There seems to be a love affair with a good deal of libertarians and US presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard. The line-up of Democratic challengers for President is desperately lacking in libertarian values. However, being the least worst option shouldn’t make Tulsi a libertarian hero.
The race for President is, no doubt, filled with foreign policy hawks that seem to support more unrest and war-like policies throughout the world. There aren’t a lot of true doves in this particular race, and so Tulsi can seem appealing.
I get it. Libertarians are sick to death of continued war and violence and the atrocities in Yemen and elsewhere where US policy leads to continued violence and meddling in foreign affairs where it has no business and does not belong. Tulsi seems to be the only one with serious intent to change that.
However, the sacrifice of being willing to support socialist domestic policy for dovish foreign policy, to me, is not an acceptable one. Let’s not forget that Tulsi has aligned herself with the socialist wing of the Democratic Party. She is a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, the poster child for all things “democratic socialism.” She supports Medicare For All and “free” college tuition. She is against personal protection freedoms and guns, something that is very dangerous to preserving freedoms against government tyranny and is often used to support the force of socialism. Perhaps Tulsi has not come out and proclaimed herself a socialist, but by aligning herself with those who are, there isn’t much difference.
Socialism is responsible for more deaths than all the world’s major wars combined. World Wars I and II were responsible for somewhere near 125 million deaths. By contrast, Stalin, in furthering the socialist USSR, purposefully starved to death some 40 million or more people. Chairman Mao of China purposefully starved to death, by some estimates, as many as 100 million people in the name of progressing the socialist state. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge murdered 1.7 million people for the sin of being educated and, therefore, not being part of the working class.
Is it a stretch to say that Tulsi’s positions represent death and murder? I think it would probably be fair to say that her positions are a long way from directly being in favor of killing people. That said, with each significant step toward socialism comes more power for the ruling class that, once they have full socialist powers, most often than not murder people who stand in the way of the state.
Socialism is an insidious evil. No amount of foreign policy dovishness can offset the deadly and enslaving nature of socialism. Medicare for All, subsidized and fully-paid college tuition, and a few other socialist programs do not represent full-on socialist control. But socialism is an evil strong enough that any and every step represents the potential for far worse atrocities than can be saved from a non-interventionist foreign policy.
Fortunately, this is not a decision between socialism and dovish foreign policy. This is not a binary decision. Perhaps it is if you insist that all libertarians in the US must vote for a Democrat in the upcoming election.
But, that just isn’t true.
Trump isn’t a libertarian either, but neither are we forced to vote for him. We can choose to vote for a minor party candidate if we want, or we can even choose to not vote at all. We don’t have to sacrifice one very important issue for another. In a republic that allows for mostly free elections, we do have other choices.
All this gushing for Tulsi Gabbard seems a little too much for me. I cannot reconcile supporting such an insidious evil as socialism in order to support more dovish foreign policy, and I don’t understand why doing so is so readily acceptable to so many libertarians. Please stop stumping for Tulsi.
Danny Chabino
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