An interesting tidbit from Sunday’s Washington Post about a new Washington Post-ABC News poll:
The poll also shows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country’s problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services. Since he won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger government has moved in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points.
juris imprudent says:
Libertarianism is always the trend of the future.
January 19, 2010, 12:51 amBruce Hayden says:
I do think that libertarianism is on the upswing, and, yes, I think that it is due to overreaching by the Democratic majority. It also doesn’t help that the only people getting raises and the only place where jobs are being added is in government right now.
January 19, 2010, 12:55 amSlipSlidin' says:
I agree with Bruce Hayden that libertarianism is on the upswing. As it continues to swing up, I wonder how many will think about whether current Democrat action is the sole driver of their libertarian sentiments, or whether big government policies of the most recent Bush Administration should be included as well.
As awareness of libertarianism increases, I wonder how many will start to ask more questions of its ideals. If libertarians don’t like government and public sector overreach, does it make sense for them to accept private sector overreach?
Some have been offering their thoughts on this latter point at http://questionspresented.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/the-thin-line-between-libertarianism-and-anarchy/
January 19, 2010, 1:10 amMike says:
Maybe, Jonathan, but if the Republicans win: Then what?
That’s the question people like me are having.
The Republicans are refusing to regulate Wall Street. They are pretending as if Wall Street rises and falls based on the free market. Due to regulatory capture and implicit and explicit guarantees, how is Wall Street a “free market enterprise”?
Republicans, too, keep spending over a half-a-trillion a year on “defense.” Is the Department of Defense not worthy of a [sic] after Defense?
So the Democrats lose, and Republicans win. Libertarians will still ask: Then what?
Nothing will change other than the identities of the parties plundering America and destroying liberties.
January 19, 2010, 1:26 amSoronel Haetir says:
I’ve seen the claim numerous times that the more educated individuals become on economics generally the more favorable they tend to become toward (small l) libertarianism. By its very nature small l libertarianism is not conducive to organization behind large goals so is likely to be forever relegated to a sideline position. As for large L it (just like other political parties) seems to have been captured by the vocal nuts. Unfortunately for the Libertarian party their nuts were already unable to find a home amongst more mainstream nuts of either the left or right so tend to be even nuttier than typical activists.
January 19, 2010, 1:28 amorca says:
Who knows, maybe the Republicans will get back into power and…increase the size of the federal government by 50% again?
The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.
January 19, 2010, 1:28 amOff Kilter says:
Libertarianism is clearly in its ascendancy…it will be a majority position any millennium now
January 19, 2010, 1:32 amMike says:
FTW.
January 19, 2010, 1:41 amjosh bornstein says:
In addition to all the above posters’ points, I wonder what will happen in 3 or 7 years, when/if a Rep. is elected president. How many of those loudly professing ‘no more big govt.’ will continue to do so under Prez (Jeb) Bush (et al). Of course the true believers will maintain their positions. But how many Teabaggers will be holding loud marches? How often will we see FOX commentators fulminating. Not as often, I would wager.
January 19, 2010, 1:43 amGCA says:
Most people seem to want smaller government as long as they can keep their government benefits. How do we square the contradiction? Methinks small “l” libertarianism will only prevail if and when government entitlements become so costly that they become unsustainable – which may not be that far off, given unfunded Medicare, social security, and public pension obligations. Reality is going to bite, and it won’t be fun; until then, people will give small government lip service but continue to expect their “entitlements”.
January 19, 2010, 1:47 amyankee says:
I wonder what accounts for this shift in the poll results? It seems unlikely that people’s substantive views have changed so much.
Of course, the real test comes when people actually try to enact a smaller government with fewer services. Polling consistently shows that Americans hate spending in the abstract, but when people try to make noticeable cuts in specific programs this turns out to be wildly unpopular.
January 19, 2010, 1:53 amLarryA says:
Compared to the Obama administration there’s a whole lot of room for people who want a little less government, but aren’t anywhere near being libertarian.
January 19, 2010, 1:55 amBruce Hayden says:
Fox maybe not, though Glenn Beck likely won’t change. But many of the Tea Party people are not Republicans, but rather small government types. And, as such, are not likeley to toe the Republican party line.
Keep in mind though that a lot of Republicans were not happy with George W. Bush’s big government tendencies, nor of the antics of the Tom DeLays and Trent Lotts in the party. I sure wasn’t.
