Everybody hates Libertarians. I suspect professional politicians have even more cause than most to do so.
If Johnson wins, it will be because prominent Republicans endorsed him, such as the Bushes and Romney. Which would mean he’d be the de facto Republican President.
I highly doubt Bush or Romney will be endorsing an avowed pothead any time soon.
From what I’ve seen there are some pretty vocal posters on this message board who hate Libertarians more than any politician I’ve ever heard.
And I say that as someone who is not now and has never been a Libertarian.
Meh. We’re just ahead of the curve. Let them get more attention and the rest will be with us.
Johnson is a pretty amusing guy though, I must say. He had a good zinger earlier:
“I hear that Donald Trump is watching the Olympics tonight. He’s seeing how high the Mexican pole vaulters go,”
I don’t know if this is widespread or if there is just a really passionate Gary Johnson supporter in Houston, but I’ve been on multiple walking/biking paths in different parks where I’ve seen some variation of “Google Gary Johnson” written in chalk on the path. I think only once or twice it even said something about “Gary Johnson for President”, the other times it was just saying to google him with hearts and stars drawn in chalk around it. So at least in Houston it could be people googling him to see who this Gary Johnson guy is, maybe he’s some hot new musician they should know about, or it’s some viral marketing for the next Cloverfield.
Gary Johnson: "I hear that Donald Trump is watching the Olympics tonight. He’s seeing how high the Mexican pole vaulters go,
I understand there are many posts in this thread, and it’s easy to lose track, but this was posted only two posts ahead of you.
If smdb would stop indicating that I’ve completely read a topic, I wouldn’t have to hunt back through the previous posts to see if somebody had posted what I was coming here to post.
TBF, Rick K provided a link, CarnalK only provided the quote.
One problem with Gary Johnson is that he’s a Libertarian. For example, while he accepts that scientific consensus on global warming, he doesn’t want to do anything about it. He seems to think the problem will solve itself, following underpants gnome logic. Excerpt from a June 2011 Rolling Stone interview: [INDENT][INDENT] Q: What about climate?
A: I accept the fact that there is global warming and I accept the fact that it’s man caused. That said, I am opposed to cap and trade. I’m a free market guy when it comes to the clean environment the number-one factor when it comes to the clean environment is a good economy.
Q: You don’t think there’s a policy response? It’s making people richer that would help?
A: Good economies results in cleaner environment. That’s been the history of the planet till this point. [/INDENT][/INDENT] Yes Gary, the middle class tends to like cleaner air. So they agitate for governmental action. There are no instances of these sorts of problems solving themselves spontaneously due to free rider problems. People emit lots of CO2 because it’s free. They conserve on labor, capital and any other input because it has a cost attached to it. It’s not that hard.
http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Gary_Johnson_Energy_+_Oil.htm
To be complete, Johnson appears to support voluntary programs but also federal R&D. So there’s that.
He sort of had the right answer. The public clamors for government action when things are free or the benefits vastly outweigh the costs in the average voters’ perception. The reason we don’t do anything about climate change is because few people want to pay now to save future generations. Clean air could be done mainly on the backs of industry. Climate change can’t be addressed seriously without forcing consumers to do their part.
A good economy, however, is more likely to bring us a technological save, which is realistically the only way out of this sort of taking it out of the voters’ hands.
Somebody should ask Johnson if he ever heard of the EPA.
A carbon tax seems like a good Libertarian solution to climate change - putting a price on an externality, as opposed to picking a number for the correct amount of CO2. In theory, you should be able to just keep cranking it up until we hit the number we need.
I’m not following. If the economy was booming, then technology will magically appear to solve the problem without the voters having to make any sacrifice?
Reminds me of a David Mitchell quote. I think he was interviewing Cameron, and he asked about forest preservation. Cameron said something like “if the people really cared about saving that forest they’d get together and do something about it.” And Mitchell said “they did get together, it’s called the government.”
Hell, someone should ask Johnson if he’s ever heard of basic economics, and what happens if you make a common resource free.
Yes, you can abolish payroll taxes and just fund SS and Medicare through carbon taxes. That’s actually somewhat progressive, because payroll taxes fall pretty much exclusively on the lower and middle class, whereas carbon taxes tend to hit everyone in proportion to their income.
If the economy is doing well, there’s more likely to be innovation. and the wealthier people are on average, the more likely they are to want to “spend” their money on things like cleaner air.
Government also has to allow “permissionless innovation”, where new, disruptive technologies or business ideas don’t get attacked by the authorities because they threaten industry incumbents. If someone tomorrow came up with an idea for a battery the size of a “D” battery that cost $10 and would power your home for a year before you had to change it, there would be all sorts of handwringing about “safety” and calls to study it before letting people buy it because it would instantly put a lot of companies out of business and a lot of union workers out of work. We’ve already seen it with Uber and Airbnb. If you want an innovative country, you need a libertarian outlook on technology.
I suspect JOhnson understands the economics just fine, he just knows that if you institute a carbon tax it’s just another tax for politicians to raise. Even when it makes economic sense and you could possibly do it in a revenue neutral fashion, history has warned us that a new tax almost never works out well for taxpayers. Old taxes never go away and new taxes always rise.