As the section in the paper explains:

The Individualism-Collectivism scale [75] is a 32-item scale that measures an individual’s levels of independence vs. interdependence. Individualists tend to emphasize self-reliance, independence and (sometimes) competition. There are two types of individualism: horizontal individualism reflects a belief that people are separate (independent) but equal entities (e.g. “I am a unique individual”), and vertical individualism emphasizes hierarchy and competitiveness between those separate entities (“It is important that I do my job better than others”). Collectivists, on the other hand, tend to emphasize cooperation, and (sometimes) equality. As with individualism, there are two kinds of collectivism, a more egalitarian (horizontal) dimension (e.g. “The well-being of my coworkers is important to me.”) and a more hierarchical (vertical) one (e.g. “Children should be taught to place duty before pleasure.”). The measure was completed by 2,975 participants (1,468 men; 1,987 liberals, 390 conservatives, and 291 libertarians).

It took me a while to understand what they meant by the differences between vertical and horizontal individualism and collectivism. The description in the paper cited by footnote 75 helped me immensely (pdf warning):

The four cultural patterns identified by Fiske match the four types of patterns that emerge from the vertical-horizontal, individualism-collectivism typology. H-C includes communal sharing and equality matching; V-C, communal sharing and authority ranking; H-I, market pricing and equality matching; V-I, market pricing and authority ranking.

Rokeach (1973) identified four types of political systems that reflected the relative importance of two values: equality and freedom. Communism was the pattern where equality was high and freedom low; fascism, the pattern where both equality and freedom were low; liberal democracy, the pattern where freedom was high and equality low; social democracy, the pattern where both equality and freedom were high. It is probable that Rokeach’s typology links with the present typology only for the case of extreme emphases on equality On the basis of this judgment, we summarize the attributes of six cultural patterns in Table 1.

Thus extreme H-C is the pattern of theoretical communism, whereas moderate H-C is the pattern found in the Israeli kibbutz. Extreme V-C is the case of Nazi Germany, whereas moderate V-C can be found in most traditional villages. In India, for example, the village elders have a very strong hand in village government. Monastic orders that emphasize hierarchical rankings of authority, theocracies, and cults with strong leadership would fall also somewhere near this pattern.

H-I is the pattern found in Australia and Sweden (Daun, 1991). For example, Feather (1992) identified a tendency among Australians to bring down “tall poppies.” They want to bring down those who have high status. Finally, the V-I pattern is found in the West, for example, the United States and France.

However, don’t read too much into the use of economic systems because, as you will see in a few paragraphs, there is more to it than just that. It also is cultural and involves the way we think about rights. Going to that paper and reading over some of the 32 questions that they asked will help you get an even better idea of the differences between the 4 types.

Upon reflection, I found the breakdown of individualism and collectivism to into those two kinds each to make a ton of sense. Learning the scores of liberals, libertarians and conservatives compiled for the “Understanding Libertarian Morality” paper helps bring them into even clearer focus and really helped to further develop my understanding of the different ways all 3 groups conceptualize different systems.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that there are numerous cultural and other factors at work in the scores and that the questions were designed for a more international audience than likely filled out the surveys on which this data is based. The way that the authors of the study interpreted them and the way that makes most sense to me is to focus more on comparing the scores of libertarians to conservatives and liberals within each category rather than comparing the scores of libertarians within each category against each other.

Click for the full screen view

Looking at the libertarian scores first, it’s easy to see why libertarians view political issues as a struggle between individualism and collectivism. We have the lowest collectivism scores and the highest individualism scores. At the same time though, it illustrates that liberals and conservatives don’t see the world through the same lens.

If you only think of horizontal individualism in terms of a Scandinavian social democracy system with high taxes and redistribution, the fact that libertarians scored the highest in this category while liberals and conservatives scored roughly equal would come as a big surprise. However, if you think about it as applied to things like civil liberties and rights it makes much more sense. The questions are also a bit abstracted from the direct political associations and some examples of the horizontal individualism questions include “One should live one’s life independently of others” and “When I succeed, it is usually because of my own abilities.” Of course, as the original study authors mention repeatedly, there are not distinctive lines between the categories and there is some overlap.

For me, the most interesting thing about liberals and conservatives is that the major difference between the two has essentially nothing to do with individualism vs. collectivism and not much to do with differences over the horizontal aspects of each, but rather is nearly entirely about the vertical. Their scores are identical in horizontal individualism and liberals only score slightly higher in horizontal collectivism, but the gap is only about 1/3 of the gap between the scores of conservatives and libertarians. By contrast, the gaps between the scores of liberals and conservatives in the categories of vertical collectivism and individualism are only exceeded by the difference in the scores of libertarians and conservatives in vertical collectivism and libertarians in liberals in vertical individualism.

Thus it should come as no surprise that conservatives and liberals appear inconsistent when viewed through the libertarian worldview of individualism vs. collectivism. That insight should prove useful when either trying to understand how liberals and conservatives approach an issue or in trying to explain to them how libertarians approach it.

For example, at least some of the appeal of vertical individualist free markets to conservatives comes from the vertical aspect it shares with vertical collectivism in that it allocates resources, decision making power and authority to those who are “most deserving.” By contrast, for liberals the problem with them is not so much the individualist everyone for themselves aspect of markets, but rather the potential for them to produce unequal outcomes.

However, it’s probably time for a reality check and Public Policy Polling delivered right on time with some polling data from Michigan about Justin Amash. It’s important to note that 71% of people weren’t sure about their opinion on him. Thus, I’m going to skip over the polling data on a head to head Senate race between Amash and current Democratic Senator Carl Levin because I’m not sure that we really learn anything from the poll results when Amash’s name recognition is so comparatively low and would certainly go up dramatically if such an election ever happened.

But, considering that the few percent of voter who are actually libertarians probably know who he is, that gives him a good shot to have decent favorability numbers among the 29% who do have an opinion of him. Unfortunately, they’re awful. The top of the line 9% favorable and 20% unfavorable is bad enough, but the cross tabs are even worse.

Looking at the breakdown by 2012 presidential vote is not good either. The sample size of “someone else / don’t remember” is really small at 6% of the 702 responses, but you have to figure that includes everyone who voted for Gary Johnson. The 11/18 split among Romney voters is really troubling as well because Romney lost Michigan by about 7 points.  Granted, not all of those voters probably liked Romney either, but still. It’s not good.

The ideological breakdown is perhaps worst of all. If a libertarian / Tea Party type group is going to get someone elected, they probably need to at least be popular with very conservative voters. An 11/13 favorability split just isn’t going to cut it.

I’m not really sure what to interpret from the male/female split. The fact that the libertarian / Tea Party / Republican base that likely is the base of his support skews male makes it kind of surprising.

The party identification numbers shouldn’t be too surprising given the Obama / Romney numbers. Unsurprisingly, he is more popular with Independents than people who identify with either party and comparing it to the Obama / Romney numbers indicates that Independent Romney voters are probably his best group, not too surprising for a libertarian leaning Republican.

There is one final possible demographic to get that elusive group where Justin Amash has a higher favorability rating than unfavorability rating is Ron Paul’s best demographic of under-30 voters. But, alas, despite relative sky high name recognition with that demographic, he still is 4 points underwater.

That also has the conversely bad impact of meaning Amash is even more unpopular with pretty much everyone over the age of 30.

