Some thoughts from Alex Tabbarok at marginalrevolution.com here.
I am sympathetic, but I think my conclusion from the evidence is to not vote for the major parties at all. Alex emphasizes, correctly, the importance of war as a destroyer of liberty, yet it is democrats and not republicans who were around at the start of most of the major American military adventures of the 20th century. In many if not most cases, the decision to participate was theirs; this is certainly true of WW1 and Vietnam, true indirectly of WW2 (which was arguably the result in part of Woodrow Wilson's collusion in the idiot treaties that ended WW1), and not so true of Korea.
Both parties say one thing and do another and seem undeserving of positive support. Given that my vote will not affect the outcome, I also see no reason to vote for the lesser of two evils or to spend a lot of CPU cycles trying to solve the problem of which party is less bad in a given election year. It is much more fun just to enjoy the show and marvel that despite all the lies, venality, petty cultural conflict, pure silliness (e.g. debates over the number of houses or whether the symbol looks like a presidential seal), pathetic hero worship, rampant hypocrisy, craven vote-buying disguised as policy and so on, America remains a relatively successful and moderately free country.
Addendum: should I give a hat tip for a pointer to a post I would have blogged about anyway but had not yet read? Hmmm .... if so, then credit Ken Troske.
Whew.
8 years ago
