Ep. 356 Crossover: Adam Haman on How Should Libertarians Think About Voting?
Adam Haman returns for another crossover, this time discussing Bob’s decision to write in “Jesus of Nazareth” for the presidential election.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube version of this episode.
- Bob’s 2016 talk making the case against voting “strategically but immorally.”
- Adam Haman substack and podcast.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
I think intuition is telling us that the marginal analysis is not correct, or it’s at least misleadingly incomplete. I’m no mathematician, but I’m guessing there’s some game theory stuff going on in voting that needs to be better elaborated on. Mass voting clearly does matter and you don’t get mass voting without the individual vote, so the individual vote must also matter. The fact that we don’t have the whole dynamic mathematically modeled should not be a reason to defy common sense.
Agreed.
My take is that the marginal analysis is “correct” in some sense, but not telling the full story.
A lot of our most useful and powerful analytical techniques are often mis-applied or over-applied, leading to confusion rather than clarity.
I think something like that is going on here. Although Bob’s “meta-game” response is brilliant. “You’ll get that barn up without me, boys. I’m over here trying to teach you all how to levitate that thing into construction.”
There are many stories of God using imperfect people to achieve His will. I am not a rabid Trump supporter, nor do I think he will magically fix all our problems. But when I saw him get shot at in Butler and saw that unbelievable photo, I felt like I saw a glimpse of God’s plan. That was an easy shot and he should be dead. Instead, we get “fight fight fight”, that photo, and RFK, Musk etc unifying behind Trump to fight actual Satanic powers. This story we are living through seems pretty unreal to me.
What do you think is the correct analytical framework in which to decide whether God is using someone?
If such a framework exists, and you felt that God is indeed using Trump, would you then be ok with voting for him?
In that moment in Butler, I felt what you felt.
It could be God that you’re feeling. Or something else. Whatever it is, I think it’s appropriate to act on (or at least consider) your intuitions when something just “feels” right or important. Usually, your subconscious is trying to indicate something meaningful.
I sure think that’s the case with Trump. I can’t say he’s “good”, but I sure think the forces arrayed against him are “evil”. No doubt about that.