Blame Libertarians for election confusion?

by philg

We’re celebrating here in Massachusetts because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib have been reelected by the wise American people (USA Today). Regarding the folks who were actually on my Massachusetts ballot, most candidates ran unopposed so it isn’t worth discussing the typical “race”. Question 1 passed (about 75/25), which means we can pay state workers to monitor what car manufacturers are doing with their telematics interfaces. Question 2, ranked choice voting, failed (55/45).

The issue of ranked choice and minor parties leads me to wonder whether Jo Jorgensen and the Libertarians are responsible for the fact that we can’t be sure right now how much ridicule should be heaped on me for my failed prediction that Biden-Harris would win. Let’s check out the NYT Results Map:

The NYT hates Libertarians so much that it takes at least three clicks to learn about any Libertarian votes. But if we click down into Wisconsin, which Biden-Harris leads by 1.1 percent, we learn that 1.2 percent of voters chose Ms. Jorgensen. Biden-Harris lead by 0.6 percent in Nevada, with 86 percent of the vote tallied. The Libertarian vote, 0.9 percent, is larger than the difference between mainstream candidates.

Biden-Harris has a 0.2 percent lead in Michigan and 1.1 percent of voters there chose Libertarian. Trump is leading by 1.8 percent in Georgia, but it would be 3 percent if all of the Libertarians had voted for Trump rather than for Shutdown Joe. It’s a similar story in North Carolina. He Who Must Not Be Named leads 1.4 percent with 95 percent of the vote tallied, which is apparently not sufficient to predict the outcome. In NC, 0.9 percent voted Libertarian. If they’d voted against the promised bigger government of President Harris, the spread would be 2.3 percent.

(I’m a small-L libertarian, but it is difficult for me to get behind Joe Jorgensen. She has come out in favor of legalized prostitution, for example. Sex work has traditionally been regulated by state governments, not the federal. So a Calvin Coolidge-style president wouldn’t express an opinion on the subject. It is also unclear how prostitution could ever work in the typical U.S. state, in which it is more profitable to have sex with a high-income customer and harvest the child support than to go to college (or even medical school) and work. See “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” or just look at the entrepreneur who successfully mined out the Biden family via Hunter Biden. An exception to this rule is Nevada, in which child support profits are capped at about $13,000 per year per child and, as it happens, prostitution is legal in some counties.)

Readers: What do we think? Fair to call the Libertarians the spoilers of 2020? In a country where most voters want a bigger government, higher taxes, and more regulation, should the Libertarians recognize that by running their own candidates they are simply helping Democrats?

Alternatively, if the Republicans were smart, would they try to appease the Libertarians into not running in swing states? Maybe agree to add a Libertarian-themed goal or two into the Republican platform (Rand Paul can draft! (note that “Rand” is short for “Randy”, not a reference to Ayn Rand)). Share some funding with Libertarians in the non-swing states to get the message out. Basically do whatever it takes to stop Libertarians from running in Nevada and the rest of the states described above.

60 thoughts on “Blame Libertarians for election confusion?”

  1. I’m surprised that the Ranked Choice Voting question failed. Probably just sounds too complicated? I thought it would pass, just by a narrow margin, but it’s pretty decisively the other way. Several of my friends voted for Jo Jorgensen, although at least one of them would have put Biden 2nd, not Trump. Is that surprising? Should we just go with a Presidential tandemocracy? [Just Putin’ things right?] Where everyone has the right to get a tan (thank Doonesbury) and the government will provide unlimited sunscreen? As long as “outside is safer” I’d go for that. Maybe we could bring back “open-air” Colosseum style events where politicians battle (to the death?) in front of a (properly spaced or even fake) crowd? This has already been covered by Gene Roddenberry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNHC7-TWS4k (well, it worked on TV!) All streamed on TV and the web (which would definitely help my business, involving media production).

