Anti-Climacus

UM: Going to disagree a bit with this Matt Yglesias post:

"The case for the LP is that no one really knows how many small-l libertarians are out there, other than that there are some of them, and they are usually aligned with the GOP. So how many anti-war, small government types are out there? 2 million, 4 million, who knows? It would be in their interests to be counted."

I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be at all smart (if your goals in politics are to get people with views similar to your own elected). A libertarian defection in 2004 would likely have the following proximate effects:

1. Every LP candidate would lose, and most of them would probably get demolished, a la the Green Party for the last few years.

2. The Republican Party would treat libertarians of this stripe rather poorly, should they decide to come crawling back to the party.

As long as elections are high-stakes affairs, it will never be rational to vote in a way that assures your side is going to lose. The premise that seems to be troublesome is the belief that there are a lot of small-l libertarians out there. Maybe there are, but their votes are undifferentiatable from everyone else's (unless you had tons of crosstabs on candidates, proposals, etc), so there's a high chance that there are probably fewer than the optimists (maybe even the realists) think there are.

If libertarians really wanted to get an idea how strong a force they are, they'd muck around in Republican or Democratic primaries.