Walter Block’s “Distance” Recommendation

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for libertarians (“we,” he writes) to vote for Donald Trump, Walter Block’s central argument is that Joe Biden “is much further from us on the political-economic spectrum than Mr. Trump” (“Libertarians Should Vote for Trump,” May 28, 2024). This argument is debatable.

Walter only intends his recommendation for libertarians in “swing states,” which raises a first set of problems. We first need to identify the “swing states,” which can be many combinations of them and which anyway are only known after the election. But I want to focus on the “distance” criterion implied by his “further from.” I will suggest that such a distance is not easy to make sense of and that an obvious alternative criterion does not point to Trump.

If the social world has only one dimension, that is, if there is only one political issue along one dimension (one axis), and if each voter has  one preferred point (“ideal point”) on that axis, we can (perhaps) find where “we” are compared to Trump and Biden, and measure who is closer to “us.” The simplest example of such an issue is “the” tax rate. We could conceivably determine the ideal tax rates of Trump and Biden and measure the distance between “our” own ideal point on the axis and theirs. Yet, even in a one-dimensional world, many issues are difficult to map onto real numbers on the axis. For example, how could we compare a Biden promise to implement three measures against the Second Amendment with one favorable measure promised by Trump? Moreover, the proposed exercise assumes that all libertarians share the same ideal point on the axis.

The real world’s choice space is defined on more than one dimension. There is more than one political issue. Not all voters, even libertarians, are single-issue voters focusing on the same narrow issue. Consider Block’s example of Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame, now in prison for life. Block tells us that Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s sentence. If liberating Ulbricht were the only political issue, Trump would be closer than Biden to many libertarians. If international trade were the only issue, Biden despite his attempt at plagiarism would arguably be closer to many libertarians. On a lot of issues, libertarians will have different preferences and make different trade-offs. Minimizing the distance between “us” and the presidential candidates becomes impossible.

Furthermore, determining what a politician’s real preferences are compared to his strategic promises and how the latter will be affected by his evolving political constraints is, to say the least, very difficult. The difficulty deepens, I would add, if we imagine an ignorant, incoherent, narcissistic, and unpredictable candidate who typically only gets along with vassals and minions.

Besides all that, we must not lose sight of a simple but often ignored reality: the tiny probability that an individual vote will be decisive, that it will “swing” anything. It never happened in a presidential election and is unlikely to ever happen. A rational individual will not vote with the intention to change the election’s result. Even if Block’s WSJ piece persuaded 1,000 “swing” libertarians to vote for Trump, any one of them will know that his vote only reduces the hypothesized 1,000-member decisive group to 999. He may prefer to spend his time milking the cows or watching the New York skyline.

The best a rational voter can do is to vote (or not vote or spoil his ballot) in order to express a moral opinion in favor of the candidate, if there is one, with whom he shares important moral values. (See Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision [Cambridge University Press, 1993].) For a libertarian, these values will be those conducive to the maintenance of a free society. Moral congruence may not look easier to evaluate than issue distance, but at least it chases a real rabbit. This suggests that the best a libertarian voter can do is to vote for the candidate, if there is one, who shows the moral character most representative of what a politician in a truly free society would be (while of course remaining a generally self-interested human being). We should leave some room for reasonable compromise but, at the limit, we may think of the required moral character for a royal president as modeled on the ideal of the head of state in Anthony de Jasay’s “capitalist state.” The less radical might look at the ethics defended by James Buchanan in Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative.

In this perspective, whoever is a candidate with an acceptable libertarian moral character, if there is one, it is not Donald Trump.

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