  2. I’m very glad RCV failed in MA. Both ballot initiatives went the way I preferred. Susan Collins can still lose in Maine because they are RCV and if the last 15% of the counting there takes away her clear-cut majority, she will LOSE the election.

  3. As a committed third party voter, I have been blamed for Gore’s loss, Trump’s first win, and, if this doesn’t go the right way, his second. Meh. My vote goes this way – if there is a third party candidate, they get my vote (prefer Green over Libertarian mostly); if no third party candidate is running for the office, vote against the incumbent; if there is only one candidate, write someone else in (unless there is something organized, I write in a friend).

    I’m generally a liberal and might approach these things differently, but I have also been waiting for single-payer health care reform through 16+ years of Democratic administrations with no real results.

  4. I was surprised by the Markey/O’Connor race in MA. Not for the result, which was predictable, everyone knew Markey would win. But O’Connor had a surprisingly strong showing with about half the votes. I expected him to get fewer and come in with around 15% of the total. If you can call getting pounded 2:1 something to be proud of, O’Connor wins the prize.

    Richard Neal ran unopposed once he vanquished the primary challenge from the young, gay man who had consensual sex with students while he was a lecturer at U. Mass Amherst, who from this point on everyone should call “Icarus”.

  5. Didn’t know this about the libertarian candidate. Sadly, the popular vote still matters as an argument topic so even though everyone who needs employment is in a previously decided state, they still have to vote for 1 of the 2 viable contestants.

  6. I don’t blame the Libertarians. Trump & Co. had a lot of opportunities to win them over and change his margins over the past 4 years and he didn’t do a very good job of it.

    • I just added my response to this to the original post: Alternatively, if the Republicans were smart, would they try to appease the Libertarians into not running in swing states? Maybe agree to add a Libertarian-themed goal or two into the Republican platform (Rand Paul can draft! (note that “Rand” is short for “Randy”, not a reference to Ayn Rand)). Share some funding with Libertarians in the non-swing states to get the message out. Basically do whatever it takes to stop Libertarians from running in Nevada and the rest of the states described above.

    • Philg, its pretty simple: Ranked choice voting so that the Libertarians get their fix of voting for their candidate and then their second choice – the Republican – gets the vote when it really counts!

    • @Philg: I’ve been so traumatized by the events of the past 24 hours and my mind hasn’t settled back into anything resembling rational thought, but yes I think there’s a good case to be made that once the Republicans start to pick up the pieces, they’re going to need a broader coalition – including Libertarians – if they entertain any hopes of winning majorities in the House, Senate and also winning the Presidency. So they can’t afford to throw anyone aside or go around blaming anyone who believes in free markets and individual liberties. The Democrats have only two speeds Left from here on out: full military and full afterburner, and the Republican Party needs to do a lot of thinking about how to appeal to as many people as it possibly can so this country doesn’t suffer what I consider to be the worst of all possible worlds.

    • @Philg: What they’re also going to need, Philip, is a return to a more coherent and intelligent messaging strategy that understands how badly they’ve been beaten by Democrats at their own game in the past 20 years or so, largely due to the influence of linguists like George Lakoff. They’re going to need people who help them frame the arguments and make them more persuasively, to a broader coalition of people. The chaos has to stop. Doing everything by Tweetstream has to stop. Twitter is one tool in the toolbox but it is not a substitute for hard work.

      Everybody needs to re-read this article, because Lakoff knew what he was doing. We lost the language war, and in a lot of cases this President squandered it because he was so completely incoherent and frankly dishonest:

      https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml

    • Alex: I don’t think it is some kind of trick that enables Democrats promising bigger government to win American political contests. The majority of Americans want the government to take care of more of their needs directly or by ensuring the price is “affordable” (at a minimum: housing, health care, and food). Remember that the standard Republican platform was so unappealing even to Republicans that all of the professional Republicans lost to Donald Trump, who was a Democrat for almost his entire life.

