"Libertarians should vote for Donald Trump in thepresidential election."
That's the resolution I'll be debating, Oxford Style, with Loyola (New Orleans) economist Walter Block this Tuesday, November 1, at New York's Soho Forum. The event is moderated by Gene Epstein of Barron's and will be preceded by the libertarian-comedy stylings of Dave Smith, host of the podcast Part of the Problem.
The event is free and open to the public, but RSVP's are a must (see info and details below). For those of you not in the New York area, it will also be livestreamed (details on that here).
I will be defending the negative proposition, which is to say that I'll argue that libertarians should not vote for Trump in the presidential election (do note that my employer, the 501[c]3 nonprofit Reason Foundation does not endorse specific candidates or pieces of legislation; all views expressed are mine and mine alone).
As the author of Defending the Undefendable, Block is well-qualified to argue that libertarians should indeed vote for a billionaire-ish real estate mogul who is never slow to use the power of the state to line his own pockets.
Here's the Soho Forum's writeup of the event (which if I'm not mistaken carries a suggestion that fisticuffs might ensue…)
November 1, 2016
Debate between Walter Block of Loyola University vs. Nick Gillespie of Reason
Resolution: "Libertarians should vote for Donald Trump in thepresidential election."
What should Libertarians do this election? Vote for Gary Johnson? Not vote at all? Walter Block will argue that Libertarians should vote for Donald Trump, and Nick Gillespie will argue that they definitely should not.
Ron Paul
Walter Block is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at Loyola University and an Adjunct Scholar at the Mises Institute. Walter is the author of Defending the Undefendable, which has been translated into ten foreign languages. He has written 22 books, including The Privatization of Roads and Highways and Labor Economics from a Free Market Perspective: Employing the Unemployable. He has published almost 500 articles in scholarly refereed journals. As chief organizer of Libertarians for Trump, he has published the essay (June 4), "Hillary, Bernie, Donald, Gary: A Libertarian Perspective."
Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV, the online platforms of Reason, the libertarian magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets." He's co-author, with his Reason colleague Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America. The Daily Beast, where he now writes a column, named Nick one of "The Right's Top 25 Journalists," calling him "clear-headed, brainy…[and] among the foremost libertarians in America." A typically irreverent moment on the Bill Maher show prompted Mayor Fetterman of Braddock Pennsylvania to propose to Nick that they "take it outside."
Back in May, I wrote a piece that lays a simple case summed up by its headline: "Libertarians: Just Say No To Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump." Read it here.
