Should You Vote for President?
Should You Vote for President?
by
Andrew P. Napolitano
Recently
by Andrew P. Napolitano: Silence
on Libya
Can you vote
by not voting? In a presidential election year in which the critical
issues have been how much personal behavior the federal government
should regulate and how much private wealth it should transfer and
consume, rather than whether it should do so, many folks
who are fed up with what George W. Bush and Barack Obama have brought
us and fear more of the same from Mitt Romney are seriously suggesting
that they will express their profound objection to big government
by not voting for anyone for president.
On the other
hand, I know many good freedom-loving people who are fed up with
big government but view Romney as the lesser of two evils from whom
they expect a turn away from the path of government sector growth
and private sector shrinkage on which President Obama has taken
us.
The president
has stated in his campaign for re-election that he underestimated
the weakness of economic forces, and he now knows that no one could
have corrected them in the past four years. Essentially, his best
argument is that he has consumed his first term learning what to
do to correct our economic woes, and he needs another four years
in office to put into effect what he has learned. He wants to borrow
more and spend more and transfer more wealth.
What he fails
to realize, of course, is that you cannot correct a problem essentially
created by too much government borrowing and spending with more
government borrowing and spending. The president’s values are Wilsonian:
Personal freedom and private property can be subordinated to the
common good; the federal government knows better than the free market
how to bring about prosperity; killing is such an effective tool
of foreign policy that the decision to kill cannot be vested in
a Congress that can’t produce a budget; and the Constitution is
merely a guideline to be consulted from time to time. I am sure
he believes that our rights come from the government and not from
our humanity.
Romney does
understand that only private enterprise can produce wealth, while
the government merely transfers or consumes it. I believe him when
he argues that the degree of federal involvement in the free market
distorts the market, gives certain parts of it a false sense of
stability and expectation, and ultimately costs more than it helps.
The cost is in tax dollars taken from those who could otherwise
employ those dollars for investment, thus impeding prosperity and
jobs. And the cost is in government borrowing that is never repaid
but merely rolled over, and in the debt service that now exceeds
half a trillion dollars annually.
Romney is right
to condemn the $5 trillion increase in the federal government’s
debt during the Obama administration, but he’s curiously silent
on his running mate’s voting record: Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican
candidate for vice president, voted to authorize the debt increases
sought during the Bush and Obama years.
The case for
Romney would also be far more appealing to libertarians and others
who fear the size and scope of the federal government if he were
not such a clone of George W. Bush on foreign policy. Hasn’t he
learned that the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and the $2
trillion the federal government borrowed and spent on war and nation
building in Iraq and Afghanistan have not made a single American
one iota more free or safer?
Now back to
voting. Can one morally vote for the lesser of two evils? In a word,
no. A basic principle of Judeo-Christian teaching and of the natural
law to which the country was married by the Declaration of Independence
is that one may not knowingly do evil that good may come of it.
So, what should a libertarian do?
If you recognize
as I do that the Bush and Obama years have been horrendous for personal
freedom, for the soundness of money and for fidelity to the Constitution,
you can vote for former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. He is on the
ballot in 48 states. He is a principled libertarian on civil liberties,
on money, on war and on fidelity to the Constitution. But he is
not going to be elected.
So, is a vote
for Johnson or no vote at all wasted? I reject the idea that a principled
vote is wasted. Your vote is yours, and so long as your vote is
consistent with your conscience, it is impossible to waste your
vote.
On the other
hand, even a small step toward the free market and away from the
Obama years of central economic planning would be at least a small
improvement for every American’s freedom. A journey of a thousand
miles begins with a single step. That is Romney’s best argument.
I suspect it will carry the day next Tuesday.
Reprinted
with the author’s permission.
November 1, 2012
Andrew P.
Napolitano [send
him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey,
is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano
has written six books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent
is It
Is Dangerous To Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case
for Personal Freedom. To find out more about Judge Napolitano
and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists,
visit creators.com.
Copyright
© 2012 Andrew P. Napolitano