    • @Philg: It’s true, the Republicans have had a big problem reconciling the globalists vs. the nationalists, and the people who want more government everything, but I still believe that the sheer volume of noisy disruption that happened because Trump was so profligate with Twitter was destructive. I’ll have more on this in the coming days, expressed better.

    • @Philg: If you look at what turned off a lot of potential women voters, the college-educated Volvo-driving Soccer Moms, I believe to this moment that a lot of them would say: “Trump sounded like a dick all the time.” I think he turned away a couple million votes with the buzz-saw rhetoric alone.

    • Alex: Why isn’t it simpler to say that Trump turned off voters by saying “The federal government cannot protect you from being infected with a respiratory virus”? Today’s successful politicians, except in Sweden, are those who say “the government can and will protect you from being infected with a respiratory virus.”

    • @Philg: He should have lied! 🙂 But he should have done it in a nice way. I can tell you that I’ve talked to women voters who went for Biden instead and they didn’t like his perceived treatment of Birx. The two of them never got along.

    • @Philg: I know it’s crazy, a little, but it’s true: people want to be protected. Women want the government to protect them. College-educated Volvo Driving Soccer Moms *really* want the Government to protect them. Whether or not the government can do that, in a political environment like the one we have, he should have understood that dynamic better than he did. Birx’s sourpuss faces there and especially her last-minute contradiction of Trump on the eve of the election cemented the perception that Trump didn’t care, that he was only in it for himself, etc., etc., or at least made it easier for them to believe that. I don’t disagree with you on the fundamentals, but he got the politics wrong because he didn’t adjust to that.

    • “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” – joseph stalin.

      sorry guys, 🙁

    • I still believe the only thing Everclear got wrong in this song, applied to the present, is that the Volvo Driving Soccer Mom is a Democrat. And she wants the Government’s help.

    • @alex , isn’t there a bit of contradiction in your point –
      the orange man seems to have taken the ‘swing states’ (Florida, ohio, pa ?),
      so it seems that there indeed support for him…

    • (apologies for commenting again n again..)

      so my earlier comment related to stalin was when I read this: https://twitter.com/5Forty3/status/1324197565261254657

      “During the 90s, Lalu Yadav’s goons used to easily capture booths and get 100% votes for their candidates… This is what is happening in the US right now with mail dumps of 100% Biden votes!

      No wonder lefties hate EVMs so much and want to return back to paper ballots!”

      then I read some Indian ‘intellectuals’ talking shit about EVMs & using only paper votes, ( i.e. vouching for following the US system of ‘paper votes’ )

      the world is going crazy .. i mean this is all so 2020 ! 🙁

      PS: ‘Lalu Yadav’ was an indian politician who ruled the state for some 15 years, got it to ruins.. and is now serving in jail for corruption.

    • @disevad:

      Biden is going to reach 270 in Nevada. The outcomes in Georgia and NC are not clear. Pennsylvania is also going to take several more days.

      Democrats are winning from the edges in. First it was the coasts, then the rust-belt North, extending into the western states. That’s the strategy. Wisconsin and Michigan are gone. I’m very doubtful PA will stay (R) when all the mail-in votes are done being counted.

      https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/president/

      Trump lost a couple million votes because of his own self-inflicted wounds. The Libertarians aren’t to blame and they’re going to be in the next Tent the Republicans try to construct.

    • @disevad: Also, it is now not clear that Republicans will have a 51 majority in the Senate. If it winds up 50/50, President Harris will be the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. And we can expect all hell to fairly break loose.