As great as Rand Paul’s success on the drones issue on the Senate floor was on Thursday, these numbers really put in perspective how far libertarianism has to go before libertarian candidates can start regularly winning statewide and national elections.

The way I see things, the first issue to resolve is the status of ICANN, namely whether or not it ought to be considered a private or government actor. ICANN is legally a private company, however, it was created specifically to be handed what was previously US government control over domain name registration. It’s funded by fees paid for registering a domain, so there are no tax or financial quandaries for a libertarian. However, given its history and the influence that government officials have over it’s decision making process, it’s not entirely clear what they ought to be considered. It would take someone with a much deeper knowledge of the history of DNS and better understanding of the current ICANN decision making process than I to truly be able to resolve their status.

Fortunately, I’m not sure that it matters. The NAP is a pretty black and white thing. Either ICANN and their domain name registration process violates it or it doesn’t.

If they are functionally a group that does not in any way violate the NAP, their registration agreement, arbitration process, and decision regarding the ownership of RonPaul.com is perfectly legitimate and libertarians should accept whatever decision that is as a legitimate one. Perhaps some libertarians would wish for a different outcome, but that doesn’t mean that was an illegitimate one.

If they do violate the NAP, then we have to examine whether or not any of their actions are legitimate at all. The case that Ron Paul is violating the NAP requires that ICANN registrations be legitimate, and thus the contract that allows the current owners of RonPaul.com to set the DNS settings within the ICANN DNS system to be legitimate, but the ICANN rules governing that contract to be illegitimate. I simply don’t see how that could be or what justification from either libertarian contract theory or some hybrid private/public status of ICANN could lead to that conclusion.

I don’t think this is a slam dunk case against the possibility that Ron Paul’s attempt to acquire RonPaul.com violates the NAP, but I think it sets some solid boundaries for such a case. I have yet to read a justification that makes a convincing case. All of them them to rely on the notion that domain names can be treated like physical property rather than a contract that allows someone to control a certain entry in the ICANN registry.

There is perhaps no better example of the way in which these conflicts emerge as public discussions than the recent resolution of a bet between Bob Murphy and David Henderson. At this point in time there are almost too many interesting blog posts and comments in order to link to them all, so I’m just going to provide a link to this David Henderson post from relatively early in the discussion and Bob Murphy’s final post on the discussion. The links included in those posts should lead you to just about all the relevant commentary on the matter, the key other players being Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman.

I’m not going to comment on the specifics of any of the underlying economics because DeLong, Krugman, Henderson and Murphy are all far more qualified to do so than I am to do so. However, I am going to use my armchair pundit skills to discuss some of Nate Silver’s insights into economic forecasting to comment on the bet and what it means.

First of all, I think it’s important to put this kind of a prediction in the proper context. In his book, Silver discusses the history and awful record of GDP forecasting. In this case we are talking about CPI forecasting which is obviously different, but we can use similar examples to discuss the current state of CPI forecasting. He points to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s quarterly Survey of Professional Forecasters as the best available benchmark because of it’s quantitative forecasts, long history (back to 1968) and accurate record by comparison to other forecasts. Fortunately, the very same survey also asks forecasters to predict inflation by forecasting the CPI, both headline and core.

Before I start, I just want to say that the predictions in the survey are quarter over quarter CPI expressed in annualized percentages rather than monthly year over year numbers that are the subject of the Murphy/Henderson bet. Therefore, the data and ease of prediction are not directly comparable and the point of this is to establish a general idea of the current state of CPI forecasting rather than make direct quantitative comparisons.

Fortunately, the Philadelphia Fed was kind enough to have one of their data analysts compile an assessment of the error in the median CPI predictions of the SPF survey responses from the first quarter of 1997 through the second quarter of 2010. That report is available here.

The most important pieces of information are the RMSE (root mean square error which is the square root of the mean of the square of the errors) of the predictions and the comparisons of the RMSE error of the forecast to that of the chosen benchmarks. For our purposes the differences between comparing the predictions to the initial CPI numbers or the revised ones are trivial.

The RMSE varies significantly depending upon whether the forecast is only for the next quarter or if it is for 2 or more quarters away. Since the survey is due in the middle of the middle month quarter before, that means forecasts for the next quarter are made when that quarter is 6 weeks away from beginning. Keep in mind that the Murphy/Henderson bet was on a multi-year time frame. For the next quarter, it is about 1.4%, but increases to between 2.3% and 2.4% for the 2nd through 5th quarters and the error only increases about 0.03% from the 2nd to 5th quarter.

Before, I start discussing comparisons of the SPF median forecast to various benchmarks, sit back for a moment and consider what an average error of just under 2.5% means in the context of the range of possible values. Since the beginning of the SPF forecasts in 1968, quarter over quarter inflation at an annualized percentage has never been higher than 17% and never lower than about -9%. Thus the error is just under 10% of the range of past values. However, when you consider that the -9% deflation that occurred in the 4th quarter of 2008 is substantially lower than the second lowest value of about -2.5% that occurred the quarter after in the 1st quarter of 2009, it is pretty obviously an outlier in the data. Further, all of the values higher than the 7.09% inflation of the 3rd quarter of 1990 occurred in 1982 or earlier. Shrinking the reasonable range of estimates to between -2.5% and 7.5% where all the values from 1983 to the present except for 1 fell means that the average error of 2.5% is almost a quarter of the reasonable range.

Turning the comparison to benchmarks doesn’t make the forecasts look much better. The first benchmark the Philadelphia Fed analysis uses is simply a no change forecast. That means just taking the previous quarters reported number and predicting it for the next 5 quarters. Since the quarter in which the prediction happens is ignored that means inflation is predicted to stay the same out 7 quarters. The RSME ratio of the SPF median forecast to the no change forecast is about 0.45 for the next quarter, but rises to about 0.65 for the 2nd quarter and 0.75 for the 5th. If you think about the no change forecast to be a sort of “no information” benchmark analogous to a pure guess in that it has no information about the trend in the future, that’s a pretty bad sign for the forecasts.

The Fed analysis also compares to two models that use a historical analysis of the CPI data to predict future values and are called autoregressive models. These models don’t use any data other than the historical CPI, so in a sense they are entirely ignorant of any economic principles. Any person sufficiently familiar with the mathematical methods behind them could produce the forecasts without even knowing what piece of data they were trying to predict. The ratio of RSME errors for the next quarter of 0.50 indicates that they are not much better than the no change forecast in the very short run, but 5 quarters out the ratio rises to 0.82 to 0.85 by the 2nd quarter and to 0.95 by the 5th. That means that the best economic forecasters are not much better are predicting CPI more than a year in advance than someone sufficiently well versed in the mathematics of autoregressive models, perhaps someone like a climate scientist; a table of historical CPI values; and a computer.

Finally, I ran my own benchmark comparison which is not really a forecasting comparison, but provides a great comparison for thinking about the accuracy of the SPF forecast. I simply took the average of the quarterly inflation over the time period in question, the start of 1997 through the middle of 2010, of 2.36% per year and calculated the RMSE error if that was the forecast for each quarter. The result is an RMSE that ranges from nearly exactly equal to the predictions 2 quarters in advance and about 0.05% below the error for the forecasts 5 quarters in advance. Of course, such a result fairs signficantly worse than the 1 quarter in advance prediction.

