Don’t Make Your Message Small Enough to Fit Inside the Cult of the Omnipotent State
By Arvin Vohra
Don’t make your message small enough to fit inside the cult of the omnipotent state. Don’t make your message small enough to be squashed or ignored.
What do we want? To replace government schools with true free market education, so that families can discover education that works, instead of being forced to pay for nonsense that does not. To massively downsize the military, so we can have a military that keeps America safe, rather than a giant one that creates enemies and endangers our lives. To end the war on drugs, release all nonviolent drug users and sellers from prison, and cut taxes accordingly. To replace government mismanaged heathcare with free market, low cost healthcare, where prices constantly get pushed down (as with laser eye surgery) instead of pushed up (as with Epipen).
People fear those ideas. Not citizens - many citizens are quite open to those ideas, and excited by their huge benefits. But those who benefit from current backwards policy - military contractors, private prison companies, worthless textbook publishers - fear those ideas.
Those groups will try to get you to gut your message, to make it small enough to fit inside the cult of the omnipotent state, make it no real threat to their unearned and undeserved money and favors. Lockheed might say, “Don’t say downsize the military and cut taxes accordingly. Instead, say use the military more efficiently.” After all, that would pose no threat to their contracts. Pearson’s might say, “Don’t say separate education and state. Instead, say create charter schools or voucher schools, but make sure they follow federal standards, so they still have to buy our useless textbooks.” Pharmaceutical companies will say, “Don’t say get rid of the FDA, eliminate border protections for big pharma, and let foreign doctors practice in America. Instead, say refocus health care reform.” That will enable them to keep selling Epipen for $600, instead of having to compete with foreign competitors that will produce alternatives for $6.
Eliminating those agencies and programs will benefit almost all of us. A few loud cronyists will complain, and a few well-meaning statists will probably join them. The first group will fight us forever, but many in the second group can be convinced.
But the biggest group we will reach: current nonvoters. As a former nonvoter myself, I can tell you a lot of people don’t vote because they:
1. Hate everything the government does, and
2. See no difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Let’s reach them.
Instead of trying to trick people into voting Libertarian by showing how similar it is to statism (an obvious recipe for irrelevance), let’s show just how different and just how much better freedom is.
In Liberty,
Arvin Vohra
Vice Chair
Libertarian Party