    • Nevada putting Biden over the top is all Harry Reid / SEIU. He left the Senate and built the next brick in the Democrat wall. One might say that Harry Reid is going to be running the casinos, the prostitution, the UFOs and the Aliens in Nevada, along with Blink-182. Reid had pancreatic cancer and was treated at Johns Hopkins, and as of 2019 he claimed it was in remission. And he is going to deliver Nevada for Biden, Orange Man be damned.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Reid

    • alright then, no one can stop the USA from becoming chyna’s bitch.

      no new wars, middle east & israel peace deals, no bullshit climate accords, no bullshit pc business on terrorism…. for a moment it seemed like things were going in the right direction overall…

      anyways.. maybe it was meant to be .. maybe it’s the beginning of the end of a gr8 country .. my country has seen it worse though, whatever …. 🙁

  7. Libertarianism is like moonshine — if you are in good health, young and partake in small doses it probably wont hurt you.

    • I’m not sure how we can define “libertarianism”. The Cato Institute has some pretty milquetoast ideas that would shrink government a bit. They call themselves “libertarian” but could just as easily call themselves “Calvinists” since what they are advocating is essentially the U.S. government under Calvin Coolidge. Check out https://www.cato.org/ and I think you’ll see that if we adopted their proposals it wouldn’t change day to day life much. The exception is their advocacy of open borders. https://www.cato.org/policy-report/januaryfebruary-2019/myths-facts-immigration-policy says “Immigrants of all skill levels expand the productive potential of Americans directly and our personal family options.” Since every person in the U.S. is entitled to taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone, it is unclear how the open borders idea would work. Suppose that 200 million immigrants who are over age 70, in poor health, and unable to speak English show up. Americans just feverishly build skyscraper apartment buildings in which they can live comfortably?

    • “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.”

    • “I’m not sure how we can define ‘libertarianism.'”

      Joseph Heath, Filthy Lucre (published in the US as Economics Without Illusions):

      … two flavors of libertarianism developed. The first claims that self-interest alone is enough to motivate individuals not only to assert their own rights, but to respect the rights of others…. No government whatsoever is required; a market economy is perfectly capable of arising in the so-called state of nature. The second claims that a state is required in order to prevent individuals from interfering with one another’s rights but that this constitutes the only legitimate role for government. Libertarians of this tendency endorse a minimal, or what Robert Nozick called a “nightwatchman,” state – one that has no mandate to take any positive action: it is merely there to ensure that the rights of individuals are respected.

      As it turns out, the first variant has collapsed philosophically. You need a state to enforce property, exchange, and contract: individual enforcement won’t work, because of collective action problems. And then once you have a minimal state (collecting taxes, punishing violations of law, etc.) to solve certain collective action problems, it’s hard to draw the line and say that the state shouldn’t solve other collective action problems (e.g. providing public health insurance) – the arguments for state intervention need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

      For example, consider some forms of social insurance typically supported by libertarians: deposit insurance, prosecution of white-collar crime, bankruptcy protection, limited liability.

      It is important to emphasize that bankruptcy law and limited liability – both of which involve the discharge of debts – categorically violate several fundamental conservative principles. They interfere with property rights, undermine contractual obligations, erode personal responsibility, and leave “society” to pay the bill for improvident or foolish conduct of individuals. So what do these policies have going for them? They help to stabilize the capitalist system, reducing volatility in output, and they serve as a major force promoting investment and economic growth. They also enjoy nearly unanimous support among the business class. Corporate bankruptcy protection has been a permanent feature of the American economy since 1898, and no modern economy has ever succeeded without similar provisions. It is difficult to imagine how anything even as simple as a mutual fund could be organized without the principle of limited liability.

      More generally, what these programs have in common is that they are all forms of social insurance that benefit people with money to lend. They all involve government-created and government-funded exceptions to the principle of “lender beware!” We might think of them as social programs for capitalists. Naturally, one seldom hears complaints from the business class about this sort of government “interference” in the market. What lenders and investors typically oppose is not social insurance, or even the principle of social insurance, but merely the specific types of social insurance that protect other people – especially workers and consumers. (Or, speaking more precisely, forms of social insurance that benefit people in their capacity as workers and consumers, rather than in their capacity as investors.)

