Romney is lame, young Rs like Ron Paul equally, might like Gary Johnson more if he got any press

This article originally appeared in the Boulder Daily Camera on October 22, 2011.

“Unlike the incumbent, I won’t make the economy worse, I won’t keep spending us to the brink of fiscal catastrophe, and I won’t lie to you.” That’s what a Republican candidate should declare to defeat Barack Obama, writes Reason magazine’s editor-in-chief.  Can the GOP front-runner Mitt Romney assert this credibly?

Like a typical Republican politician, Romney talks a good game about effectively reforming costly fraud-ridden government dependency programs. But he opposes cuts to the military’s bloated budget. He claims to support repealing ObamaCare, but still defends the failing state-level version of Obamacare that he signed into law in Massachusetts. Worse yet, in 2007, Romney said that for national health care policy, “What you have to do is what we did in Massachusetts.”

Compare Romney’s proposals to the bold fiscal plan of candidate Ron Paul, who tied Romney for first in a Reason-Rupe survey of young Republicans. Paul’s plan would eliminate the budget deficit in three years by cutting government jobs, spending, and taxes, while eliminating foreign “aid,” corporate subsidies, burdensome regulations, five unconstitutional federal departments, and the dollar’s money monopoly.

More than Ron Paul, many young voters might prefer former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. His fiscal policy resembles Paul’s, while he is more pro-liberty on gay marriage and immigration. But TV networks have unjustly excluded Johnson from polls and debates despite his strong polling relative to invited candidates. The “Gary Johnson rule,” says the campaign website, is to continuously shift debate eligibility criteria to exclude candidates named Gary Johnson.

Carlos Gonzalez, MVP voting, & Ken Buck’s spoilers

Has the Rockies’ Carlos Gonzalez won the National League MVP award?  The public doesn’t know yet, but we know how the voting works. Baseball writers don’t vote for one player. Instead, they rank their top ten, with higher ranked votes worth more points than lower ranked votes.  The player who accumulates the most points wins.

This version of preference voting reflects the electorate’s preferences better than our government elections do. If your favorite candidate is not a top contender, voting for him might make him a “spoiler” and help put your least favorite candidate in office. Instead of supporting your favorite candidate, you may resign yourself to voting for the proverbial “lesser of two evil” top contenders.

Newly-elected Secretary of State Scott Gessler endorses a solution: range voting. It’s like preference voting, but you can award each candidate any number of points within a specified range.  A simple version of range voting called “approval voting.” Vote for as many candidates as you like. The one with the most votes wins.  In this year’s election, if you preferred the Libertarian most and Michael Bennet least, you could vote for the Libertarian, but also for Ken Buck to help defeat Bennet. Some Buck supporters blame non-leftist candidates for spoiling a Buck victory. Instead, they should blame elected Republicans for supporting our crude voting system that makes spoilers possible.

“The state legislature should allow home rule municipalities and counties to develop voting methods that meet their needs, including approval voting and range voting,” says Gessler’s website. Boulder’s political parties should consider collaborating to bring one of these methods to Boulder County.

A version of this article was printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on November 6 2010.

Thanks to Dale Sheldon-Hess for pointing out the difference between range voting and preference voting.  I was operating within a word limit and wrongly figured that the MVP-style voting was a type of range voting.

Advice to Tea Partiers for expanding liberty

The Cato Institute’s John Samples, author of The Struggle to Limit Government, offers advice to those affiliated with the Tea Parties:

1. Republicans aren’t always your friends.
2. Some tea partiers like big government.*
3. Democrats aren’t always your enemies.
4. Smaller government demands restraint abroad.
5. Leave social issues to the states.

(Via Reason.tv)

*See, for example,  Leviathan on the Right, by Michael Tanner, and The Republican Spending Explosion by Veronique de Rugy

See also this New York Times article, Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated, April 14 2010.

How the GOP Lost My Vote

Paul Hsieh has an excellent essay on this in the Denver Post:

After a resounding electoral defeat, in which voters in this once-red state rejected Republicans McCain, Schaffer, and Musgrave, the Colorado Republican Party will undoubtedly be asking themselves, “Why did we lose?”

I want to let them know that they lost the vote of many former supporters (including myself) because they have chosen to embrace the Religious Right.

I voted Republican in 1996, 2000, and 2004. I believe in limited government, individual rights, free market capitalism, a strong national defense, and the right to keep and bear arms – positions that one normally associates with Republicans.

But I didn’t vote for a single Republican in 2008. I’ve become increasingly alienated by the Republicans” embrace of the religious “social conservative” agenda, including attempts to ban abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and gay marriage.

The Founding Fathers correctly recognized that the proper function of government is to protect individual rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But freedom of religion also implies freedom *from* religion. As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, there should be a “wall of separation” between church and state. Public policy should not be based on religious doctrines.

Read the rest here.