When Libertarians Start Achieving Electoral and Policy Success...

I hope that libertarians start to influence policy soon, and I see signs that they are beginning to affect some elections. But I have this nagging feeling that the recent election cycle really brought home to me. Attack ads against Republicans often feature some minor piece of legislation that slightly altered how our massive welfare state functions. Maybe a slight reduction in transfer payments or Medicaid. This gets tagged as "casting thousands of families into dire poverty" or causing "millions to lose their health-care," often without any substantive empirics on any actual harm done.

Uh oh. I favor cuts to the welfare state far deeper than anything any Republican has proposed. I think these programs tend to be counter-productive, or they tend to enrich the government employees who administer them without actually helping poor people very much. But nuts to my "sophisticated" argument to this effect. Any such proposal to cut government is going to be demagogued as "Heartless libertarians want to cast millions into Dickensian poverty!"

My nagging gut feeling is that shitty, simple-minded populism is going to kill libertarian chances of policy success. Unless we can really change the conversation, unless we can institute some sort of social sanction for this kind of overheated rhetoric, these cheap tricks are going to keep winning. (Someone apparently thinks so, according to the numerous campaign fliers that came to my house in recent weeks.)

I wrote about this a while ago. I'm trying (along with many other libertarians who write about policy) to preempt this kind of nasty partisan bickering. The case has been laid out on the table. It's there now for all to see. If there are any objections, raise them now while tempers are cool. Fat chance of that, though. Critics will ignore these arguments until they are within striking distance of an actual policy change, and then react with feigned surprise and outrage.

Ugh. Sorry to be such a downer. What is there to do about this? Learn your topics really, really well. Be prepared to confront this kind of rhetoric, and calmly, and without any bullet-biting. ("No, I did not just advocate murdering all children. Let's try this one more time...") If nothing else, you'll come off looking polished and the insult-slinging demagogue will come off looking foolish.