It is important to keep in mind that this is not in any way a forecast or prediction. It uses the data to “predict” itself which is not possible for any forward looking forecast. However, it is useful for conceptualizing the amount of information conveyed by the SPF forecast because the RMS errors are so close. Essentially, the SPF forecast over these years of more than one quarter in advance contains as much information about future values of the CPI as knowing the average yearly increase. If you simply knew the average and had no idea about what years were recessions, what actions the Fed took or even what CPI meant, simply predicting each quarter to be the average ends up being by this metric just as good of a prediction as the SPF survey median.

It’s the equivalent of a climate scientist producing a climate model that yields no more information about global temperatures than their monthly average or a teacher trying to predict the scores of their students on an upcoming exam and yielding on average no more information about how each student will do than the class average would tell an outside observer. It’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate any deeper understanding of the phenomena being predicted. In fact, compared to phenomena that are well understood in fields like physics and chemistry, by comparison it indicates sheer bewilderment.

There are of course many reasons why this analysis is not perfect. It assumes that the Survey of Professional Forecasters is the best records of CPI predictions available and that RMSE is the best measure of the accuracy of a forecast. Another example of a CPI prediction with a long history to measure the accuracy of it is the University of Michigan Inflation Expectation survey. I haven’t run the numbers for that survey, but just comparing their predictions to the CPI indicates they severely underestimated several spikes and dips while predicting a severe dip at the end of the 2001 recession that turned out to be quite mild. I can’t imagine their predictions are much better if any at all.

However, the analysis of the SPF is good enough to illustrate my point which is that on time frames of more than a few months in advance, no one is much better at predicting CPI than just a reasonable guess. Not Paul Krugman or Brad DeLong, not Bob Murphy or David Henderson, not Keynesian models, not Austrian theory. No one.

One difference between the Murphy / Henderson bet and the SPF forecasts that I think is worth considering is that the Murphy / Henderson (and even more so for the Murphy / Caplan bet) bet is over a time span of several years. However, the increased time span just serves to make things like economic growth, changes in demand for US dollars, and changes in Fed policy more and more important and any underlying economic model or theory less and less relevant. For example, if I were to ask you to predict the CPI in 30 years, economic theory would have little to do with your answer and instead it would have to do more with your forecast for the future of monetary policy than anything.

Even on the time span of the 3 year Murphy/Henderson bet and the 7 year Murphy/Caplan bet, these other factors start to play a much larger role. For example, the decisions of the Fed to launch further quantitative easing, the odds that unemployment numbers would continue to only show marginal improvement, changes in the demand for US dollar denominated assets based on changes in economic uncertainty in Europe or the chances of a recession certainly would impact a forecasters assessment of the chances the CPI would exceed certain future values.

As Nate Silver discusses in his book, in climate change prediction all of the relevant economic and political uncertainties can be wrapped up into the single variable of carbon emissions and is described as scenario uncertainty. On a sufficiently long time scale, the scenario uncertainty comes to overwhelm even the uncertainty inherent to the model.

It’s hard to know exactly what Murphy, Henderson and Caplan believed the future would hold when they initially made their bets, but if they simply proved to be poor forecasters of future Fed monetary policy or prospects for US or world economic growth, it doesn’t tell us anything about their understanding of economic principles or the merits of their preferred economic theory.

Finally, I want to turn to a very important consideration in any kind of market forceasting, the human element. The economy and various markets are the results of the individual decisions of millions and billions of people. The subjective desires of these people go a long way towards dictating future outcomes.

The best example of this from Silver’s book is predictions of the stock market. The price to earnings ratio of the S&P 500 has historically been about 15 and tended to stay between 10 and 20. On 10 and 20 year time horizons, a lower price to earnings ratio is a sure sign of higher future stock market returns and a higher one is a sign of lower future returns. However, when trying to predict a significant decline in the market such as the late 90′s bubble, a P/E ratio of over 30 only results in a 19% chance of a crash within the next year.

The herd behavior of the market means that just because you know the stock market is overvalued and will decline sharply when the bubble bursts can make a forecaster look like a fool trying to pin down when it will happen.

The relationship between inflation and the behavior of people isn’t quite as simple as the stock market valuation of a stock, but fundamentally it is still based upon the individual decisions that combine to create the market. Certainly expectations of inflation have some role in the market and thus in determining actual inflation. That means a good CPI prediction not only has to forecast future economic conditions and the Fed’s monetary response to those  conditions, but also the reaction to those monetary policy changes from investors and other market actors.

For all of these reasons and more, I very much think that the economics blogosphere ought to stop making such a big deal out of bets like this. They aren’t good tests of different economic models, understanding of economic theory, the quality of an economist or really anything at all other than perhaps luck.

First of all, considering libertarians to be fiscal conservatives implies that conservatism is a major philosophy that everyone should be familiar with and that libertarianism is a minor one that is forced to piece together views from other more important political schools of thought. It implies that libertarian ideas are not important enough to stand on their own and that we must piggyback on conservative ideas. Political movements that are important enough to be taken seriously create their own identities rather than borrowing from others.

Secondly, I will have to admit I am a bit biased about this, but when you look at history, it is probably more accurate to say that conservatives have gotten their ideas from libertarian economists than to claim that libertarians are borrowing from conservative economists. The history gets a bit tricky because the word libertarian is a fairly recent one and conservative has meant different things, but libertarians trace their identity essentially through a series of very free market oriented economists going back to at least before 1900. Most of those economists referred to themselves as liberals, not conservatives, until well after WW2. In recent times, it may be conservatives who get elected and implement ideas, but there is no doubt that many right-wing economists either identify as or are better classified as libertarians. Much of the libertarian-conservative fusion think tank world revolves around conservatives implementing the ideas that libertarians come up with.

For these reasons, I hereby propose that all libertarians cease to referring to economic or fiscal conservatism or conservatives and instead refer to economic or fiscal libertarianism and libertarians.

What are the worst things that can happen? The one potential downside that I can think of is that it could perhaps come off as arrogant or abrasive to call a conservative a fiscal libertarian. This could potentially be a real problem, but isn’t one that should come up that often.

The upside is enormous. The way that we use language can have powerful effects on perception and if libertarians ever hope to overcome the notion that libertarianism is just the awkward step child of the liberalism and conservatism, we’re going to have to start talking like we deserve a seat at the adult table. Even if there is a credible case to be made that we’re not there yet, conservatives and liberals don’t want us there and aren’t going to invite us, not that there is a person or group that makes that determination anyways. We’re going to have to just sit down at that table ourselves and let people know it’s where we belong.

It is more historically accurate in its description of the ideas in question. We haven’t adopted very many economic ideas from conservatives if any at all, yet they have adopted quite a few from us. The potential to spark discussion about why it was used in place of conservative has limitless potentially to create situations to discuss various aspects of libertarianism.

At the time I wrote the post, I had no idea. I actually had initially set out to try to gather the evidence that libertarian friendly Republicans would do better than Romney. I bought into the idea that Ron Paul and Republicans like Rand Paul and Justin Amash had more appeal to independents than establishment Republicans like Romney would. I fully expected to find Amash creating independent ticket splitters who would vote for him and Obama.

After a week of thought, I think that I have the answer. There is both a surface level explanation and a more detailed explanation of how we arrived there. I want to start with a brief description of the surface level explanation and then start from the beginning to explain the fundamental strategy decisions that lead us to that point.

