printGary Johnson and his sidekick William Weld, Libertarian Party goofballs, are running for president and VP, respectively. The two fulminated to CNN’s Victor Blackwell against Donald Trump. From the libertarian perspective, though, their mindset was much more statist and deferential to state structures than Trump’s.
Weld, in particular, went over the various policies Trump was proposing, voicing objections to each that were thoroughly statist.
WELD: Some of the stuff that he’s running on I think is absolutely chaotic. I’m going to do this to Mexico. OK, that’s a violation of the North American Free Trade agreement, which is the supreme law of the land. It is a treaty. We signed it. I’ll do this to China. No questions asked. OK, that’s a violation of the World Trade Organization rules [which good libertarians despise], exposing us, the United States, to sanctions. And we would be the rogue nation. I don’t think we want to be the rogue nation. You know? Let’s let North Korea be the rogue nation, not us.
Trump can’t do what he proposes because he’ll be in violation of this or the other agreement between states, national and international, which Weld treats as holy writ.
Not to real libertarians. The idea of radical freedom is to dissolve the chains with which others have bound us. Smashing or refashioning these agreements and reclaiming national, state and individual sovereignty, as Trump proposes, is more libertarian than the queasiness these two evince at such actions.
Johnson and Weld objected to Trump’s proposals on the statist grounds that renegotiating agreements or optimizing them for Americans would violate agreements that by their nature sideline the American people.
You don’t get more un-libertarian than that. Then there’s the viva Hiroshima attitude:
Friend just called, horrified that @GovGaryJohnson is on CNN saying bombing of Hiroshima was a Good Thing. This is a "libertarian"?
— Justin Raimondo (@JustinRaimondo) May 27, 2016