      As a result, the commitment to “limited government” and “laissez-faire” capitalism turns out to be not so much a principled defense of individual liberty as an arbitrary privileging of the interests of those with money to invest (whom we may refer to, for convenience, as “the wealthy”). The right-wing call for “less government” therefore becomes a call to “keep those programs that benefit the wealthy – scrap everything else.” And this simply doesn’t qualify as a political philosophy. When spoken in the mouths of the privileged, it’s just a fancy way of saying, “More free stuff for me, less for you.”

      For another example, Heath explains the massive efficiency gains Canadians get from public health insurance and public pensions, via risk-pooling. A minimal-government advocate who argues that we should dismantle these programs is basically saying that we should pass up these gains, in the name of principle.

    • Yeah, but Russil: Canadians limit their immigration. You just can’t show up and get in there.

    • @Russil: I’m quite sure that everybody in power in California has read what you wrote and they just turned it on its head because they know where the government jobs are, and those folks are gonna get richer.

    • What’s amazing is that you sound like you want to get rid of that, but in fact, all the Democrats running for anything in this country just want to make them stronger.

      “They interfere with property rights, undermine contractual obligations, erode personal responsibility, and leave “society” to pay the bill for improvident or foolish conduct of individuals. ”

      The improvident or foolish individuals are now the people running the government and believe me, they want the protections. They don’t want to be held accountable for bankrupting the country! It would interfere with their enjoyment of their mansions.

    • Russil: Are you sure that the 1.6 million Americans who voted for Jo the Libertarian subscribed to any of the stuff you’re writing about? https://jo20.com/covid-19/ says that they want a streamlined FDA approval process, an end to the multi-$trillion COVID-19 bailouts, which they say went primarily to “government cronies and special interests”. That’s not some sort of grand philosophy. They just don’t want to see $trillions in tax dollars spent in this new way. https://jo20.com/issues/environment/ does not advocate for eliminating the EPA, for example, but only to cut subsidies for government-favored forms of energy or transportation. https://jo20.com/issues/criminal-justice-reform/ calls for an end to the War on Drugs. People can vote for that even if they don’t have a different philosophy on how to run an economy and government.

    • Philip: I think it’s fair to say that someone who describes themselves as libertarian wants smaller government. This isn’t limited to people who vote for the Libertarian Party – the Republicans typically push for smaller government as well.

      In purely economic terms, I think this is unwise: in Canada, we get tremendous economic savings from running social insurance programs. Politically, it seems to have driven the Republicans into something of a cul-de-sac: the Republicans have now lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight Presidential elections (the exception being George W. Bush’s victory in 2004), and their main response seems to be to try to keep Democrats from voting.

      I guess you could argue that the Republicans should shift more in the direction of small government to try to keep libertarian-minded voters in the tent, but I thought Trump’s 2016 campaign demonstrated that moving in the opposite direction, promising not to cut Medicare and Social Security, is pretty appealing.

      @Captain Moneybags: Heath isn’t saying that we should get rid of bankruptcy and limited liability laws (and neither would I!), he’s just pointing out that they can’t really be justified by a “minimal government” philosophy – they’re justified by their practical benefits. Same applies when considering any social program or government intervention: is there an egregious market failure, such that the benefits of intervention would outweigh the costs?

    • Russil: Canada is an inspiring example? https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/211rank.html shows Canada as 19 percent poorer per person than the U.S., despite Canada’s vast natural resources. How many Americans would be excited about a 20 percent cut in their income and spending power?

      Why wouldn’t small-government (and rich) Singapore be a more inspiring example to Americans than big-government (and slightly poorer) Canada?

    • > In purely economic terms, I think this is unwise: in Canada, we get tremendous economic savings from running social insurance programs.

      That’s great Russil! You do not live in the United States. You do not have the enormous fiscal responsibility of maintaining a gigantic military and neither do you allow anyone to come across your southern border and just claim government benefits, as we do here. When Canadians start agreeing to take in a few million immigrants a year across their southern border, we’ll talk again.