The Surface Level Explanation

The surface level explanation is interestingly enough, exactly the same one that nearly everyone in the media came up with right after the election – namely, that Republicans need to become more moderate on social issues in order to reach out to female and Hispanic voters. The problem was that libertarians heard that and thought to themselves, “Great! Libertarians are left-wing Republicans on social issues. We want to end the drug war, repeal the Patriot Act and protect the privacy of Internet users! We’re exactly the kind of Republicans that the media is talking about!”

Unfortunately for us, those are not the social issues that they were talking about. They were talking about a set of social issues that are exemplified by abortion and immigration. They were not talking about libertarian Republicans, they were talking about Republicans like the mayoral version of Rudy Giuliani, a pro-choice, pro-immigrant (at the time) Republican who no one in their right mind would confuse for being a libertarian. Successful liberty Republicans on the other hand, have tended to be very pro-life and have taken a rather anti-immigrant tone.

The confusing thing for many people within the libertarian movement is that those attitudes are not representative of libertarians a group nor are they issues we tend to care a ton about. Thus we haven’t picked up on the importance of those issues and their important implications for electoral success. The result is that we suffer from the same problems as the Republican Party as a whole, too many old, straight, Christian, white men who fail to communicate well with people too far outside of that demographic.

For example, read through the comments in this thread on reddit about Rand Paul. You can see that the attitude is that Rand Paul is a great defender of civil liberties for straight, white men. As user BDS_UHS puts it:

As long as you’re not gay, a racial minority, or a woman, he’s done more to protect your liberties than many senators of either party.

Remember, that I’m not asking you to agree with that characterization or arguing that it is true. I’m just pointing out that that is the impression that other people have of the libertarian Republicans who are most representative of the movement I’m talking about, such as Ron and Rand Paul, Justin Amash, Ted Cruz, etc.

Establishment vs. Insurgent

Turning to the underlying causes, I am going to borrow a graph and explanation of the Republican primary process from NY Times’ predictor extraordinaire Nate Silver. He utilizes a 2-axis graph to identify different positions in the field that is somewhat similar to the Nolan Chart that most libertarians are familiar with. However, rather than plotting social and fiscal conservatism on different axes, he keeps them grouped together and instead plots each candidates place on a moderate to conservative spectrum against their place on an establishment to insurgent spectrum.

Of course, such a graph has its flaws. As Silver admits:

There is room to analyze how I’ve positioned the individual candidates. Libertarian-minded candidates like Mr. Paul are never going to be easy to classify on a chart that includes just one dimension for political ideology. And I’m not quite sure where to put Rick Santorum on the establishment/insurgent axis.

Wherever Ron Paul should be placed on the moderate to conservative axis, there is no doubt that he is just about a close to the insurgent side as possible. There is also no doubt that he tried to run as a candidate playing up his very conservative fiscal views. As I blogged about during the campaign, it was pretty clear that the strategy of the Ron Paul campaign was to eliminate everyone from the race except Romney and then try and unite voters who thought that Romney was either too establishment or too moderate behind his candidates.

However, more than anything, he needed to be able to spin the race as establishment candidate vs. insurgent candidate. That’s a big reason why the campaign tried to deal with issues very selectively rather than focus on comprehensive libertarian education, leading to the controversy over the Super Brochures. He needed to be able to appeal to anti-establishment voters across the ideological spectrum.

In my opinion, GOP primary voters tend to fall in a band that goes from establishment moderate to insurgent conservative. Keep in mind this is only within the Republican party and it handicapped by its inability to reflect deviations from the moderate to conservative spectrum, such as libertarians. I’ve attempted to illustrate a heat map of roughly where I believe Republican Party voters fall on the chart:

This is only based upon my persognal observations and logic. Generally, it is very difficult for very conservative positions or politicians to end up being favored by the party establishment. Such principled views making taking power and governing once you have power much more difficult. Similarly, moderate candidates and positions are only permissible if they agree with the Republican establishment. Insurgent moderates would just never end up in the Republican Party in the first place. The people who end up in the top left tend to be pragmatic compromisers while the people in the lower right are the principled trouble makers. The people who would like to be in the top right corner can never make it into the establishment and the people who would occupy the lower left corner never join the Republican Party in the first place.

That is the root of the problem for libertarian activism within the Republican Party. The combination of political beliefs that oppose state power, a minority status within the GOP, and the very nature of our morals and personalities to oppose authority, libertarians have little choice other than to operate from the insurgent wing of the party.

The problem is the allies that leaves us within the Republican Party are not the ones we would want if we had a choice. People like the religious right and paleo-conservatives like Pat Buchanan and the John Birch Society. The results can be seen in the candidates that emerge as able to become GOP nominees and then actually get elected.

Abortion, Immigration and Gay Rights

While the libertarian movement is not particularly concerned with abortion and has self-identified libertarians taking positions ranging nearly across the spectrum from pro-choice to pro-life, the libertarian friendly candidates that emerge from the Republican Party end up as very pro-life. Justin Amash doesn’t believe in rape or incest exceptions and considers himself the most pro-life member of Congress and has introduce legislation restricting abortions in DC. Rand Paul doesn’t support rape or incest exceptions either. Neither does Ted Cruz. Ron Paul does support such exceptions, but can you really say he is in the moderate wing of the GOP on the issue? Much less pushing them that direction? I haven’t been able to find definitive statements for every one of the YAL PAC endorsed candidates, but I can’t manage to find a single one that is any more moderate on the issue than supporting rape, incest and life the mother exceptions.

I’m not arguing that abortion is the issue that was responsible for the Republican election losses 2 weeks ago, but perceived extremism on the issue certainly is contributing to the decline of the GOP brand. The losses of Todd Aiken in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana make it very clear that extreme right-wing rhetoric on abortion is one of the quickest and easiest ways for a Republican to lose what should be easy victories in red states.

On immigration, the liberty Republicans are better, but it is still not entirely clear that they represent a more moderate direction for the GOP on the issue. Even Ted Cruz, of Cuban descent himself, opposes amnesty and the DREAM Act leading to articles questioning if he is “Latino enough”. Rand Paul has recently made an about face on the DREAM Act after getting elected to office while opposing it. In heavily Hispanic Arizona, Jeff Flake has draw criticism for voting against the DREAM Act in 2010 in what some believe was a move designed to help him win the Republican Senate primary. Ron Paul himself advocates for a Constitutional amendment ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants and voted against the DREAM Act in 2010. Justin Amash sounds like a conventional conservative Republican on immigration. Ron Paul’s anti-war ally on the Republican side in Congress, Walter Jones, proudly cites a anti-immigration group that ranks him as one of the top 10 members of Congress.

What makes the failure of liberty Republicans to lead the GOP towards a policy of freer immigration even worse than their positions on abortion is that there very clearly is a libertarian position on immigration. I personally believe that the most libertarian position on abortion is the one held by Walter Block that he calls evictionism, but I don’t think that the position held by people like Ron Paul or those who are more pro-choice than that is necessarily unlibertarian. On immigration, there is no doubt that we ought to be working to reduce restrictions on the free flow of people across international borders.

Further, there is no doubt that the Hispanic vote is growing and growing in importance and that the Republican Party’s hardline stance on immigration and immigration reform is going to make it very difficult for them to avoid losing Hispanics by an overwhelming margin. Obama won Latino voters by a wider margin than in 2008, 71-27, in a demographic that has seen an increase of 27% in the number of registered voters in just 4 years. A Republican Party that wants to win back the White House and the Senate can’t allow that trend to continue.

