When asked on a news channel this morning whether he would support the Libertarian Party ticket in November, Ron Paul responded that, if Gary Johnson was a real libertarian, he might consider it. I had a conversation with a libertarian friend the other day on this question, and I reminded my friend that it has been 52 years since I last voted in an election, and that this year wouldn’t see an end to that streak. My friend replied that the Libertarian Party would at least be a “step in the right direction,” to which I responded that it would be a sidestep; that, while Johnson had some sound positions on some issues, he and his vice-president candidate, Bill Weld, seemed to have little appreciation for the principle that lies at the heart of libertarian thinking: respect for the inviolability of private property. Johnson has said that bakers should not be permitted to refuse baking a wedding-cake for a same-sex couple because of their religious opposition. Johnson contended that a cake, by itself, had no religious message; that if the baker was asked to incorporate a religious message into the frosting this would trigger a “religious freedom” issue. Anyone who understood and defended the private property principle would understand that the wrong forced onto the baker related to his liberty to accept or refuse business as a matter of property ownership. As with Johnson’s support of legislation requiring “equal pay for equal work,” a libertarian would regard such an issue as something to be resolved by contract, i.e., by an agreement between two or more property owners.
Nor did Bill Weld exhibit any insight into the social order implicit in the property principle. After admitting to the irrelevancy of the LP ticket by asserting that he was “not sure anybody’s more qualified [for the presidency] than Hillary,” Weld declared that resort to government was the only reasonable solution to problems caused by environmental pollution. Had he thought the question through as a principled libertarian, he would have understood that pollution of the air, rivers, lakes, and underground water tables, are examples of property trespasses, in which politically-connected interests have been permitted, by the courts, to impose such costs – correctly referred to as “socializing” the costs – onto other property owners.
As for having recourse to political solutions to political problems, libertarians – along with everyone else – should grasp the meaning of Einstein’s words, when he stated: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
3:01 pm on October 3, 2016
