It’s always so easy for libertarians to say that they disregard politics since it’s a rigged game designed to advance the goals of the politically connected elites.  But every four years, a presidential election happens and many libertarians get caught up in the idea that they can make a difference at the ballot box.  This time around was clearly no different.

I used to be in the camp of “Voting is aggression!” and while it can certainly be used aggressively, I’m fine with people looking at the options in front of them and making the decision to hold their noses for the candidate most likely to bring about the most common good.  There was pretty much nothing redeemable about a Kamala Harris presidency, so if you wanted a chance to vote for a winner, you had to determine whether you could bring yourself to vote for Donald Trump or not since, on cue, the Libertarian Party nominated yet another snooze of a candidate in Chase Oliver.  You might look deeper into the third party candidates, but for all intents and purposes you might as well have not voted.

You could make the case that Trump offered at least some potential for improvements.  In my opinion, there were enough bad policies promised and a reasonably high unlikelihood of the good policies happening that I wouldn’t cast a vote for Trump.  Plus, we’ve already had a Trump presidency—while there was some good that his administration did, it was overall a disaster.  But we all make our own decisions, so a libertarian deciding to vote for Trump wasn’t something that was going to get me worked up.

But many libertarians didn’t approach it this way.  Many libertarians, including prominent ones, went out of their way to campaign hard for Trump.  They made the arguments that this was the singularly correct libertarian strategy—you’d be a bad libertarian unless you voted for Trump.

The people who told us that “Trump is literally a socialist” that banned guns went on to formally endorse him only a few months later.  Even the Libertarian Party chairwoman, Angela McArdle, sought out and got Trump to make a campaign speech at her own party’s national convention and went on to be a vocal Trump supporter herself.  She described her work as an “incredibly positive influence” on the Trump campaign.  And now today, she says, “If Chase Oliver had worked out a deal with Trump, he would be at Mar A Lago right now, negotiating cabinet picks. What a wild timeline that would have been…”  What happened, Angela?  I thought your incredibly positive influence would have yielded something other than assigning blame to the guy that you arguably abandoned.

Perhaps the most frustrating example is that of Dave Smith.  He was very outspoken about why libertarians had to support and vote for Donald Trump.  This is the Donald Trump he’s called “a statist piece of garbage,” said perpetrated a genocide in Yemen, and generally referred to as a war criminal.  I don’t think Dave would deny any of this now—his argument was that despite all of these things, Trump was our best shot at getting out of the mire we’ve been slowly and steadily sinking in.  That sounds like it could work until you consider you’re expecting a genocidal war criminal statist piece of garbage who had the chance to get us out of it before to do the job.

If the position were, “Hey, someone’s going to get elected, so we might as well try for this one turd that is just a little less stinky than the other one,” then I really wouldn’t have cared.  But voting for Trump has just dominated the conversation for the months leading up to the election. 

It was Trump or bust.  And they got Trump.

So just eight days after the election, where is Dave’s head at with Trump presidency as he nominates members of his cabinet?

“No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.”

Thanks for the insight, Dave.  We were all blindsided.  It’s not like there were tons of us saying that using the government to try to shrink the worst parts of the government wasn’t a great idea.

Part of the deeper problem with this strategy is that normally libertarians are collecting the people who feel disenfranchised by the whole political circus and offering real answers to what goes on.  Where was the Libertarian Party?  Aren’t they supposed to be advancing the message of liberty via their presidential candidate?  And what happened with the Mises Caucus?  Instead, the Libertarian Party seemed much more interested in raising funds from the highest bidders without regard for principle.

We largely lost the opportunity to grow our libertarian numbers this election cycle.  But it’s worse than that.  Because of the fervent campaigning for Trump among libertarian and Libertarian Party ranks, we probably on net lost people to the Republicans and MAGA movement.  Hopefully they come back.

Many of the libertarian Bitcoiners have been begging people like Dave Smith to embrace Bitcoin more and make it a bigger part of their message.  We’re not asking for Dave to pivot his podcast to a Bitcoin show or that the Libertarian Party replace their entire platform with the words “Bitcoin fixes this,” but there simply must be a bigger emphasis on Bitcoin among libertarians at large.

How would I have responded to Kamala Harris being elected president?  I would have bought Bitcoin.

How would I have responded to Donald Trump being elected president?  I would have bought Bitcoin.

How would I have responded to Chase Oliver being elected president?  I would have bought Bitcoin and put down the crackpipe.

With the state becoming crazier by the day with no end in sight, we need to find ways to practically protect ourselves from the rabid money printing that eviscerates the value of our wealth each day.  We need a way to be able to transfer that value for goods and services that we need in the event that we get locked out of fiat channels.  We need a way to be able to refuse to participate in the war machine.

Bitcoin provides a way for all of these issues.  It’s the long game and it’s difficult to be patient to see it to fruition—I get that.  But it’s definitely not the rake to the face that the ballot box brings you to.

If instead of just voting, libertarians bought Bitcoin on election day, they’d be up about 33% on that purchase as of the time of writing this article just eight days later.  What if there were more emphasis on Bitcoin over the last year or two?  Bitcoin is up 144% over the past year.  That is real, material help to the libertarian.  Holding Bitcoin over the long term and using it as your money has been the best tool at fighting the massive inflation we’ve been seeing.  Your grocery bill is going up in terms of fiat.  What do you think it’s been doing in terms of Bitcoin?

Bitcoin might take a drop here and there, but overall it’s on its way to becoming the global monetary standard.  That’s one of the reasons why talking about Bitcoin every blue moon or so just to quiet down the Bitcoiners just isn’t enough.

We want libertarians to get themselves into positions where who gets elected president starts mattering less, not more.  We have the tool to achieve that.  We wasted a grand opportunity to get lots of people on board.

Fortunately, it’s not too late.  Maybe Trump might even do some good things as president, but we cannot afford to put our livelihoods and our fate in the hands of a genocidal war criminal statist piece of garbage.  We need to take control and help ourselves.  If you haven’t gotten into Bitcoin yet, the time is now.