 |
| Anthony "The Mooch" Scarmucci |
A friend, who watches politics closely, recently emailed me:
Bob, the best sure fire investment advice I can give you is to go to an online political betting website and put big money on the Democratic party to win the presidency in 2020. Currently this proposition is priced at 55% chance when the real odds are 99.5% +. Donald Trump has pretty much a ZERO percent chance of being re-elected.His argument is that Trump has energized the Democrats and they are going to show up at the ballot booth in 2020 to vote Trump out while many Republicans, especially Republican women, are disenchanted with Trump and will not be motivated to head to the election booths on Tuesday, November 3, 2020.
There is probably a lot to this analysis. It could very well mean a Democratic presidential victory, possibly Elizabeth Warren.
In 2016, I argued that from a strategic perspective for libertarians it would have been better if Hillary Clinton would have been elected. As I expected, almost all of the anti-Hillary crowd has been swept up by Trump and his erratic state nationalism.
Trump's nationalism flies in the face of classical liberalism.
As Ludwig von Mises put it:
Imagine a world in which the principle of private ownership of the means of production is fully realized, in which there are no institutions hindering the mobility of capital, labor, and commodities, in which the laws, the courts, and the administrative officers do not discriminate against any individual or group of individuals, whether native or alien. Imagine a state of affairs in which governments are devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual's life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression. In such a world the frontiers are drawn on the maps, but they do not hinder anybody from the pursuit of what he thinks will make him more prosperous. No individual is interested in the expansion of the size of his nation's territory, as he cannot derive any gain from such an aggrandizement. Conquest does not pay and war becomes obsolete.Anti-liberalism, in the classic sense, is what Trump is promoting, and because of his buffoonish style, he has chased America's youth into the hands of the socialists, since the kids view Trump as reflective of capitalists and capitalism, and blue-collar masses may go along for the anti-Trump ride, along with the elitists and lefty intellectuals on both coasts.
It could very well result in a Democratic presidential victory in 2020 but this time the Democratic nominee will not be the lazy, crony Hillary Clinton who as I have said in the past couldn't get a wave going in a baseball stadium. The 2020 Democratic presidential nominee could very well be a can-do energized socialist, most likely Warren.
me: someone help, I’ve got crippling student debt and I—— حنا حداد (@hannnnanana) August 17, 2019
elizabeth warren: pic.twitter.com/BilHI3eeT4
She is not lazy, she does not appear to be a crony driven by money. She is sharp and power-crazy with a führer complex. She would not be a foil for libertarians the way Hillary would have been, we would be fighting for every inch of liberty we have now, never mind advancing.Me running to the polls to vote for Elizabeth Warren pic.twitter.com/nsy0lo0HYU— Jenny ✨ (@jennychen8601) August 14, 2019
Thus, we must examine closely the unpredictable, nationalist buffoon Trump. He appears to get more and more erratic and more unpredictable with each day that passes.
Within a 24-hour period, he flipped flopped on cutting taxes. He has made an out of nowhere statement that he wants to buy Greenland.
After triggering a stock market decline with his comments on China and trade, and Fed chairman Jay Powell, he made this absurd tweet:
It certainly appears as The Mooch has said: Trump is losing it:The Dow is down 573 points perhaps on the news that Representative Seth Moulton, whoever that may be, has dropped out of the 2020 Presidential Race!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019
It now appears debatable as to whether Trump can win in 2020 and it is less clear what a second-term Trump presidency would bring. Without having to be concerned about re-election how state nationalist would he take the country?Trump is, "having a full-blown mental breakdown on the job," according to @Scaramucci pic.twitter.com/ChV3Bi0e7X— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 23, 2019
There is not much to say about non-Trump Republicans other than that they are not as extreme lefty as Democrats, so from merely a tactical position to give libertarians a minor bit of breathing room, it is time to support The Mooch in his attempt to find an alternative to Trump on the 2020 presidential ticket.
The Mooch has written in The Financial Times:
The president’s demagoguery requires not loyalty but blind obligation. He turns out to be a real life example of philosopher John Stuart Mill’s definition of despotism: “whatever crushes individuality”...
