Every four years without fail (and usually a little earlier in each quadrennial cycle),  both “major” American political parties wind up and toss the same slow, fat pitch across the public’s plate:

This is the most important presidential election of our lifetimes.

Maybe even the most important presidential election EVER.

You gotta vote.

And this time, just like every other time, you can’t risk voting for anyone but Candidate X.

A vote for third party or independent Candidate Y, the candidate you like best, isn’t really a vote for Candidate Y. It’s actually a vote for Candidate Z, the “major party” candidate you like least.

Why? Because it is, that’s why. Didn’t you get the memo? Most important presidential election of our lifetimes, maybe EVER, yada yada yada! Stop asking so many questions and vote as you’re told! Hey batter batter batter swing!

Routinely, more than nine of ten voters do swing. And miss (the point).

Henry Ford offered his Model T in any color you wanted as long as the color you wanted was black. This year, America’s “major” political parties are offering you any kind of president you want as long as what you’re looking for in a president is a creepy, handsy, corrupt, senile, septuagenarian, authoritarian hack.

If your preferences vary from those characteristics, the Republicans and Democrats resort to fearmongering: If you don’t support THEIR creepy, handsy, corrupt, authoritarian, senile, septuagenarian hack,  they whine, the OTHER creepy, handsy, corrupt, authoritarian, senile, septuagenarian hack might win.

I don’t find that particular fear-based approach compelling as candidate sales material. I’d rather “waste my vote” on a candidate whose ideas I actually support than hand that vote over to the candidate I loathe less just to thwart the candidate I loathe more (if I can even figure out which one is which).

If you vote for who and what you actually want, sure, your candidate may not win. In fact, he or she probably won’t.

But if you don’t vote for what you actually want, you almost certainly won’t get it either.

The difference is that voting against what you actually want is treason to your values.

Here’s my variant of the “major party” pitch:

A vote for Trump is a vote for Biden.

A vote for Biden is a vote for Trump.

A vote for the Libertarian or other third party or independent candidate of your choice  is a vote for things you want instead of for things you don’t want.

It’s also a demand signal for better “major party” candidates in the future, a message to the Republicans and Democrats. Tell them that they if they want your vote, they’re going to have to start EARNING it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Has New York Times columnist Paul Krugman become an advocate of laissez-faire? Probably not. But if he carried his observations “On the Economics of Not Dying” (May 28) to their logical conclusion, he just might.

Krugman notes that economic growth is “just a means to an end, namely, improving the quality of life” — and that not being dead, rather than just not being poor, “also makes a major contribution to the quality of life.” Yet this seemingly common-sense observation cuts against much of his own economic theorizing.

In 2001, Krugman wrote that “the [9/11] terror attack — like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good … the economic slowdown has been a plunge in business investment. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings. As I’ve already indicated, the destruction isn’t big compared with the economy, but rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending.”

A decade later, Krugman looked to the skies to deliver the economic growth that 9/11 had failed to yield: “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.”

This economic boost would hold even “if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there weren’t any aliens,” echoing classic science fiction stories in which similar ruses provided fabricated grounds for space programs and earthly cooperation before their long-term benefits materialized.  William Tenn, whose mid-1940s “Alexander the Bait” had one of the earliest such plots, noted in retrospect that while he had been correct to predict that the large-scale effort required to achieve spaceflight would require a concerted effort fueled less by lofty scientific idealism than remorseless self-interest, the motivation would not be “hoping to make a lot of money” but “hoping to make an awful lot of war.”

In a 1933 letter, John Maynard Keynes advised Franklin D. Roosevelt to use deficit spending in peacetime, and feel “free to engage in the interests of peace and prosperity the technique which hitherto has only been allowed to serve the purposes of war and destruction.”  As Robert Higgs explains, assuming that the ensuing military spending brought prosperity relies on the conflation of economic activity with human well-being decried by Krugman.

Yoda is as fictional as Krugman’s hypothetical invaders, but his aphorism that “wars not make one great” should caution historians whose lists of top political leaders are dominated by wartime presidents — and to those who would seek war, or its equivalent, to make the economy great.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• • “War is Not Good for the Economy or Living Things,” by Joel Schlosberg, River Cities’ Reader [Davenport, Iowa], 06/03/20
  • “War Is Not Healthy for the Economy and Other Living Things,”
    by Joel Schlosberg, Antiwar.com, 06/04/20
  • “War is Not Good for the Economy or Living Things,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 06/12/20

Protests quickly broke out nationwide following the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, which was caught on video and quickly went viral.

Yes, Chauvin has been arrested and charged with murder.

Yes, the usual “voices of reason” are issuing a new round of calls for “police reform,” just as they do after every police murder of an unarmed, non-violent civilian.

No, murder charges and “police reform” aren’t going to fix the problem. Long hot summer, here we come.

It’s tempting to believe that protest marches, violent confrontations, looting, burning, and riots can change police behavior, or perhaps that they COULD change that behavior if applied frequently and vigorously enough.

That kind of widespread delusion is, as Thoreau put it, “a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,” with predictable results.

If protest marches, violent confrontations, looting, burning, and riots followed every police murder of an unarmed, non-violent civilian, we wouldn’t see fewer police murders of unarmed, non-violent civilians. We’d just see bigger police overtime budgets.

The root of police violence isn’t racism, nor is it the presence of “a few bad apples” on police forces, nor is it the absence of sufficient safeguards such as body cameras and civilian review boards.

The root of police violence is the modern conception of policing itself: The creation of “police forces” as state institutions separate from the populace and dedicated to suppressing that populace on command.

“Police departments” as we know them were just coming into existence in England at the time the United States declared itself independent. They didn’t establish themselves in major American cities until the mid-19th century, or in smaller cities and towns until the 20th.

At one time, a handful of state and federal agencies, a sheriff in each county, and an ad hoc system of volunteer posses and local watchmen handled “law enforcement” in America.

Now more than 18,000 “law enforcement” organizations lord it over the American public, stealing their salaries from that public’s earnings, padding their budgets with literal highway robbery (“asset forfeiture” and so forth), and usually protected by “qualified immunity” when they kill.

If the goal is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” police as we know them are at best a failed experiment.

How do we wind that experiment down?

Step one would be ending qualified immunity and holding law enforcement personnel as responsible for their actions and as liable for the consequences of those actions as regular Americans are.

Steps two and three would be, respectively, standing down “police departments” entirely in favor of unpaid volunteers for most “law enforcement” duties, and ultimately abolishing the state itself.

Steps two and three, while inevitable in the long term, don’t seem very likely in the short term.

Step one, on the other hand, could be accomplished by Independence Day if the right incentives were applied.

Let’s give the politicians a choice: End qualified immunity or burn, baby, burn.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY