2 out of 3 are Liberty Candidates!

This article makes the assumption that Rand Paul will remain the frontrunner in the presidential race and be the Republican Party’s nominee on the November 2016 ballot.  No other Republican candidate will be good enough for a stalwart libertarian like me.

2016 will be a much better election year for the liberty movement than 2012.  Back then, Ron Paul had to claw and scrape his way to getting two minutes of speaking time out of two-hour-long debates.  Moderators and major networks never took him seriously, except for the times they’d briefly mention him to drive home how ‘crazy’ he was, or to remind themselves that he was ‘unelectable’.  Worst of all, the libertarian ideas Ron advocated were deeply misunderstood. 2012 wasn’t our year.

This time, our libertarian ideas actually have a shot at being heard and accepted.  Rand Paul is being taken much more seriously than Ron was.  This is due in no small part to Ron blitzing America like a kamikaze in 2012, with ideas like “end the Fed,” “end foreign aid,” and “legalize drugs”.  Because Ron took the full blast of heat in 2012, America in 2016 can find it more palatable when Rand pushes ideas like “let’s fully audit the Fed,” “we can start cutting aid to this list of countries,” and “let’s end the War on Drugs, which is really a war on the black community.”

To make a long story short, Rand Paul’s candidacy excites me.  Sure, he isn’t a pure libertarian like his father, but making that constant comparison is getting silly.  ‘Conservatarian’ Rand Paul will take mainstream America MUCH closer to libertarianism than Hillary Clinton, that’s for damn sure!

I’m also excited that Gary Johnson will be running for president again on the Libertarian Party ticket.  Though I’ve long-since agreed to actually cast my general election vote for Rand, I can see the importance of Gary’s candidacy.  Many in the liberty movement are concerned that Gary running against Rand will ‘divide’ the libertarian vote in America.

I disagree.

If there exists any 'division' within the liberty movement, it runs along these lines:

1. Most libertarians will ultimately swallow their pride and support Rand. They realize that, despite his ‘impurities’ he’s worlds above the other rabble playing the Ronald Reagan name card.
2. Libertarian Party members will vote for Gary Johnson because the Party needs to run candidates in order to function as a Party and not as a weekly tea social.  For some of these folks, Rand might not be ‘good enough’.  They have every right then to run a candidate that better represents them.
3.  Libertarians and libertarian sympathizers who don’t much care for either Rand or Gary will stay home and find creative life hacks that defy government regulations.  Their focus is on advancing liberty through action, not politics.

Judge Napolitano recently said, "I want Rand to win."

Frankly, the liberty movement needs all three groups of people.  We NEED Rand, we NEED Gary, and we even NEED a liberty-advancing alternative for those who are sick of politics.  In the long-run, people are already aligned for what they’ll do or who they’ll support in 2016.  Because libertarians are notorious for sticking to their principles, there'll simply be no arguing with these three groups.

I’m still incredibly excited just to know that I could be seeing Rand Paul and Gary Johnson both on the general election ballot.  Though the Libertarian Party is a smaller party, it’s still the third largest party in the United States.  This means that, of the three biggest American political parties on the November ballot, two out of three candidates will be liberty candidates.

I say again, two out of three general election candidates will be representing libertarian ideas and policy objectives.

Only the Democrat candidate, probably Darth Hillary, will be the candidate representing corruption, government surveillance, and corporate fascism.  The other two candidates will starkly contrast; their platforms will differ from tyranny and instead offer a mostly-libertarian option (Rand) and a super-libertarian option (Gary).

Absolutely nothing about the 2012 election looked like this, and I count all of our lucky stars that years of hard work and activism are finally starting to pay off.  I can only imagine one day in the future when libertarian ideas will have so deeply infiltrated politics, that all three parties’ candidates will be different shades of libertarian.

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ENTER the Rand Paul writing contest!

Images courtesy of aLibertarianFuture.com