarians for Putin.”
Anybody who joins this group is a fucking idiot who should kill themselves before their retardation spreads into the gene pool. That is all.
No, that would be Scientology.
This is more like “Astrolotistics”
More or less, this is just “Libertarians for (Whoever’s most popular)” …much like Gary Johnson’s recent pro-Bernie comment on Stossel’s recent libertarian debate.
Is this an offshoot of the Scientists for Astrology?
Block and (I suppose; dk) Miller are from LewRockwell.com; AFAIK they’ve never had anything to do with the USLP – though when Block was at the Fraser Institute he spoke at a lot of LP of Canada events, and he endorsed the LP of Canada in the last election. He endorsed Ron Paul in 2012, and maybe in 2008; I didn’t see that.
He’s a respected Austrian economist, a disciple of Rothbard, and a lot of the paleo influence has rubbed off on him (though unlike most of the Rockwell crew, he supports open borders).
A lot of paleos see Trump as the end of the neocon reign in the Republicans. That’s probably the major motivation here, too.
I am not on the Trump bandwagon, but in all fairness to the Libertarians for Trump, from what I have heard from them, they all seem to recognize that there are flaws with Trump from a libertarian perspective. They are backing him because they think that he is less bad than the other Republicans and Democrats who are in the race.
Whether or not this is a good strategy is another issue (i am skeptical about it myself), I was just adding some clarification to their view.
Lysander Spooner noted that most of society was comprised of “dupes(the stupid), knaves(the corrupt), and cowards(those too afraid to challenge oppressive political entities).”
I’m pretty sure that the people who support “Libertarians for Trump” fall into one or more of the prior categories.
Libertarians don’t believe that eminent domain is legitimate or necessary, even in its “constitutional” form. That said, the gross expansion of eminent domain under the “Kelo v. New London” SCOTUS decision enabled the worst, most abusive form of government oppression possible (as Rand Paul recently said). The decision allows municipal governments to confiscate an individual’s property and deed it over to a private entity, simply because that private entity(in the Kelo case, Pfizer corporation) agrees to pay more in taxes than the individual pays. The “Kelo decision,” as it has come to be called, was too radically communist for even the left-leaning Sandra Day O’Connor, prompting her extreme dissent, and her retirement from the court in protest. Since that decision, several states attempted to make the Kelo decision illegal, using the citizen-sponsored initiative and referenda process. (It is, by far, the most popular petition I have ever circulated, and people regularly waited in line to sign it in Missouri, Oregon, and Montana, something that rarely happens with political petitions.)
Once the Kelo decision was rendered, Donald Trump tried to use it to confiscate Vera Coking’s house for his Casino parking lot. Using the worst, most anti-property-rights Supreme Court decision in years to attempt to use government force to steal an old lady’s property is AS ANTI-LIBERTARIAN AS IT GETS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Coking
So, if Donald Trump is anti-libertarian on one issue, is there just a chance I’m not being fair to him? Am I just not giving him a fair shake? What if he changed his mind on the issue? (He didn’t. He recently defended his attempted gross abuse of eminent domain by claiming we wouldn’t have roads, hospitals, etc. without eminent domain. This shows that he has a child’s grasp of property rights, and not just disregard for property rights, but contempt for them. He actually said “Eminent domain is a wonderful thing.” in an interview with Brett Baier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75Cd7oHG6pk ) What if he’s just bad on that one issue (albeit a core issue)? Stossel challenged him on this, way back in 2008, and even explained it in detail in his book, “Give Me A Break.” The Institute for Justice, a group of heroic Libertarian lawyers has repeatedly challenged Trump about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmM4ZBoppNQ Trump, in the prior interview with Baier claims that he thinks “Conservatives just haven’t had it(Trump’s position) explained to them.” Well, aren’t libertarians supposed to think for themselves? Trump’s advocacy of eminent domain, and each argument he uses to defend eminent domain, puts him in the same totalitarian collectivist camp that Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton occupy.
But does he bring anything good to the table?
In many of his speeches, Donald Trump is a drug warrior, who claims he wants to increase enforcement of the drug laws. He repeatedly promises this. But he’s also self-contradictory on the subject, “playing politics” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2J4Cnzu3Ik (He claimed at one point in 1990 he wanted to legalize drugs, then recently told Sean Hannity he did not want to “legalize pot.”) So, he’s a typical politician who panders to whatever audience he’s in front of, much as Bob Barr did in 2008 when he was on Hannity. So, maybe Block and the other “libertarians for anti-liberty” are dupes in this case, and not corrupted “knaves.”
