Two pitches, two very different perspectives, but both focusing on a similar theme — a Joe Biden presidency would be dangerous to Americans’ rights. Rush Limbaugh’s home-stretch argument won’t surprise anyone, but his focus here on Biden’s negatives rather than Donald Trump’s positives is notable. We’re no longer in a “same objectives … different philosophies” paradigm, Limbaugh warns, and it’s time to vote accordingly (via The Blaze):
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“Hey, folks, sitting here in the library getting ready to watch the confirmation vote — Amy Coney Barrett, Supreme Court — and it just reminds me: Folks, we don’t have a choice in this election. It’s got to be Donald Trump.
“We’re not going to have the kind of country everybody thinks we’re going to have. This is not the old ‘Republicans versus Democrats,’ where we all have the same objectives, just different philosophies on how to get there. They do not have those objectives any more. Their purpose is to erase the Constitution, start over rewriting it, eliminating the concept of ‘The citizen has rights which prevail over government.’
“It’s serious, and it’s scary, and we don’t have a choice. You have to get out there and vote Trump.”
I agree with Rush on all of the above, and so would most Hot Air readers, I’d guess. Surprisingly, Reason’s Nick Gillespie largely agrees on everything except the part about having no choice. Yesterday, Nick wrote that his libertarian (and Libertarian) readers have “11 trillion reasons to fear Joe Biden’s presidency,” and not just on the usual fiscal-insanity grounds:
Not only is the former vice president likely to win, but FiveThirtyEight predicts Democrats have a 74-in-100 chance of taking the Senate while holding the House of Representatives, meaning that he will have a great opportunity to deliver on all of his campaign promises, which add up to a mind-blowing total of $11 trillion in new federal spending over the coming decade. His “platform is more liberal than that of every past Democratic nominee,” writes The Washington Post.
That’s bad news not just for the economy but for a wide range of libertarian concerns about things such as individual autonomy, free speech, school choice, and gun rights. In last week’s debate with Trump, Biden warned that we are entering a “dark winter.” He was talking about rising COVID-19 cases, but his own platform is likely to keep us at home, out of work, and in a bad place for a long time to come. …
Perhaps even scarier than Biden’s explicit plans to tax, spend, and regulate what already exists are the seemingly infinite promises he has made to push new government controls onto virtually all aspects of our lives. He wants to repeal Section 230, the law that protects online platforms from legal liability for speech generated by users, and wants to “take a really hard look” at breaking up tech companies, especially Facebook. He’s called for an end to federal funding for charter schools and the reinstatement of ineffective assault-weapons bans and countless other gun-control measures.
Pick any page of his campaign website’s extensive “vision” section and you’ll find endless proposals to tinker with everyday life and employment. He pledges to “aggressively pursue employers who violate labor laws, participate in wage theft, or cheat on their taxes by intentionally misclassifying employees as independent contractors” and also to “establish an Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the U.S. Department of Justice.” What sort of bureaucracy do those sorts of things require? The same sorts of questions are raised by his on-again, off-again endorsement of a federal mask mandate. On many, perhaps most, issues, Joe Biden’s America will be one in which political and economic power is unified under Washington’s control.
Where Nick disagrees — and passionately so — is that voters do have another choice besides Trump. The Libertarian Party has nominated Jo Jorgensen, who will appear on the ballot in all 50 states this year. The question, as always, is whether this is a rational choice or a vote throwaway. However, don’t lose sight of the fact that Nick is not endorsing Trump, but that he does point out just how dangerous a Joe Biden administration would be to individual liberty and subsidiarity in government. Nick and Rush agree on that much, even if they likely don’t agree on the solution.
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