    • Philip: It’s true that US GDP per capita is considerably higher than in Canada – but surprisingly, because of greater income inequality (more gains have gone to the top), the median after-tax household income in the US has fallen behind the median in Canada. Given that public services like health and education are better, that suggests that at least half of Americans would find this appealing. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html

      What’s the relationship between size of government and economic growth? Stephen Gordon:

      Some people might at this point be tempted to confidently assert that high levels of government spending are incompatible with growth and prosperity. These people would be wrong. In his paper “15 Years of New Growth Economics: What Have We Learnt?”, Xavier Sala-i-Martin notes: “The size of the government does not appear to matter much. What is important is the ‘quality of government’ (governments that produce hyperinflations, distortions in foreign exchange markets, extreme deficits, inefficient bureaucracies, etc., are governments that are detrimental to an economy).”

      Alex: I’m curious what you think of Christopher Jencks’ comments in The Immigration Charade.

    • @Russil:

      Easy question. I’ve always, and for many years, been very consistent about enforcement of immigration laws among employers and companies who bring people in to pad their bottom lines. I agree with that now, but I don’t think the Biden Administration is going to do it either, for different reasons.

      Companies in America are responsible for most of the illegal immigration and the government is basically saying: “OK, that’s terrific!” Nobody has really decided to put a stop to it. I think the Hispanic population that voted for Trump has it right: they came here because they want something that the government doesn’t provide. It’s a terrible injustice to them for America to allow unregulated immigration at the border.

    • BTW Russil, in California among the wealthy, they want the immigrants there to clean their toilets and wash their dishes. They want a steady supply of people manicuring their gardens and picking their grapes. And they don’t care about the economic consequences because in their minds, the government has an unlimited amount of money. It’s very unlike Canada.

    • Russil: Are you sure that the 2014 NYT article you cite supplies a great argument for big government? Of the 9 countries included, Canada is the only one where the median income is comparable to the U.S. France, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, Spain, Norway (with all their oil money!), the Netherlands, Britain, etc. are all poorer from the perspective of a household at the median. Unless you want to argue that France is an example of a small-government country, my take-away from the NYT article is that countries with bigger governments are poorer.

      (Though of course the main reason they’re poor could be that they have a larger population relative to their natural resources! In which case the NYT article becomes a good illustration of how low-skill immigration makes a country poorer.)

    • I just wanted to say that the comparison of after tax income of these countries is difficult. It is true that the take home pay in the UK is less than in the US but health insurance in the US costs like 5k a year while in the UK it is already included in the taxes. If, God forbid, you get some medical expense in the land of hospitals that is Boston, the out of pocket is exorbitant. If Russil’s comment about the efficiency of public pensions vs 401k is true, that might net you some gain in the UK as well. All in all, US and UK might be closer than the charts suggest.

      Another fact to consider: if I remember correctly, the productivities of the US and France are roughly the same. The higher GDP per capita of the US comes almost entirely from the higher number of hours people work in the US. You could say France is poorer but that is because they choose to enjoy life more.

    • Philip: It doesn’t. “The income category in the study is often referred to as disposable household income. It includes income received from work, from wealth and from direct government benefits, such as retirement or unemployment benefits. The measure then subtracts direct taxes paid, such as income taxes. The definition does not include sales taxes or noncash benefits, such as health care provided by a government or employer.”

      I don’t mean to drag on the United States. Obviously there’s a number of areas where the US does better than Canada or other countries, from the point of view of an ordinary person:

      Housing is cheaper; gas is cheaper; food is cheaper; consumer goods are cheaper. The US can employ the economies of scale that come with a much larger market.