Similarly on gay marriage, nearly all of the libertarians I know, though that is certainly biased by my age, have essentially the same view on gay marriage as I do – that we would prefer the government stay out of it all together, but to the extent that they are going to be involved, same sex couples need to be treated exactly the same way as straight couples.

However, where is the evidence that the libertarian leaning Republicans we have managed to get elected or nominated by the GOP are leading the party in a moderate direction on the issue? Ron Paul supports DOMA and would like to see Lawrence v. Texas overturned. Just this summer, Rand Paul made this awkward remark about President Obama and his “evolving” views on gay marriage. Justin Amash supports DOMA as well. Ted Cruz criticizes the “gay rights agenda” and bashes his opponent for marching in gay rights parades.

For independent or swing voters who would like to see a more moderate Republican Party on gay rights issues or a gay fiscal conservative who feels passionately about both gay rights and budget cuts, can libertarians seriously make the claim that the candidates they have been supporting in the Republican Party are the answer?

Interestingly enough, libertarians as a group suffer from nearly all the same demographic failures of the Republican Party as a whole. We’re very white and very male, probably even more than the base of Republican voters, which is a pretty white, male dominated group. If you believe that the problem Republicans have is their inability to reach out to women, gays, racial minorities, and non-Christians in an increasingly diverse America, there is really no good argument that libertarians are the answer.

We’re roughly equal to or significant less than the general population in our proportions of any of the aforementioned groups and the candidates we put forward are no better than the Republican Party as a group on the important social issues to those groups. Therefore, in an election that Republicans lost because they lost with female, non-white and gay voters it shouldn’t be a surprise that candidates who are not much different than the Republicans as a group on the issues important to those groups, didn’t do any better than Republicans as a party in the election results.

Is the Tea Party just Paleolibertarianism 2.0?

Back in the early 1990′s, a group of libertarians who were tired of political irrelevance believed that an alliance with anti-establishment social conservatives within the Republican Party was exactly what was needed. Lead by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, they termed their movement paleolibertarianism. If you are unfamiliar with the movement, the part on paleolibertarianism of my essay “Why Don’t They Like Ron Paul?” is a good place to start.

Looking back, it is not hard to see that the movement was mistaken in many ways. Attracted by a similar anti-interventionist foreign policy approach from the right, it made compromises on economic policy by getting behind Pat Buchanan’s presidential runs. As we learned from Ron Paul’s 2008 and 2012 runs, jump starting a libertarian movement requires an actual libertarian. It can be worth supporting and working with non-libertarians to further various policies in the libertarian agenda, but our long term success requires our own intellectual leaders, politicians, think tanks, websites, etc.

Not only was paleolibertarianism not successful at the time, it’s now clear that the ways in which it deviated from standard libertarianism were from poor long term political strategy choices. To someone like myself who wasn’t quite yet walking or talking when the 90′s began, the rhetoric of Rothbard and Rockwell on social policy sounds like it might as well have been written in 1960. Time was not and is not on the side of opponents of gay rights, drug war crusaders, and people trying to appeal to lingering racism.

Predicting the political future is a difficult thing to do. However, I am confident in predicting that 20 years from now that gay marriage will be legal in more places than it is now, marijuana will be legal for either medicinal or recreational use in more places than it is currently and that on average people will be more welcoming to Latino immigrants than they are today. Deviating from libertarian values to take the ultimately losing side isn’t a very good long term strategy to grow the libertarian movement.

I see many parallels between paleolibertarianism and what the Tea Party movement has become today. It bring back together many of the same people that made up the Pat Buchanan coaltion of 1992, with the exception that this time the emphasis on fiscal issues. The Tea Party alliance is certainly more advantageous because of the focus on the issues where conservatives agree most with libertarians and because we have been able to use it to leverage social conservative support for libertarians instead of letting our efforts be used to support candidates who were not libertarians.

Conclusions

Considering how long this post has gone on already, I’m going to save the lessons we should learn and the strategy suggestions for a subsequent post. My previous post on the election results explains what happened, this post explains my theory about why it happened and the next one will explain what we can do about it.

One topic that I cannot recall ever having heard or read libertarians discussing in much detail is what issues we ought to be working on. For the most part, libertarians tend to pick issues of emphasis in the same way that liberals and conservatives do. Basically, we either pick the issues that are most important to us or take the issues that are most important to the general public.

For conservatives and liberals working through the Democratic and Republican Parties, picking issues to emphasize that way makes all the sense in the world. If you are a majority or are looking to become a majority, the issues used to build that majority coalition don’t particularly matter, so you might as well either pick the issues you prefer or the ones people care about to build a majority coalition around. There is no reason to pick anything other than either the issue you care most about or the issue they care most about.

For the moment, I’m going to put aside the discussion about whether or not libertarians could create a political world where we too are fighting to control a majority of Congress rather than just a couple of seats in it. Instead, I want to talk about what optimal libertarian issue emphasis selection might look like in a world where libertarians are a distinct political minority, making up perhaps around 15% of the population and are outnumbered on both the right and the left. In such a world, I believe that libertarians ought to focus on the issues that are closest to their tipping points. Rather than focusing on the issues most important to libertarians, we should focus on the issues that are close enough to a majority that the efforts and votes of 5 or 10% of the population could be the difference.

For example, many libertarians have focuses their activist efforts of the past two years on getting Republicans elected who will do things like vote for Senator Rand Paul’s budget and other spending cuts and vote against the Patriot Act and the NDAA. The problem is that in the Senate, all 3 of those issues are dozens of votes away from happening. Senator Paul’s budget failed 16-83, the Patriot Act was renewed 72-23, and the NDAA passed 93-7. Only because the Patriot Act could be stopped from renewal with just 41 votes in the Senate could enough Senate votes be flipped in a single election to change any of the votes. But, flipping more than 18 Senate races out of 26 (33 seats are up for election, including 7 nay votes) is a monumental task. If libertarians had that kind of political muscle, we could just use it to elect libertarians.

Consider instead the referendums on gay marriage and marijuana policy that took place in states like Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland, Arkansas, Montana and Massachusetts. Nearly all of the votes were within 10 point whether they passed or failed. It is very likely that additional effort and focus on those issues by libertarians could have made the difference where they didn’t. Certainly in Arkansas where the medical marijuana vote failed by a 51-49 margin.

For anyone familiar with basic microeconomics, this idea should seem very familiar. It’s essentially the political version of making decisions on the margin. The way to maximize the difference that you can make is not by working on the biggest issue, but rather the one where you can make the biggest difference.

Of course all of this assumes that libertarians are not only not currently able to potentially elect a majority, but also never going to be able to hold a majority in Congress. Even if focusing on tipping point issues when it comes to electing politicians is the optimal strategy in the short run, if it eliminates or delays the potential for a majority, it is likely not the best long run strategy.

As the media returns to their never ending quest to report on some kind of horse race narrative for an upcoming election by looking ahead to 2014 and 2016, I think libertarians everywhere would be wise to instead look back on the election of 2012 and examine our strategies and their successes and failures. If we are going to revamp our strategy going forward, this time immediately following an election seems to be the optimal time to do so.

One particular topic that I first encountered around 2 years ago, was the research into libertarian morality being conducted by a group researches behind the data collection website YourMorals.org. For whatever reason, I stumbled onto their work again a few weeks ago and not only read their paper, but, in an attempt to more fully understand the results and their implications for the best way for libertarians to communicate our ideas to liberals and conservatives, have been taking the quizzes about morality myself and where I can looking up the scoring systems for each to understand which kinds of questions translate to different categories of morality.

The final paper was published this past August and is available here. For the purposes of this blog post, I am going to use the figures from a draft copy of their paper that was written 2 years ago because I like them better for my purposes, but will quote text from the published version.

The first part of the study I want to talk about is the Moral Foundations Questionnaire  It’s a series of questions that rates how a person feels about 5 different moral foundations, harm/care, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity. People are asked to rate a series of considerations on a scale of 0 to 5 and then asked to agree or disagree with a series of statements on the same scale of 0 to 5. Thus, 2.5 can be considered the “zero” point. If a group averages above a 2.5, that foundation can be considered a part of their morality. Below 2.5 and they either don’t care about it or potentially disdain it.

If you would like to read the questions and/or take the quiz yourself to find out your own scores, you can either do it online at YourMorals.org or look at a PDF copy here or a .doc format here. If you are going to take the time to complete the quiz, I think it would be a good idea to register and take it online, so that you’re answers will be added to their data set and the authors of this study can have more data from which to write more studies about the beliefs of libertarians. If you want to see which questions fall into which categories, look at a the pdf or .doc versions as the online quiz autotmates the scoring process and thus doesn’t give you the key.

Below is the graph that displays the results for self-identified liberals, libertarians and conservatives. I have drawn in red a line at about 2.5 to help illustrate whether or not a the foundation is a part of the group’s morality or not.

I’ll let the authors of the study analyze the results for you:

Our results suggest why libertarians do not feel fully at home in either of the major American political parties. Consistent with our prediction, libertarians were relatively low on all five foundations. Libertarians share with liberals, a distaste for the morality of ingroup, authority, and purity, characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right [43]. Like liberals, libertarians can be said to have a two-foundation morality, prioritizing harm and fairness above the other three foundations. But libertarians share with conservatives their moderate scores on these two foundations. They are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly. Libertarianism is clearly not just a point on the liberal-conservative continuum; libertarians have a unique pattern of moral concerns, with relatively low reliance on all five foundations.

For people familiar with the libertarian movement, I think some of the results, such as the idea that libertarians don’t like authority or that we don’t really feel at home with either liberals or conservatives, are obvious.

The one result that certainly caught me by surprise is that libertarians look nearly identical to liberals except for not feeling as strongly as liberals about harm and fairness. The history of cooperation between libertarians and conservatives would seem to suggest that libertarians have at least as much in common with conservatives as liberals if not more.

However, something just doesn’t seem quite right. The questions don’t seem to address some areas of libertarian beliefs. The authors of the study realized further questions were needed:

In the original conception of Moral Foundations Theory, concerns about liberty (or autonomy or freedom) were not measured. But as we began to collect data on libertarians and to hear objections from libertarians that their core value was not well represented, we created questions related to liberty in the style of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. We generated 11 items about several forms of liberty (see Appendix S1) and collected responses from 3,732 participants (2,105 men; 2,181 liberals, 573 conservatives, and 525 libertarians). Principal component analysis using varimax rotation indicated two clear factors (Eigenvalues of 3.40 and 1.48; next highest was .74). Six items loaded greater than .60 on the first factor, which represented concerns about economic/government liberty (e.g., ‘‘People who are successful in business have a right to enjoy their wealth as they see fit’’). Three items loaded greater than .60 on the second factor, which can be interpreted as a ‘‘lifestyle liberty’’ factor (e.g., ‘‘Everyone should be free to do as they choose, as long as they don’t infringe upon the equal freedom of others.’’).

The Liberty Foundation quiz results explain a lot about what was missing from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire alone. (Once again, I have added in a red line myself at the “neutral” value of 2.5 on the scale of 0 to 5.)

Suddenly, things start to make sense. When you consider liberty as an end in itself, libertarians no longer seem to be more amoral versions of liberals. The same 0 to 5 scale is used for both surveys, so it can be accurately said that libertarians care more about both economic and lifestyle liberty than either liberals or conservatives care about anything.

Thus, liberals are like libertarians who don’t care about economic liberty and instead care more about harm and fairness. Conservatives are similar to libertarians except they care slightly less about lifestyle liberty and also care about authority, ingroup and purity.

Trying to convert all of this academic insight into the morality of various political groups into insight about the optimal political strategy for libertarians leads us to all kinds of questions. Many of them, I don’t know that anyone has an answer to. Others require the kind of large scale data collection and analysis that were needed for this study.

Given that we are a distinct group, should libertarians even be pursuing political alliances at all? If so, should we ally ourselves with the right or the left? Do we have to pick or can we manage alliances on specific issues? Politically, is it easier for us to work with a group of people whose difference is that they don’t value something we do or a group whose difference is that they value several things we don’t?

Are people’s senses of morality static or can we change them? What kinds of things cause people’s senses of morality to change? Is trying to change them a viable political strategy?

Are there people who have morality profiles similar to liberals or conservatives, yet end up coming to the same political conclusions as libertarians and self-identify as libertarians? If so, are there any common traits that lead them to do so?

At nearly 1500 words, this post has gotten long enough and some of those questions require easily another 1000 words, so I will leave them for another post.

Some have even gone so far as to make the rather bold claim that if Ron Paul was the nominee, Obama would have lost.

As much as I would love for such a sentiment to be true, the data simply does not bear it out. Though the sample size is small and as I cannot yet find a breakdown the presidential election results by Congressional district, the analysis is not yet possible for all of the races, the evidence is fairly clear that the election was a disaster for libertarian-leaning Republicans and those Republicans endorsed by the Ron Paul machine.

I’m going to first start by establishing a baseline for measuring success. As in any presidential election, the most obvious and useful one is the vote total of the presidential candidate from the same party. In this particular year, for Republicans that baseline is especially low. Nearly every election indicator that didn’t involve Mitt Romney pointed to an Obama loss. From the economy to the President’s approval rating, this was a good year to be the challenger and Romney didn’t managed to hold Obama under 50%.

Thus, if a more libertarian strategy would have prevailed, we should expect to see that the more libertarian leaning Republican candidates who did run performed better than Romney. Obama won more than 50% of the vote, so a successful candidate running against him would have either had to win the votes of about a million and a half people who voted for him, find 3 million people who didn’t vote or some combination of the two. Especially if the differences in electoral performance between a more libertarian candidate and Romney were so great, we should expect to see more libertarian House and Senate candidates being more successful than Romney.

One important caveat on this is that there are many people who don’t vote in down ballot races. They are only there to vote for President and leave the rest of their ballot blank. The result is that there are usually more votes for President, or whatever other race is on the top of the ballot, than for the down ballot races. This leaves open the possibility that a down ballot candidate could get a higher percentage of the vote than their party’s presidential candidate, not by drawing cross-over voters, but simply by getting a higher percentage of the people who voted for their presidential candidate to vote for them rather than not voting in the down ballot race. Therefore, my analysis will consider results that do not conclusively prove evidence of a Republican candidate picking up non-Romney voters or at least coming very close as not significant.

The final thing I want to establish before I state the analysis of specific races is having a Congressional candidate outperform the presidential candidate of the same party is very possible. The most obvious example to this point is Paul Ryan. Despite actually being on the ticket alongside Romney, he managed to win votes that went to Obama. Believe it or not, there were thousands of voters who cast ballots for both Obama and Paul Ryan. For example, in the two most populous counties in Ryan’s district of Racine and Kenosha in the Southeast corner of Wisconsin, Ryan undoubtedly pulled votes from Obama. In Kenosha, Obama won 44,838 votes to Romney’s 34,942 while Ryan managed to only lose the county to Democratic challenger Rob Zerban 41,101 to 36,092. In Racine, Obama prevailed 52,887 to 49,137 while Ryan running without Romney’s name in front managed to win the county 50,106 to 47,618.

There are other examples, such as Minnesota Democrat Jim Graves who came within 5000 votes of defeating Michele Bachmann despite the fact that her district had been made even more conservative by redistricting.

I could use even more examples to prove my point, but the fact that Paul Ryan was about to distinguish himself from a presidential ticket that he was on should be all the evidence needed to prove that it can happen. Furthermore, any impact from Libertarian candidates worked against Ryan. Johnson got just 0.7% in Wisconsin while the LP candidate in Ryan’s district got a bit better than 1.6% of the vote.

Turning our attention to the US Senate races, there were 3 candidates endorsed by the Ron Paul-affiliated Young Americans for Liberty PAC in Minnesota’s Kurt Bills, Rhode Island’s Barry Hinckley and Texas’ Ted Cruz, and one additional candidate who does not generally receive great reviews from the Ron Paul crowd, but is well liked by Cato Institute-types in Arizona’s Jeff Flake. All 4 candidates underperformed Romney.

Starting with the best performing, let’s look at Ted Cruz in Texas. The best thing that can be said about Cruz is essentially that he performed exactly how one would expect a generic Republican candidate to perform relative to how well Mitt Romney did in Texas. Romney received 4,556,000 votes while Cruze received 4,457,000 votes. By comparison, Obama received 3,294,000 votes and Democratic Senate nominee Paul Sadler received 3,183,000 votes. Cruz lost slightly fewer voters compared to his party’s presidential nominee than Sadler and had a Libertarian Senate candidate who received 73,000 votes more than Gary Johnson did running for president, but it can hardly be said that Cruz did any better than Romney. Their performances were basically indistinguishable.

The next best election result came in Rhode Island from Barry Hinckley. In that state with a single precinct still not counted, Obama beat Romney 264,000 to 149,000 while Hinckley lost 255,000 to 138,000. The reason that I rate Hinckley’s performance as worse than Cruz’ is that while Cruz had a Libertarian Party candidate who theoretically could have pulled some Romney voters away from him, Hinckley had no such problem. The Libertarian Party didn’t field a candidate for US Senate and Gary Johnson got 4,000 votes for President. Thus, Hinckley not only lost more presidential voters from his party than his opponent, Sheldon Whitehouse, he stood to benefit rather than lose from the presence of Libertarian Party candidates.

Continuing down the line is Arizona’s Jeff Flake. The Arizona results not only have Flake underperforming Romney, but provide positive proof that he lost more Romney voters to his opponent, Richard Carmona, than he gained from cross-over Obama voters. Romney won Arizona 932,000 to 742,000 while Flake only managed to win 836,000 to 755,000. Perhaps the results would be understandable if Flake had just lost the roughly 52,000 votes that the Libertarian Party Senate candidate received over Gary Johnson’s total, but the fact that Carmona got more votes that Obama tells us Flake was net losing Romney voters to Carmona even if we assume that all 5,000 of Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s votes went to Carmona.

The results for Kurt Bills in Minnesota can only be described as a disaster. In a state where Obama won only 25 of the 87 counties, Kurt Bills managed a plurality in just 2 and broke 50% in exactly zero. In a state that Obama won just 1,542,000 to 1,321,000, Bills got demolished by incumbent Amy Klobuchar 1,851,000 to 869,000. He lost by about 4 times as many votes as Mitt Romney did. Klobuchar outperformed Obama by over 300,000 votes, most of which must have come from Romney voters.

One final race I would like to mention is in Montana. Ron and Rand Paul’s last minute endorsements of Denny Rehberg were slightly confusing to me last week when I read about them. In the aftermath of the victory there by Democratic incumbent Jon Tester, the behind the scene politics have become apparent. Independent groups backing Tester had apparently realized that Tester probably couldn’t get 50% and decided spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a campaign to convince libertarian minded voters to back Libertarian Party candidate Dan Cox. The Republican establishment must have sensed a loss and called in the libertarian calvary for a last minute charge. The strategy worked and Tester received 34,000 votes more than Obama while Rehberg lost about 59,000 Romney voters to Tester and Cox, who received about 17,000 more votes than Johnson and got 6.5% of the vote. Thus, Tester was able to win the election with a plurality of only 48.7%.

Turning our attention to the YAL PAC endorsed House candidates, the news gets a bit better. At least 2 of the 9 were able to do noticeably better than Romney in their districts. Though I won’t have any final numbers until someone goes through and adds up the presidential election totals for each Congressional district, I can say that in many of counties in Rep. Walter Jones’ North Carolina district, he slightly exceeded the totals of Romney. I believe that when the final numbers are in, Jones will have received about the same number of votes as Romney and held his opponent well below Obama’s vote total.

In Florida, Ted Yoho seems to have done slightly better in his overwhelmingly Republican district. Yoho appears to have done better than Romney in every county percentage wise and received more total votes in most. Solid proof that there were thousands of Obama/Yoho voters at the polls on Tuesday.

The news is slightly less positive for Michigan’s Justin Amash, Idaho’s Raul Labrador and Kentucky’s Thomas Massie. All 3 managed to turn in performances that were similar to Cruz and Hinckley with both the candidates and their opponents receiving slightly fewer votes than the presidential candidate from their respective parties.

Oregon’s Art Robinson seems to have underperformed Romney significantly He never managed to even equal Romney’s percentage and allowed his opponent Peter DeFazio to win more votes than Obama in every county entirely within their district.

The remaining 3 candidates, Michigan’s Kerry Bentivolio and Don Volaric along with Arizona’s David Schweikert, all have districts that contain only parts of one or two counties and thus analyzing their results on a county by county basis doesn’t work. We’ll have to wait for the presidential results from their districts for comparison. We do know that Schweikert and Bentivolio won in Republican leaning districts and Volaric lost in a Democratic leaning one, so there were no big surprises either way.

There are of course many possible reasons for any given candidate’s electoral performance. From fundraising to volunteers to the campaign manager, consultants and ad agency they hire, many of them don’t even have much to do with the policies they support. However, all of those factors are reasons why any libertarian-leaning Republican would underperform, including Ron Paul. Further, in light of the recent details about the internal failures of Romney’s campaign, such as the Orca Project, it’s hard to argue that the baseline set by the Romney campaign was anything even above average.

The sample size in this election is very small and thus I want to be cautious about drawing any major conclusions from it. However, if Ron Paul’s policy positions represented a winning strategy for Republicans, the odds of the Tuesday’s results for the candidates being what they were would be very small. The only two candidates to do better than Romney in their districts did so in districts that were 2 to 1 Republican and likely did so well in part because they didn’t face serious opponents in the general election. Yoho’s opponent J.R. Gaillot didn’t raise even the $5,000 required to file with the FEC and Jones outspent his opponent Erik Anderson $665,000 to $27,000. Every single liberty Republican in a competitive race failed to win more votes than Romney.