While I am contrite over my past support of Mr Trump, I am more concerned about removing him from office. That is why I have set up a political action committee to help defeat him.Please don't write to me and tell me that the other Republican options are bad, they are, but they are not as bad as the Democratic alternatives. And, if by some magic circumstance, Trump is re-elected, it is totally impossible to know in what erratic manner he will take his state nationalist view.
A Mooch led Trump replacement on the 2020 Republican is the best option. It is admittedly a rearguard political action that will do little more than place a speed bump against the ever-growing state, but on a short-term basis, this is all we have.
We must hinder the socialist advance to the degree we can and spend most of our time in the development of a great mental revolution for liberty.
Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.comand Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bankand most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.
I expect Trump to start a major shooting war. I don’t think necessarily because he thinks he will lose, I’m not sure he is capable of thinking that, but because he will think it will cement his victory. All options are the State wins, Liberty loses, in these scenarios.
ReplyDeleteI am vehemently anti-Trump, but I think arguing that Hillary would have been better is -- at minimum -- bizarre. The voters hat two awful choices, and the REAL problem is that most of them didn't even recognize that.
ReplyDeleteAnd that the crux of what I think you keep missing, Robert. Trump is a symptom, not the cause.
The Democrats have promoted hate and division politics for decades. The Republicans have done nothing to really alleviate any problems for decades, and in most cases, they played the "we're slightly better than Democrats" card to electoral successes while tanking liberty. The frustrations caused by all this have caused mainstream Republicans to become goofy because one can only say one thing while rationalizing the exact opposite actions for so long before it destroys one's ability to reason and to have consistent principles.
Trump has added no new federal government powers that I can think of. Every time I am told he's advanced government power the very worst he has done is use some powers that were rarely used or we were promised the federal government wouldn't use but needed. They were granted to the executive branch long prior to his election. Which is far better than we could have expected under HRC. Republican opposition to HRC would have been louder than it was to Obama but would have done nothing of value just as it did under Obama. The opposition to Trump has basically means 4-8 years of no additional executive powers. When was the last time liberty even got to tread water?
ReplyDeleteTrump's election has sent the democrats so far down a leftist SJW rabbit hole that they have put traditional democrats in spot where their choice is either don't vote or vote for Trump. Maybe if Biden gets the nomination they'll get out of that spot, but Trump just keeps trolling democrats and they take the bait and they are moving far away from the votes they need. Yes there is this move to collectivism but now its trying too much to fast. Collectivism can't do fast boil or people wake up.
"His argument is that Trump has energized the Democrats and they are going to show up at the ballot booth in 2020 to vote Trump out"
ReplyDeleteThe other side of the coin is that the crop of Democrats running is SO bad, people who wouldn't have otherwise felt compelled to vote for Trump will do so. Trump vs. Bernie Sanders is the clearest picture I have in mind of this situation. It might even tempt me who has voted Libertarian since 2000. Not counting primary elections (Ron Paul) I don't think I have ever voted for a Republican or Democrat except in 2008 when I voted Dem for my congressional district to "teach Bush a lesson" (no Libertarian was running). Well that Dem switched switched parties to Republican in 2009 so I only taught myself a lesson - paraphrasing Harry Browne: "when you vote for the lesser of 2 evils, you wind up with evil and you send a signal to the powers that be that they don't EVER have to offer you anything but evil because they know they have your vote". Even knowing all this it would be tempting to vote Trump if he was running against Sanders (very unlikely that I would though unless the 2020 Libertarian nominee was horrible. A Bill Weld type could push me in the direction of Trump. More likely I just wouldn't vote)
I also am hearing from Democratic friends that they are appalled by every presidential candidate. But if it comes to it, they will probably vote for the Democratic nominee rather than Trump. I will start asking them that question.
DeleteThe only way Trump loses is if he were to make a major unforced error against his base. Michelle Obama could possibly beat him as well, but that's the only ways he loses.
ReplyDeleteWe are not accepting that the spaces that our people secured are for everyone on earth who never did a damn thing to deserve any of it. We have all the moral authority we need. Your marxism disguised as libertarianism is not working.
ReplyDelete