      If you work in many industries, it’s likely that the top jobs are in the US. Silicon Valley is the envy of the world, and there’s nothing equivalent in Canada. Wall Street is the global headquarters of finance; Hollywood is the global headquarters of film and television. In academia and in scientific research, the best universities are in the US. In literature and the arts, New York is the center of publishing. Besides all of these, many world-leading corporations (like GE and Boeing) are headquartered in the US.

      But I think the widespread assumption in the US among Republican voters that smaller government is always better (I think of it as the libertarian assumption) is causing Americans to sacrifice considerable economic gains. Sometimes, when market failures are especially egregious, public programs make sense.

    • Russil: If you did want to adjust this for Canada’s government-provisioned health care, you’d also have to adjust this for U.S. government-provisioned health care (75 million currently on Medicaid; 60 million on Medicare), housing (people at up to 130 percent of “area median income” are eligible for free/subsidized housing), food (about 40 million on SNAP; 51 percent of K-12 students are on free/reduced lunch (see https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/01/30/379330001/true-or-false-free-and-reduced-price-lunch-poor )).

      There are American families where nobody has worked for three generations living in vastly superior conditions to a median income family in Canada. The American welfare family might have a $500,000 to $1 million apartment in Manhattan, San Francisco, Boston, or Cambridge. The American welfare family can go to the most gold-plated children’s hospital or Massachusetts General Hospital and never see a bill and not experience a longer waiting time for any procedure than a high-income patient with private insurance. The U.S. has so many different welfare programs that I don’t think it is possible for a simple study to capture the true spending power of an American at the median (since housing and health insurance subsidies, for example, are applicable even above the median).\

      (And, because welfare creates the greatest inequalities in the U.S., there are also American welfare families who are on multi-year waiting lists for housing and who are currently receiving nothing! (they do still get unlimited free health care, free food via SNAP, and free smartphone))

    • @Philg said:

      > The U.S. has so many different welfare programs …

      And this is one of our biggest injustice of our laws in the Land of the Free. It is a loophole / blackhole that no one wants to talk about or address. If you try to close this loophole, you will start a riot in major cities across the country. Over the years, our government, because of infighting among politicians, created this loophole, bit-by-bit be it intentionally or accidently, to win votes — not to help those in need to get back on their feet.

    • Philip: Housing affordability is a big issue in Canada (especially in Vancouver), but your description of US public housing and other welfare programs doesn’t sound very inspiring! BC has a rental assistance program for low-income working families with children who are not receiving welfare, something like the Section 8 voucher program in the US.

      It seems to me that US political institutions are often gridlocked, which leads to drift – policies which no longer make sense can’t be changed.

  8. I am also a small -l- libertarian , but it is clear to me that Libertarians don’t stand a chance because most people want security more than liberty (and responsibility!). And politicians are happy to promise security (however fake and/or temporary it is) in order to win votes. Now that we have let more people who are uneducated in macroeconomics and microeconomics to vote (women *cough* children *cough*) there is no hope. As Peter Schiff has said: “Even back then (1800s), everybody wasn’t voting. You had to be 21 to vote. That means you’re in the workforce for many, many years because people generally got out of school at 12 or 13. So you had been working for many years. In many cases, you had property qualifications, you had poll taxes, you had literary tests. There were all sorts of ways that they limited the suffrage, just so it wasn’t everybody voting because they recognized the damage that you could create when you turn elections into advanced auctions on the sale of stolen goods.”

  9. Also Russil, I almost stopped reading the article at this point:

    “To many Americans Washington’s failure to control illegal immigration, like its failure to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,”

    This entire country down to the level of troglodytes who read Popular Mechanics knew that New Orleans was sinking for at least a decade earlier than Katrina. Nobody did anything, except for the Army Corps of Engineers and a few intrepid researchers, but that was a generational bipartisan failure. Who gets the blame wasn’t, though. I was online the day Katrina hit New Orleans and I watched as Ray Nagin’s emergency plan was REDACTED from the NOLA website in real, real, realtime. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

    • Here’s the Good Democrat who was running New Orleans when Katrina hit. And I can tell you that most of them are the same way.