David Frum made an excellent point that a huge problem of the Republican Party was that they were lied to by the conservative media and their party leadership. It is of utmost importance that the same thing not happen to libertarians. In light of the election results, I think there is compelling evidence that the strategy being pursued by organizations like the Campaign for Liberty and others who are pushing for working through the Republican Party is a losing one.

I got an email from Jeff Frazee this morning trying to tell me that the failure of the Republican Party was because they failed to nominate a candidate more like Rand Paul. Given that the candidates they deemed to be most worthy of an endorsement only did better than Mitt Romney when they faced an opponent who failed to run a serious campaign, I have my doubts.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that every single candidate mentioned in this post will have a better voting record than the alternative if they had not run and someone else had been elected. However, given the results, I am starting to believe that a strategy that uses libertarian efforts to get these kind of candidates elected is a failing one.

It is only the combination of a highly educated population with comparatively few immigrants, who are less likely to be citizens and therefore eligible to vote, along with a heavily left-leaning electorate that is able to produce the high voter turnout and one-sided results needed for such a rarity to occur.

Anarcho-capitalists, voluntaryists and radical libertarians who believe that by not voting they are doing something to reject the state could not do more to ignore empirical evidence if they tried. Most of your friends, neighbors, relatives, and the people all around you don’t vote most of the time. If not voting were to actually represent some kind of anti-state activism, it is by far the one most widely employed.

Even in the 2008 general election, a presidential year with unusually high voter turnout, less than 57% of people over 18 cast a ballot. President Obama won a convincing victory during an election with heavy turnout and yet still received about 30 million fewer votes than there are people who didn’t vote. In that election there were 6 states were the non-voters represented a majority of adults.

Midterm elections are even worse. In the 2010 midterm elections with turnout supposedly driven by Tea Party enthusiasm, only Minnesota and South Dakota had a majority of adults bother to fill out a ballot. A stunning 73.1% of Texans didn’t bother to vote that year. That’s nearly 3 non-voters for every voter in the second most prominent election every 4 years.

During the primary season, turnout is even lower. New Hampshire usually records by far the highest rate of participation, but in 2012, even they only managed a 31.1% turnout rate among eligible voters. In caucuses turnout can be so small that only 1310 of Wyoming’s 420,000 eligible voters bothered to vote in the Republican caucus there, despite a race that was still very much up for grabs. That’s well over 99% of Wyoming adults who chose to not bother voting.

Turnout in local elections varies tremendously, but when those elections aren’t held along with the bigger name national votes, even fewer people tend to show up to the voting booth.

Yet despite these huge variations in turnout, what tangible results have been produced by the hundreds of millions of Americans who don’t vote? Is a public official elected when over 70% of people vote in Minnesota any less legitimate than one elected in Texas by less than 30%?

Just in the US in the last several years, there is a great deal of empirical evidence that not voting is an entirely useless strategy for anti-state activism.

Of course, this does not rebut the claim that voting doesn’t accomplish anything. It is certainly possible that neither voting nor not voting makes any difference. There are plenty of examples of races where both candidates are so similar that it is impossible for the victory of one over the other to have any real meaning. In either event, it is certainly true that your individual vote has such a small chance of making a difference in anything beyond a local election that it might as well be zero.

However, there are many things we can accurately say are the result of voting. Everything from the Iraq war to the Patriot Act to current tax policy to the Defense of Marriage Act are the results of the people that we elected to office. Voting clearly has helped accomplish a great deal of terrible things.

To be fair, I should probably clarify that there are some other aspects to the electoral process than just people showing up to cast their ballots. In the context of a strategy for political change, voting has to mean trying to impact all aspects of the electoral process, most importantly getting candidates on the ballot. It is more participation in electoral politics than just merely voting.

If not voting doesn’t accomplish anything and voting for one of two largely indistinguishable candidates who will probably make things worse only makes things worse, what options do we have left?

A strategy for political change through the ballot box does not require, and in fact probably should oppose, blindly picking between two indistinguishably bad candidates. Rather than stressing the importance of often counter productive general civic engagement that is the focus of most get out the vote efforts, my proposal is that the proper strategy is to simply vote for candidates that are more libertarian than the status quo.

The exact standards and implementation, such as whether or not less libertarian positions on a few issues or stances that are no better or worse than the status quo are acceptable, are less important than the general idea. Think of it as a modified Hippocratic Oath for the voting booth. It’s not quite “do no harm,” but it is at least “don’t make anything worse.”

In terms of concrete accomplishments, it’s very clear that a strategy of voting requires fewer people to be successful than a strategy of not voting. A simple majority of the electorate, much less than half the population in nearly all cases, could accomplish nearly anything through voting. More than that already doesn’t vote with no discernable impact on the system.

Electing libertarians to office doesn’t have to be the only answer in order for it to be part of the solution. One of the major lessons of the Ron Paul campaign was that electoral politics is a great compliment to other strategies like education. Having a libertarian candidate bringing libertarian ideas into electoral politics making bringing them into discussions that much easier.

Voting might not be the most effective strategy for bringing about libertarian political change, however, it is clearly a superior strategy to not voting at all. If you don’t vote because it’s a waste of time, that’s fine. However, keep in mind that the very same logic that leads you to that conclusion indicates that nearly all non-electoral forms of political activism are a waste of time as well.

One strategy that anti-voting libertarians like to point to is education. More than education, what they usually mean by this is persuading more people to become libertarians. Lets for a moment assume casting a vote takes an hour of your time. How many people can you convince to become libertarians in that hour? On average, the answer is certainly much less than one.

Think about it this way, how many hours in the next year will you spend on libertarian political activism? How many people will you convince to become a libertarian? If every libertarian were capable of convincing just one more person to become a libertarian, our numbers would double each year. Clearly if that had been happening, libertarians would currently run the country.

Consider also that a few of the most prolific libertarian persuaders have impacted millions. How many libertarians were at least in part persuaded to change their views by Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul or Milton Friedman? When you assign even partial credit to libertarians like those I just mentioned, the total lifetime conversion credit left over for the average libertarian begins to disappear quite rapidly. The exact answer will depend greatly on how you assign credit for each new libertarian, but I find it hard to argue that the median libertarian is even responsible for converting more than a single other person throughout their lifetime. The work done by the few at the top dwarfs the efforts of the rest of us.

Thus I submit to you, that for the average person, an hour of political activism is probably not worth any more than a vote. Even if you were an extraordinary libertarian activist and could claim sole responsibility for converting 5 people to libertarianism, in they end their opinions are not much more effective at changing society than 5 votes are at changing an election. And that’s 5 people over the course of a lifetime and hundreds or thousands of hours of effort.

If an when the world does become a more libertarian place, it is almost certain that your efforts to make it so will be indistinguishable from zero. You are not going to accomplish enough to be able to look back at your efforts and clearly trace them to some kind of difference making impact on the political world. If that realization is enough to keep you from engaging in any political activism whatsoever, then I apologize to the libertarian movement for having convinced you to abandon us. However, if you would like to contribute to what I believe will be our inevitable success even in some small way, I content that voting is probably just as effective of a way to do so as anything else you could come up with.