I dislike the products of electoral politics for a number of reasons, and presently have no horse in the ongoing race. Others who apparently do have suggested of late that even persons of a libertarian-ish perspective—arguably the least represented viewpoint amongst the current crop of candidates, and now politically homeless to borrow a phrase from a recent Daily Beast column—should find and settle for a least-bad option. Answering this query, one strangely popular position suggests a case might be made for a libertarian to support the campaign that is most in line with the model of European social democracy. As offered in this post, the argument is really a simple syllogism:

Premise 1: Bernie Sanders wants to make America more like Denmark, Canada, or Sweden.

Premise 2: Denmark et al rank higher than America on the Fraser Institute’s 2015 Freedom Index.

Conclusion: People who value higher levels of economic freedom should therefore support Sanders.

I actually take no position on Sanders’ campaign, finding some elements of it less disagreeable than others. In fact, I’ll even suggest that only a slight tweaking of this argument in a different direction (as we shall see below) could make it applicable to almost any candidate, including Donald Trump. Accordingly take these remarks as a matter of testing the validity of what I find to be a deceivingly appealing but also very poorly constructed argument, rather than a commentary on specific candidates. So while Sanders is indeed the occasion, his specific example only muddies the political waters around a philosophically problematic way to go about rank ordering really any candidate, that is to say: taking him at his word that he will “Make America ____” (More like Denmark/Great Again/Your Ad Here).

Political Economy & Denmark

There’s a fundamental flaw in the claim that a stated preference for making the U.S. more like Denmark (or Canada or Sweden) makes one’s candidacy commendable to libertarians on account of those countries’ comparatively preferable Fraser index ranking. It assumes that a replication of the economic policies of either of those countries is actually an attainable movement out of the present political structures of the United States. Such a sweeping and systemic move, if attempted in the U.S., would immediately encounter several deeply entrenched political interests that simply make it an untenable proposition. And if, by some miracle, it were ever able to overcome those already entrenched interests, it would then succumb to new political appropriation by further interest group capture, leading to the perversion of its original stated goals.