Rothbard vs. Real Politics

by Carl Milsted Jr.

Posted October 09, 2005

Murray Rothbard said that libertarians should only advocate the ideal. They should never advocate compromise half-measures or incremental steps. According to Rothbard, to do otherwise would be to admit some rightness to the statist position.

At the national level, the Libertarian Party has mostly followed Rothbard’s strategy -- and has succeeded in getting a tiny percentage of the vote. True, there have been some LP candidates way down the ticket who have actually won elections, but few if any of these candidates have followed the Rothbard strategy.

The reason why the Rothbard strategy fails can be seen by applying elementary political science.

Let us look at a simplified, wildly optimistic scenario. Consider an electoral district which is evenly divided across the spectrum on the issue of the size of government, ranging from 100% cut to 50% growth. Thus, the median voter is in favor of cutting government by 25%. Meanwhile, the incumbent is a bit of a statist; he favors increasing government by 10%. We can represent the situation graphically as:

This district should be easy pickings for a challenger who wants to significantly cut government. But what happens when we apply the Rothbard strategy? Consider a purist anarcho-capitalist running using the Rothbard strategy. He has to advocate 100% cut in government. We have:

If we make the further simplification that people have a linear preference for a candidate based on difference in size of government (that is, the difference between 10 and 20% cut in government is the same as the difference between 90% and 100% cut), we see that the incumbent gets voters in the red band while our Rothbardian candidate gets the green band. Everyone who wants government cut by 45% or more votes for the Rothbardian anarchist while everyone who wants more government or government cut by less than 45% votes for the incumbent. The incumbent wins 63% to 37%.

Of course, many, if not most, Libertarians are minarchists, not anarchists. So, let us consider a monarchist Libertarian using the Rothbard strategy. This more “moderate” Libertarian only wants to cut government by 80%.

Everyone who wants to cut government more than 35% votes for our Rothbardian minarchist. The rest (-35% to +50%) votes for the incumbent. The incumbent wins again, 57% to 43%.

To break even with the incumbent requires moderating our stance by advocating a “mere” 60% cut in government—in this wildly optimistic scenario.

In reality, one should expect not an even distribution of positions, but instead, some type of bell curve centered near the status quo. Under real conditions a Libertarian needs to propose a much smaller incremental change in the size of government in order to win.

The Rothbard strategy is a guarantee of political failure!!

So, Was Rand Right?

Ayn Rand thought that the current political system does roughly reflect societal views. Therefore, to change politics requires changing society.

She advocated teaching philosophy, and changing the “sense of life.” Then, political change would automatically follow.

Or would it? Consider my earlier scenario. We had a district that was already ready for a smaller government candidate. But without that candidate on the ballot, the statist incumbent remains in office. If the Libertarian party does not do real politics, then some other party needs to. Given the corruption of the two major parties, I am not too hopeful of that happening “automatically.”

Based on my talking with people as well as other studies, I think that the body politic is already ready for significantly less government. However, this body is served by two major statist parties and a libertarian party that refuses to play real politics. For the Rand strategy to work in conjunction with the Libertarian Party’s Rothbard strategy, we need to educate 50+% of the population of some districts to desire a form of governance that is radically different from what we have today.

Ayn Rand correctly realized that this requires a huge fraction of the populace to confidently place their lives in the hands of some serious abstract speculation. To combine education with the Rothbard strategy requires creating a nation of theoretical free market economists and philosophers.

Sorry, ain’t gonna happen.

Man is not a “rational animal.” Man is a conservative animal--when it comes to life or death issues like governance.

And don’t rail against the public schools or naturalist philosophers. This is a feature of human nature, not a bug. What exists, works. The status quo may be unpleasant and inefficient, but if you are living in it, you are living. What may be may fail. And philosophers have a grand history of failure. A huge fraction of what Plato and Aristotle said was very wrong. Great disasters have occurred during the past few centuries as nations experimented with shiny new political systems. It is difficult to derive the universe from a finite set of propositions.

To convince most people of the value of a truly different system, you have to demonstrate it! Science trumps philosophy.

Without a libertarian party that is willing to implement step-by-step demonstrations of the value of cutting government, we will not get any such demonstration. This is true even if the Free State Project succeeds in getting 20,000 libertarians to move to New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, the state continues to grow. More people get hooked on welfare and entitlements. Socialized medicine is coming soon. The present drifts ever farther from the ideal. The Rothbard strategy becomes more and more radical compared to the current situation. Time is running out.

This country needs a libertarian party willing to play real politics—yesterday! For this reason I have devoted the greater fraction of my spare time to the Libertarian Reform Caucus. And if the caucus fails to reform the Libertarian Party, I guess it is time to try starting a new libertarian party.

Either that, or learn to love socialized medicine.

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