“A vote for the Libertarian,” Madison Cercy tells the Washington Times, “or a protest vote from any Republican who sits this one out, is a vote to hand the U.S. Senate to the democratic socialists.”

Cercy, a spokeswoman for Ken Paxton’s US Senate campaign in Texas, is responding to a Rasmussen poll that shows Paxton trailing Democratic candidate James Talarico by 1%, with 5% of likely voters undecided … and 4% planning to support Libertarian Ted Brown.

It’s not just Texas. In Kansas’s Senate race, Libertarian David Graham also draws 4% in polling, with incumbent Republican Roger Marshall trailing Democrat Adam Hamilton by 2%. In Montana’s 1st US House district, Libertarian Nick Sheedy enjoys 5% support, with Republican Aaron Flint enjoying a razor-thin 1% lead over Democrat Sam Forstag.

In every election cycle, Republicans and Democrats start playing the “spoiler” card whenever a race looks uncomfortably close.

Usually it’s Republicans griping about Libertarians and Democrats grousing about Green Party candidates, on the supposition that those two “minor” parties’ voters would, in the “normal” course of things, vote Republican and Democrat respectively.

That supposition is probably incorrect — many third party voters simply won’t vote if they don’t see options they prefer on their ballots, and others might vote opposite the assumptions of the big players’ strategists.

The incorrectness doesn’t bug me nearly as much as the arrogance.

For more than a century, the Republican and Democratic parties have used ballot access laws and debate exclusion criteria to rig elections, making it as difficult and expensive as possible for “third party” and independent candidates to even appear on ballots.

Then when Republicans and Democrats lose, or look like they may lose, the whining begins.

“Why, the nerve! How dare anyone but us seek political office? Those other guys can’t win — we’ve busted our butts to make sure of that! But here they come, ‘stealing’ our votes and ‘spoiling’ the rightful outcomes! There oughta be a law! Oh, wait, there is … why isn’t it working?”

Note to political candidates:

Votes don’t belong to you, and aren’t “stolen” by other candidates.

Votes belong to voters and have to be earned — in those voters’ judgment — by you or by those other candidates.

Additional note to the Texas GOP:

You nominated a guy who was impeached on 20 counts by a legislature controlled by your own party. Those counts included abuse of office and accepting bribes. You nominated a guy who plea-bargained his way out of a felony indictment for securities fraud. You nominated a guy who committed voter fraud at least twice by voting “from”  an address he didn’t live at.

Stop blaming the Libertarian for your nominee’s deservedly poor standing with the voters. James Talarico may not deserve to win the race, but Ken Paxton definitely deserves to lose it. Texas could, and  unfortunately almost certainly will, do a lot worse than Ted Brown. If he saves you from six years of Paxton, he deserves a medal.

Stop whining about “spoilers” already and start trying to earn support instead of just demanding it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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I suspect nearly everyone reading this column will agree that ovarian cancer is a terrible thing, and that preventing ovarian cancer, or predicting it and catching it early to enhance a woman’s chance of surviving it, is a good thing.

I open with those stipulations, burying the lede just a little bit, to preempt the obvious arguments against my position on this report from The Hill:

“A group of lawmakers spanning both parties and chambers is introducing legislation that would require insurance plans to cover genetic testing for patients with hereditary risk factors and expand education and outreach about gynecologic cancer risk. Sens. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and Katie Britt (R-Ala.) are leading the bill, the Ovarian Cancer IMPACT Act …”

Genetic testing for ovarian cancer risk sounds like a great idea.

And genetic testing for ovarian cancer risk (and other cancer risks) costs money — typically $250 to $500, sometimes less if fewer gene markers are screened for, sometimes much more if the tests are more comprehensive.

Before considering who should bear those costs and why, I should probably take a moment to  discuss the exact role the US Constitution assigns to Congress when it comes to the provision and delivery of healthcare:

THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

It’s simply not Congress’s business to decide what kind of testing or treatment your insurer or other healthcare provider may, or even must, offer.

Not that Congress pays attention to the Constitution when paying attention to the Constitution seems inconvenient. They just wave their hands, quack about “interstate commerce,” and mandate whatever they want to mandate about your healthcare options — even if you, your insurer, your healthcare provider, and the testing company are all located in the same state.

