This gets to a real misunderstanding conservatives have about libertarianism, one that leads them into the strange belief that libertarians have some sort of obligation to vote for conservatives. The confusion is in thinking this: Liberty means lower taxes. Thus the candidate who wants to lower taxes (or, at least, opposes raising them) is the candidate most in favor of liberty. All other positions he might hold are irrelevant. And if libertarians care about those other positions–same-sex marriage, the drug war, foreign policy, etc.–they are abandoning their commitment to liberty insofar as they let their views on those other positions push them toward voting for someone who might raise taxes. Taxes matter, yes, but if I have a choice between a candidate who would lower taxes by 10% while ramping up the drug war and a candidate who would end the drug war but raise taxes by 10%, I’d feel deeply unprincipled–not to mention immoral–if I voted for the former over the latter.

In this regard, a vote for Obama at the time isn’t unreasonable by libertarian standards. McCain had a lot of scary ideas. Obama did, too. But Obama also seemed much better on many issues than McCain. (That Obama turned out to be terrible on most of those issues is beside the point, because Hunter’s criticism is of libertarians voting for him then, not libertarians supporting him now.) Likewise, wanting Republicans to lose that election, after eight years of George W. Bush, is understandable, especially if you believed that McCain represented a more likely continuation of Bush’s dreadful policies. Thus it’s downright silly to claim, as Hunter does, that those libertarians who voted for Obama (or, at least, against McCain) did so because they wanted “to let the country lose, to get that smug sense of self‐​satisfaction they were feeling.” They simply believed–again, based on evidence available at the time, and not on the hindsight we have after half a decade of Obama’s rule–that a McCain victory represented more of a loss to the country than an Obama one.

Of course, even if I support a given candidate, that doesn’t mean I endorse all (or even most) of his positions. Which means I may still have much to complain about! And given how far from libertarian nearly all politicians are, libertarians do quite a lot of complaining. Still, to return to where we started, does complaining about the political solutions offered by candidates and lawmakers mean libertarians don’t also have their own solutions in mind?

In medical ethics, there’s the principle primum non nocere. “First, do no harm.” It’s one libertarians keep very much in mind when approaching politics. Most government “solutions” don’t simply not work. They actually make things worse than if they hadn’t been enacted at all. Thus standing in opposition to expanded government isn’t motivated by an uncaring attitude about America’s problems. Instead, it’s motivated by a well‐​founded understanding of how often government is the cause of those problems. Even so, opposition to most state‐​based solutions gets mischaracterized–by people like Derek Hunter–as petulance instead of principle. It’s a frustrating misunderstanding, as Thomas Sowell notes: