On the other hand, this will take decades of careful and very dedicated work. I wonder if you’ll find enough people willing to work on it for as long as it’ll take.

A two party system is a natural consequence of a majoritarian winner-take-all election system. I don’t consider it any better or worse than the more European way of proportional representation. In either system, the better solution is simply a decentralized government of limited powers. The number of political parties is a non-issue.

but it comes down to this…I am an informed voter and I vote for who I think is the best candidate…I know when I pulled the switch on Badnarik it was a wasted vote, but if enough people waste their votes, maybe, just maybe the major parties will get our point.

my concern is that so many libs vote dem or rep, or no vote at all…it’s like saying the current two party system is o.k.

MPH has a valid point. I had not heard of LP until I came across Balko’s article on Foxnews.com a year or 2 ago. I didn’t realize how LP I was until I saw it defined.

Use your heads. You can argue the pro and con of libertarian philosophy all you want to, but it’s the ass kissing that gets the job done.

I share a lot of views with libertarians. But when I vote I want a candidate who agrees with me. I do not vote for the one who wants me to agree with him. If you take an honest look at our society, you’ll find out that my bottom line is the bottom line for every voter.

Make all the high minded arguments you want to. But the ass kissers are winning the elections. You have to find out what the largest blocks of voters want, then shamelessly offer it to them. That’s the whole point of, and problem with, self government.

How did Perot get 19% of the popular vote in 1992, and why can’t any other “3rd” party achieve the same or better? I voted for him, but don’t honestly remember the specific reasons why.

Didn’t he too have a looney VP candidate?

If the press refuses to cover our candidates, they’ll never win, no matter how good they are.

In today’s election, in FL, there are 8 people on the ballot for president. I hadn’t heard of 3 of them before I saw the ballot. How can we make an informed choice if we’ve never heard of a candidate prior to reaching the polling booth? We can’t determine someone’s policy choices from just their name.

So I blame the press for letting us down when it comes to informing us of our choices. They say that they’ll cover third party candidates once they poll high enough. But that is a viscious circle: the press won’t cover the candidates until enough people will claim to vote for them, but the people won’t know enough about the candidates to decide to vote for them until the press covers them.

First, I have my doubts that this is really “a country that polls issue-by-issue libertarian.” The country probably polls somewhat more libertarian than either current law or the Republicrat platforms, but my experience doesn’t bear out the idea that there is majority support for the (non-incremental) positions of real true-believer libertarians.

The other problem is the lack of a real coherent libertarian set of political positions. Leave aside the deep pro/anti split on the war. It seems to me that those who think of themselves as libertarians are primarily motivated by very different issues (drug laws, strict free market economics, social/lifestyle freedom etc.) and don’t necessarily care much about or even agree with each other on the other issues that didn’t bring them to table in the first place. That becomes a problem when it comes time to actually chose and support a specific candidate who will often support parts of the basket of “libertarian issues” and oppose others, or at the very least will attach wildly varying priority to different pieces of the broad agenda.

The same thing happens with Republicrat candidates, of course, but those are understood by all involved to be coalitions where such compromises are expected. It seems to me that libertarians aren’t necessarily compromisers by nature, so any actual flesh and blood candidate tends to drive a significant portion of the libertarian faction off in a huff.

What RB’s strategy lacks in ideological purity it makes up for in spades in practical results – find your allies in power where you can and don’t let the perfect (but unobtainable in any foreseeable timeframe) be the enemy of the good (or at least marginally better) that’s achievable now.

You’ve got to get some kind of electoral reform, and try and halt the debasement of democracy that sees not a gnats whisker between the positions of the two candidates, and where the election is decided by voters choosing who looks best holding a gun or posing by a truck.

Libertarians will not get a look in, while they are trying to make reasoned, rational arguments and persuade people through actual debate, not while the election remains a beauty contest.

Could libertarians contemplate a coalition with greens, socialists and the like in a quest for electoral reform?

The second problem is that way too many libertarians, just like way too many Greens and Socialists and other third party types, reject the idea of incrementalism as not ideologically pure enough. The idea of compromise is seen as capitulation in the minds of most libertarians I meet. The fact is that most people are inherently “conservative” in the sense that they don’t want things to change quickly. If you run for office on a platform of radically changing government, abolishing the majority of departments and agencies and so on, even people who agree with you on a point-by-point basis are going to be scared off by the whole picture. Most people are pretty comfortable with their lives, and other than in times of major crisis, are going to vote for at best minor changes in the status quo, because they’re afraid of what a big shakeup might do to their comfortable lives.

A lot of libertarians I meet don’t seem to want to recognize this or deal with it – they prefer to rail against the people who won’t vote for the LP candidate as blind or deluded or stupid or what have you. The fact is that you don’t get elected to office, and you don’t create change in a country, by telling people that they’re stupid for disagreeing with you, especially when you’re working at a third-party disadvantage. You can dislike that fact all you want, but it won’t change it.

Short of a major crisis spawning some sort of revolutionary-type change, libertarians need to clean up their PR image and work on getting credible candidates (who won’t say crazy things in public places) to run for and win offices in order to make gradual changes to the political discourse in this country, if they ever want to get anywhere.