So, what happens when every insurance company gets told that, by law, it must pay for this or that kind of genetic screening?

In four words, everyone’s healthcare costs go up. Not just the healthcare costs of  women who are, or may be, at risk for ovarian cancer. Everyone’s.

Why? Because patients at such risk can’t be magically identified in advance and charged for those testing costs.

The costs can’t even be limited to the half of the population that MIGHT have to worry about ovarian cancer, because many healthcare policies are “family” policies provided through employers, and the single male who gets insured today may add a female partner or daughter to the policy tomorrow.

So, all of us get to pay for testing we may or may not ever want or need.

In a free and open healthcare market, many insurers might cover these tests as part of their normal policies, or offer them as cheap add-on options to those most likely to want them. After all, testing for ovarian cancer is much cheaper than treating ovarian cancer.

However, we live in the opposite of a free and open healthcare market.

Decisions about what testing, prevention, and treatment options get covered are made by politicians and bureaucrats, usually with the “assistance” of industry lobbyists who know which testing, prevention, and treatment options best serve their employers’ bottom lines.

The Ovarian Cancer IMPACT Act is almost certainly less about women’s health than about who enjoys a payday at others’ expense.

Like speech, press, and religion, we’d be better off with complete  separation of medicine and state.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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US president Donald Trump caught America by surprise in late September while gabbing with reporters during a visit to the United Nations: “I’ve said let’s not send out the diesel,” he said. “We make a lot of diesel.”

The impulse is understandable. With prices topping $6 per gallon for a fuel widely used in long-haul trucking, rail transport, shipping by sea, and public transportation, everyone who buys anything is taking a new hit to the wallet. Trump would  like to see those prices come down before the November midterms.

Other writers have ably explained why an export ban wouldn’t lower prices at the pump, but here’s an AI-generated (Microsoft Copilot) summary for your convenience: “[E]xisting pipeline bottlenecks force regions such as New England and the West Coast to rely on waterborne imports; an export ban would trap Gulf Coast supplies in the region and compel refiners to cut daily output, driving up prices for gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel.”

Quite a few chickens are coming home to roost, and to defecate on all our heads while roosting. The idiotic and illegal war against Iran is driving oil prices up. The ill-considered but never-dying Jones Act, which forbids using foreign-built, foreign-crewed, and foreign-owned ships to transport material between US destinations, holds domestic cargo tonnage down.

Fortunately, Trump seems to be reconsidering a ban. Politico reports that federal officials are looking at other measures, such as encouraging states to put their diesel taxes on hold and/or allowing highway use of tax exempt diesel (identified by its red color and normally only allowed for off-highway uses such as agriculture, construction, and home heating).

That would be a welcome reversal from the usual trend.

As Thomas Sowell wrote in 2013, “sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.”

Government perceives, or even creates a problem. In this case, the US government created the problem of high fuel prices with its war on Iran.

Government intervenes in markets to “solve” the problem.

But that intervention creates new, different problems — usually while failing to solve the previous problems.

And those new problems are addressed with yet more interventions.

At every point in that never-ending loop, things get generally worse than they were before the latest intervention, and even in specific areas it’s usually hard to discern any improvement.

The only way to solve these problems is to reverse course and undo the interventions that caused them in the first place.

The effects usually aren’t instant. If the war on Iran ends today, it may be years before the oil market recovers to steady, cheaper output and delivery.

Furthermore, such reversals aren’t politically palatable. No politician likes to publicly admit that he screwed up and has to pull a U-turn from a policy he previously tried to sell the public on. Trump personally seems even more resistant to doing so than most. Admitting that he lost a war, and in doing so screwed the American public over for no good reason, just doesn’t match his previously revealed temperament.

Bu to be clear here, it’s not just Trump. It’s pretty much every politician you’ll ever encounter. They all want to run your life, and they all do so pretty poorly when given the wheel. Trump is just the case of the moment.

The problem is that political government isn’t a workable substitute for a free market. Markets adapt to actual conditions. Politics adapts to the egomania of politicians. So don’t expect any big breaks on fuel prices any time soon.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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