      “In 2014, Nagin was convicted on twenty of twenty-one charges of wire fraud, bribery, and money laundering related to bribes from city contractors before and after Katrina[3][4][5][6] and was sentenced to ten years in federal prison.[7][8]”

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Nagin

  10. Most people in the Bay Area are purchasing second homes in Lake Tahoe NV! Beautiful summers and winters in tax free Nevada.

  11. Don’t blame the Libertarians. Blame the Pope! Rod Blagojevich should know! Not that it makes much difference now. He’s a convicted felon (Trump commuted his sentence) so in Florida he might be able to vote, but I don’t think so in Illinois.

    “‘Is The Pope Catholic?’: Rod Blagojevich Has No Doubt Democrats Are Stealing Votes”

    https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/06/rod-blagojevich-no-doubt-democrats-stealing-votes/

    “If the question is, ‘are the Democrats stealing votes in Philadelphia?’ then my answer is, ‘is the Pope Catholic?’” Blagojevich replied. “It’s a time-honored tradition in big Democrat-controlled cities like Chicago, my home town, Philadelphia, to do precisely what they’re doing.”

    He was right about Oprah Winfrey!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Blagojevich

    “To begin with, she was perhaps the most instrumental person in electing Barack Obama president. She is a larger-than-life figure in America and around the world. She has a huge bully pulpit and tremendous support across America … She has a voice larger than all 100 senators combined.”

  12. https://twitter.com/newsmax/status/1324783608909844480

    “I’ve never seen it on such a magnitude…and I don’t think it’s just confined to Philadelphia. My instincts, again, coming out of Chicago Democratic politics, my instincts tell me it’s going on in Atlanta, it’s going on in Detroit, it’s going on in Milwaukee, it’s going on in Las Vegas. … And coming out of the Democratic Chicago political establishment, I know how they operate. They control polling places, they stop votes when their candidate’s behind, and then in the wee hours of the morning, in the dark of night, the stealing starts. … And the fact that they’re doing it with the impunity they’re doing it with, is because the media is simply looking the other way…”

    “And not to hit a nerve…but, you went to jail for this kind of stuff.”

    “In Democrat big cities where they control the political apparatus and they control the apparatus that counts the votes, and they control the polling places and the ones who count those votes, it’s widespread, it’s deep, and as I said it’s a time-honored tradition.”

    “…I took on that corrupt Democratic machine and they brought me to ruin. They destroy you when you take on a system where you won’t play ball…they hijacked a Governor, they’re now stealing a Presidency.”

    You don’t to believe Rod Blagojevich, either. You just have to have seen it yourself in the past. The Libertarians have nothing on the Democrats when it comes to election confusion.

  13. Tabulator: I’m sure if the Trump campaign has evidence of cheating, their lawyers will present it in court. But unlike 2000, where it all came down to Florida, this election doesn’t hinge on a single state. Biden’s also ahead in Arizona (called by Fox News on Election Day) and Georgia (where a Republican is responsible for running elections). Either Arizona + Nevada or Georgia would be enough for Biden to have a majority.

    • @Russil:

      [Sigh]. As someone once said: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” I’ve witnessed the absence of evidence personally in the past, in Chicago, before Blagojevich went up the river (as it were), and he may be a convicted felon, but I’m also quite sure that he is telling the truth about how Democrat machine politics operates to influence elections, especially in the last mile.

      We will see how much evidence emerges, but I don’t expect it to make much difference. I think Trump’s other mistakes during the campaign — and indeed throughout his entire Presidency — cost him several million votes. When you have so many former members of your own Administration telling everyone they can that the person in the Big Chair in the White House is doing a lot of things the wrong way, you’ve gone way past violations of Reagan’s 11th Commandment. And Judgment Day has arrived.

      But I do think Blagojevich knows what he’s talking about. He participated in it!

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