That said, you are asking exactly the right question of libertarians about this election. Divided Government remains the least bad option to slow the growth of the state.

Perhaps, but your vote has nothing to do with whether or not that happens.

“[D]on’t pretend the aggregate effects of people with a certain political inclination avoiding the polls don’t push things in the other direction, which would be tragic.”

I’m not pretending that. But your vote doesn’t determine what everyone with a certain political inclination decides to do.

In theory, my making this argument in a public forum could have an appreciable effect on the number of anti-statists who vote (but why just anti-statists?). However, from past experience, I assure you that even though what I’m saying is true, and my arguments are sound, no one who reads what I have to say will be persuaded to adopt my position. People are just weirdly attached to voting.

If, in a worst-case scenario, it is _primarily_ anti-statists who choose not to vote — and disproportionately convince other anti-statists to do likewise — statists win the elections, laws remain more oppressive, and life gets worse.

I don’t think you have a strong moral obligation to vote if you don’t want to — you may have more productive ways to use that time — but don’t pretend the aggregate effects of people with a certain political inclination avoiding the polls don’t push things in the other direction, which would be tragic.

If anything, we’d be better off if individualists were very, very excited about voting (a chance, if wielded strategically, to fend off even-greater coercion, at least) while all the statists decided to boycott the whole process until the dictatorship of the proletariat arrives.

(I am similarly skeptical of generalizations based on only eight or nine presidential election cycles, a la “Senators don’t get elected president” — a rule which will obviously get broken this year.)

R. W. Bradford once analyzed the history of government spending in the U.S. since World War II. He concluded that “Prior to fiscal year 1970, there were very strong correlations between fiscal restraint and Republican control of the White House and Congress, and between spending increases and Democratic control of those institutions. Since then, there has been hardly any correlation, despite the fact that Republican candidates for office generally claim to favor fiscal restraint and Democratic candidates for office generally claim to favor the expansion of government.”

Some interesting facts he discovered about spending since 1970:

1. “[S]pending has grown 64% faster when a Republican sits in the White House than when a Democrat does.”

2. “When Democrats controlled the White House plus both houses of Congress, spending grew at 1.70% per year, slightly below the average growth rate of 1.83% for the entire period.”

3. “Government spending has grown fastest when a Republican was in the White House and Democrats controlled Congress. It has grown most slowly when a Democrat was president and Republicans controlled Congress.”

Read the whole thing here: http://www.libertyunbound.com/archive/2004_11/bradford-spending.html

Aside from that, I think the Republican Party needs to suffer another beat-down at the polls. If the warmongering, welfare-state-expanding, civil-liberties-trampling, high-spending policies of the Bush years don’t lead to electoral defeat, the GOP will keep offering more of the same. If they lose the Presidency, there’s a good chance the neocons will be purged from their positions of influence within the party. If that happens, libertarians will have a shot at reform.

One final point. Sheldon Richman makes a compelling case that no Republican should *ever* be elected President: “[A]ny Republican administration will be portrayed as advocating and practicing laissez faire. If it happens with George II, it’ll happen with anyone. The result is that when the economy turns sour under a Republican, the laissez-faire administration be blamed. Protests and demonstrations of the facts to the contrary will largely fall on deaf ears.” (http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2008/04/why-no-republican-should-ever-be.html )

The distinction between bad and evil is often more important than the distinction between good and bad. I will not support people who think torture is okay. I will not support people who advocate for unlimited presidential authority. I will not support people who think the war was a good idea or should continue. These are not negotiable.

Given my choice between my money and my life, I’ll pick my life, and the fake conservatives (I will not dignify them with “neo”) in charge right now are not people I trust with my life. I’d prefer more lying democrats who want to take every penny I have to another four years of this insanity.

Anyway, the free trade deal with Colombia is nice for the economy, but not pissing 3 trillion down a hole in Iraq for no observable reason whatsoever would have been nicer for the economy still. It isn’t like the fake conservatives are any good for the economy at all — the current massive inflation of the currency, the rush to increase banking regulation, the medicare drug plan, the failure to reform social security, the idiotic bouts of protectionism (Clinton did more for free trade than Bush has), etc., are all evidence that there isn’t any real benefit to the Republicans in the first place.

So, no, I don’t want any part of the Republican party. They can all rot for all I care. Indeed, I’d go further and say they all rotted already and I’d like the smelly corpses buried before they become more of a health hazard.

All part of the broad (though largely futile) trend in political philosophy toward dragging us back into very local, isolated ways, whether for communitarian, protectionist, or green reasons.