Donald Trump is a xenophobe who opposes free trade, immigration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7FwFEYzwJw , and internet privacy . He thinks Apple should be forced to break into its own phones, enslaving them to the government, and destroying privacy for all Americans. He thinks Edward Snowden is a traitor, and should be extradicted back to the USA to face a death sentence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDfxcVJXqTc
He’s a chest-beating, saber-rattling chicken-hawk who promises to destroy ISIS, more of the same. (War for the purpose of re-upping military contracts.) Now, I’m actually somewhat in favor of destroying ISIS, but I think that the job could be done very inexpensively if we simply take the Craig Venter approach to the problem, and work smarter, not “behave more violently.” Showering the military industrial complex simply opens the USA to a moral hazard of epic proportions. Block’s assertions that “Trump is the most anti-war candidate,” and that “the decision to go to war is the tail wagging the nation” are both absurd, if the intention is to restore the Bill of Rights domestically. After all, in all domestic areas, Trump is a cop kisser, and a fan of the security state, security theater, and “police actions.” (As his bellicose attitude toward protesters, police brutality, whistleblowers, etc. shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XauAcxaaS-M “We have to give power back to the police.”) So, the domestic portions of “wartime-induced” social changes are fully supported by Trump, even if he truly believes (as he says he does) that the Iraq war was stupid.
That the establishment doesn’t want Trump to “open the door” to wealthy people running just because they have wealth (allowing the possibility of a serious libertarian candidate at some point in the future) doesn’t matter. As near as I can see, that’s the only argument that a libertarian could use to defend Trump’s candidacy. Even so, championing his ELECTION is entirely different than championing his CANDIDACY.
The problem we face is a problem of a people beset upon by tyranny. Electing a “different sort of tyrant” will change nothing for the better.
So sure, put Trump on the ballot, and use his loud mouth win attention for the issues of the day. But if you’re a libertarian, you shouldn’t be trying to help elect him, because he’s a petty tyrant, and he’s grossly politically unprincipled.
I don’t want to drum Raico, Block, and Miller out of the tiny libertarian movement. I just think they’re doing something very stupid, instead of something very smart. Political networks must contain people who do stupid things, because that includes all of us, at one time or another. I also suspect it has to do with their desire to shrink the “electoral participation” of libertarians, so they can claim that “the only legitimate position for a libertarian is not to vote” –a foundational tenet of Samuel E. Konkin’s “Agorism.” This is, of course, a doctrine that counsels abject failure in electoral politics. If all of the people who agree with you stay home on election day, then you will simply lose. If your ideas are libertarian, and you lose, then someone who intends to use the full power of the office you were running for will be able to do so.
One can make a case for Trump being included on the ballot. One can make a case for the fair application of the election laws, and delegate election procedures to be applied to his candidacy (so the establishment doesn’t simply get to pick). But to claim that libertarians should support Trump is toxic to attracting socially tolerant individualists in society who should form our natural voting base.
John McAfee is smart enough to see that a government big enough to give you what you want is smart enough to take everything you have. http://www.mcafee2016.com
Trump is not.
I’m voting for McAfee, in Orlando. If McAfee loses, I will act as an intelligent node in the network I have allied myself with: I will vote Libertarian, for Johnson, Petersen, or whomever the Libertarian nominee is, assuming they are “more libertarian than not.”
If the Libertarian nominee is Trump, due to his “packing the convention,” I will vote Libertarian for the lower offices, and I will simply not vote for president, or I will write in “I have no representation, there are no acceptable candidates” and take a picture of it for my blog.
Supporting Trump is not a libertarian thing to do. The case strains the credulity of even the least-informed libertarian. The support for Trump by Block and the others place them more in the “contrarian” category than the libertarian category. That’s fine. Again: I don’t want to “drum them out of the libertarian movement.” I just don’t want asinine and anti-libertarian proposals of theirs to be taken seriously by the often strategically clueless libertarian movement.
Libertarians shouldn’t support Trump. Libertarians should try to get seated on juries, and vote “not guilty” if the offense alleged lacks “injury” and “intent to injure” a specific, identified individual or set of individuals. This requirement of a valid “corpus delicti” in criminal law is what separates libertarians from the mainstream Democrat and Republican leadership. Trump’s government would not require such a corpus before using state power to confiscate or punish.
…And this is where he represents one more face in a crowded, but philosophically homogeneous field of wretched totalitarian candidates. (With a single solid exception: John McAfee.)
I can point to libertarian things McAfee has done. I can point to libertarian positions McAfee has taken. I can show a long track record of opposition to state power from McAfee. I can show that McAfee comprehends Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” and jury nullification of law.
Trump supporters can do none of these things. Nor do they even make the claim that they can.
That should remove Trump from consideration, not just from libertarians, but from that of well-intentioned people who do not fancy themselves “dupes, knaves, or cowards.”
I just puked all over my American Flag. Which one of you douchebags should I send it to???
What’s NEXT, Libertarians for Putin? (aka Pukin’)
Do any of these guys have any official affiliation with the LP?
The point about intervention is wrong. Doesn’t The Donald want to invade Syria to fight ISIS? Maybe I don’t have his position down.
Any self-professed libertarian supporting this racist douche should stop referring to themselves as such. This screams co-opt to me.