But keep in mind that whatever the Republicans did when they were in power is nothing like what the Democrats are doing right now. There is a big difference in magnitude between Bush’s deficits and Obama’s. And between Medicare Prescription Drug benefits and the Health Care Reform pending in Congress right now. Besides, borrowing to fight a war is much different from institutionalizing trillion plus dollar deficits extending as far as the eye can see to implement programs that the majority of Americans really don’t want. That said, we probably could have and should have cut government spending outside fighting the war in order to finance it, instead of borrowing. Bush didn’t have the inclination to do that, and so we are faced with what we have here – a charge of hypocrisy.
January 19, 2010, 2:04 amBruce Hayden says:
Except that the choice is always rigged. You don’t see a choice of cutting welfare payments, because those are non-discretionary, etc. Rather, you see a choice of cutting visible, typically low cost, services, such as the Forest Service, highway construction, etc.
The other problem though is that much of it isn’t all that democratic. There really aren’t that many people who support agricultural subsidies, but our republican structure, esp. the Senate, gives a lot of power to states that don’t have much population, but do have a lot of agriculture. Of course, this sort of rent seeking is not limited to agricultural subsidies. Rather, it permeates the budgetary process in Congress.
January 19, 2010, 2:11 amArthurKirkland says:
When I see marijuana and same-sex marriage legalized, warmongering placed on a leash, the anti-abortion crusade diminished, government secrecy reduced, agricultural subsidies eliminated and government surveillance restricted, I will find ‘small government and libertarianism on the march’ arguments worth considering.
In other words, a wholesale restructuring of the Republican Party platform, and a few important steps toward freedom in the Democratic Party platform.
January 19, 2010, 2:13 amEngineer says:
Previously I regarded myself as a conservative. But increasingly I’m thinking like a libertarian …
The reason is that the urban liberal mentality that I’m seeing is so different from anything I can understand or relate to – so that forging a society or an educational system based on common principles of decency or fairness seems less and less possible.
January 19, 2010, 2:55 amRicardo says:
And they were largely impotent in their opposition. If so many Republicans were opposed not only to Bush but also to the Republican Congressmen who actually voted for all these spending increases, who elected them in the first place? Republicans are just like everyone else: they like their government benefits as long as someone else pays for them.
Bush would almost certainly have lost to Gore if he had not promised the prescription drug benefit as part of his campaign in 2000. Political reality tends to rule the day before ideology.
The deficits under Obama are a combination of lowered tax revenue due to the severe recession and temporary spending increases as part of the stimulus package. Compare the CBO projections for 2008 (Bush’s last year) and 2009 — the deficits will snap back to what they would have been otherwise in a few years once the stimulus package runs its course.
If you want to pooh-pooh the idea that any kind of spending is ever “temporary” — as I suspect you might try to do — first ask yourself if you believe the same thing when it comes to spending on the War on Terror.
January 19, 2010, 3:24 amThe less deceived says:
That’s so naive. “Smaller government and fewer services.” As if governments go bankrupt by what they spend on services.
Government employees are getting serviced. The rest of us service them. We’re their servants. We work for them.
And then they retire, and we pay them then.
January 19, 2010, 4:53 amCareless says:
I’m sure we can make libertarians a majority if we import 10 million or so Haitians
January 19, 2010, 5:22 amDaniel S says:
If libertarianism was just about small government. But it isn`t. Ask those that said they would prefer a smaller government what they think about the Patriot Act. What they think about religion and state. What they think about copyright and state granting monopolies. Libertarians have been fooled for decades by the Republican Party into thinking that they were actually for smaller government. Yes, they are, but only when the Democrats are in power.
January 19, 2010, 6:01 amPunditKix says:
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January 19, 2010, 7:31 amShag from Brookline says:
Is being a little bit libertarian comparable to being a little bit pregnant?
January 19, 2010, 7:32 amJeffH says:
January 19, 2010, 8:06 amMike P Wagner says:
I am concerned that we may have hit a steady state oscillation – elect Democrats to solve perceived problems, then sanctimoniously elect Republicans who refuse to pay for those solutions because they are big government.
The critical issue – to my mind – is that the oscillation is one of appearance only. The size of the Federal government never actually shrinks. The Republicans don’t actually decrease the size of government – that would entail cutting programs popular with some constituency.
The real Reagan revolution, in my opinion, wasn’t about decreasing the size of government. The real Reagan revolution was the discovery that a politician only needed to talk about reducing the size of government to accrue votes as a “small government” conservative.
Before Reagan, it was assumed that “small government” politicians would actually decrease the size of government. Reagan showed that as long as a politician talked a lot about small government, he could run up (then) shocking deficits, and still be considered an advocate for “small government”.
I will believe that libertarianism is on the ascendancy when I see politicians unafraid to discuss reducing Social Security benefits be elected.
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January 19, 2010, 9:37 amFloridan says:
“Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services.”
As has been noted above, this means nothing. Ask Americans about specific programs, such as “should the Federal government sell the National Parks to private interests?” or “should the Federal government privatize Social Security?”
Oh, wait . . . that last question had already been asked.
January 19, 2010, 10:26 ammooglar says:
It seems like a truism that almost everyone is for “smaller government” and no one thinks they should have to pay (with their taxes) for things they dislike, but when we get down to brass tacks we don’t agree at all on what to cut and what to keep. And a lot of government spending is on handouts that few fully understand, like the farm bill, that has powerful interests backing it and very motivated to keep it. There will never, I think, be a vocal opposition to the farm bill to rival the voices on Capitol Hill supporting it. (I’m just using the farm bill as an example of a bill few understand but many would probably vote against if it were put up for a popular vote, not voicing any particular opposition to the farm bill over other such legislation).
So what seems to happen is that we keep everything and then we complain that we really want “smaller government,” when we can’t agree on what “smaller government” should be or look like. We all mean something slightly different when we say “smaller government” and so what appears to be consensus really isn’t when you get down to brass tacks.
A personal example. During the 2000 campaign, I saw Ralph Nader on David Letterman. He was talking about his platform, what he stood for, and I was sitting there nodding at point after point, thinking, “I agree with that. And that. And that.” He sounded pretty good to me.
But then, he started talking about what he wanted to do with the military. He was basically talking about gutting it. I’m a liberal, but I’m not completely naive. There’s a lot of room to discuss exactly how big our military should be and how much we should spend, but the cuts Nader was talking about were way beyond anything I would consider. After all, even liberals like me understand that if you had a lot of stuff others will want to take it!
So, right there, Nader’s vision of a “smaller government” lost me, even though I, in a general sense, want “smaller government.” But I didn’t want that kind of “smaller government.” The ways in which conservatives (I won’t say Republicans since they actually tend to increase the size of government just like Democrats) want to make government “smaller” are anathema to liberals, and vice-versa.
But, in the end, I think what is important for us to note, is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are the party of “smaller government” now, if they ever were. When choosing between the two the choice is in how you want government to expand, not in which one will make it smaller.
January 19, 2010, 11:04 amMike says:
LOL at thinking we’re going to be living out “Red Dawn.” Woooolverines!
January 19, 2010, 11:19 amDavid Sucher says:
A shift to libertarianism is whistling past the graveyard.
January 19, 2010, 11:31 ammooglar says:
Mike wrote:
Heh. Red Dawn was actually on last night on AMC. I watched about five minutes but the incoherence of Cuban and Soviet paratroopers just landing, apparently at random, in the heartland and shooting up civilians and schools was just too much.
I didn’t even get to the part where they start shouting “Wolveriiines!!!” :^)
January 19, 2010, 11:42 amShawn-non-Anonymous says:
I used to be huge proponent of “let the market decide.”
January 19, 2010, 1:07 pmThen I bought a cell phone.
Bob from Ohio says:
Libertarian does not equal “smaller government”.
Like many conservatives, I favor less spending on government so hence smaller government.
I do not favor the social liberalism that makes up the rest of libertarian belief.
So, the answer to the professor’s question is no.
January 19, 2010, 1:48 pmCato The Elder says:
Yes, yes, there are some equivalencies you can draw out between the Republicans and Democrats; we readily observe that’s it’s hard to cut federal spending when the politicians we elect have to consider the political dangers of cutting off entitlements to constituents. It’s often said in politics that we are given the choice between a horrible choice and a not-so-horrible choice; I agree.
But I see a very fundamental difference between the Rs and the Ds, and I would have to say that the reason I vote the way I do is that at least the Republicans have a circumscribed vision about the role of government in the economy. The reason the “socialism” epithet is so readily applied to Democrats is that because, aside from perfunctory appeals to some airy “belief in the role of the free market” you can always find some arrogant, and importantly, powerful liberal somewhere to endorse whatever crazy economic plan you might imagine.
You see, liberals like to espouse the ideal of “scientific management” but they rarely practice it, and they often become so wedded to the ideal of a thing that they’re willing to pass total garbage in order to proclaim a win. When I was younger and more naive I used to be attracted to such an “engineering” and “pro-active” ideology, having the sympathies of someone of a scientific bent, but later I changed as I grew perplexed why liberals were so wedded to the unfalsifiable macroeconomics theories of Keynes, a myopia readily seen in Krugman’s exclaimation “but what we needed was a bigger stimulus!” I think that criticism also applies to the current health-care reform; IMO, history demonstrates that the economy is a versatile yet ultimately delicate chained-system and too often find myself despairing how readily the Democrats can abuse it so with legislation possessing all the precision of a sledge-hammer. I can only puzzle at how some liberal journalists with very rudimentary grasps of statistics all of a sudden become pharmaceutical executives and industry scientists, able to divine exactly how much a company should spend on marketing and R&D and the denial of claims. What do they know of these things?
If I had to summarize the salient difference between the two parties I’d have to say it comes to what has been characterized on this blog as epistemological humility; people who vote Dem simply have too many, and too strong, opinions on matters that are best left personal.
January 19, 2010, 3:40 pmandrew graham says:
I suspect respondents’ definition of “larger government” is partially responsible for the disparity.
It’s one thing to ask about a “larger” government; it’s another to ask if, and how, government should react to private-sector participants caught behaving badly, or what the precise role of the government should be in the first place. And it’s still another to be able to rationalize that in the United States, most everything related to enjoying (relatively) favorable economics is large: GDP, taxation, spending, private-sector earnings, IP production, et cetera.
Rather, I expect most respondents to the question have the knee-jerk reaction of assuming every instance of a “larger government” is also an instance of a “wasteful government,” with waste being something most reasonable people would object to.
January 19, 2010, 3:51 pmHan Solo says:
Over the last 5 years I have heard more people start to talk about the founders and their visions compared to what is going on today than I heard in the 20 years prior.
There is definitely a growing interest in the founding of the US and how things have changed. And it seems that most people that know better would rather go back towards the original vision of the US I think.
Maybe its due to all the great books in the last decade about the founders such as John Adams from David McCullough, as well as his excellent ’1776′ book, the excellent book on Washington by Joseph Ellis, and James Gabler’s fun read ‘Evening with Franklin and Jefferson’….and the good movies that have come out such as the John Adams mini series based on the McCullough book as well.
January 19, 2010, 4:46 pmHan Solo says:
I switched to libertarian when I realized that Barry Goldwater would no longer be welcome in the republican party. Goldwater’s book “Conscience of a Conservative” was a key influence on me when I was younger. I followed it into being a republican through Regan, but I no longer consider myself a Republican.
I share the founders’ vision of limited government and the ability of people to voluntarily join with others to help their communities and themselves. I don’t agree with the Republicans who want government to play the role of morals policemen, and I don’t agree with the nanny state liberals. I am a libertarian.
I believe that there are more and more ‘Goldwater libertarians’ these days than there are the social liberal types.
The writing is on the wall. The Republican party is dying and the libertarian party has a real chance to take its mind share.
No one is going to be satisfied with the Republicans just being pro-war pro-life Democrats anymore.
January 19, 2010, 4:57 pmSecurityGeek says:
I think it was David “BoBo” Brooks who pointed out that conservatives used to be motivated by hatred of government, but now many are motivated by hatred of liberals. Perhaps the same thing has happened to “libertarians”.
Here’s a hint: if you agree with >30% of the opinions offered by Fox News commentators, you are not a libertarian, you just hate liberals.
January 19, 2010, 6:55 pmBob from Ohio says:
The Founders certainly did want government at the state and local level to play the role of morals policemen. Take a look at the statutes in force in colonial times. Sunday closings and the rest.
The Founders as a group were not modern libertarians at all.
January 19, 2010, 8:23 pmArthurKirkland says:
Slaveholding largely settled that issue — and indicates that not all of the Founders’ positions were worth preserving.
January 19, 2010, 10:20 pmM. Plaxton says:
Ron Paul for President in ’12!
January 20, 2010, 3:58 am