It is not a theoretical objection -- that is, a fundamental objection -- but an aspect of the libertarianism focus on electoral politics that I find disturbing is its obsession with numbers. How many candidates are running in how many districts with what total votes as compared to whose other numbers... All the movement becomes a numbers game that is stripped of non-arithmetical substance. Even if a vote total turns out to be 'good', is it really a victory? Campaigners will shout "look how many libertarians we now have!" but you never know why people voted for the somewhat libertarian candidate -- in protest against the other parties, out of movement 'purity', a preference for his non-libertarian positions, the candidate's personal charm, the lack of alternatives, or...? If the last few years have taught anything, it is that voters are incredibly fickle.

And what if a libertarian were to win the numbers game; by which I mean, what if he (or she) were elected to a high public office? What if he were able to grab the Holy Grail of libertarian goals and have a bad law repealed? I'm all for repealing anything but I don't put any stock in that strategy. What is enacted today can be repealed tomorrow and re-enacted the next week thereafter. My time frame is inaccurate but my point is that repealing laws is a poor strategy because it plays the legislative game, which is heavily rigged against libertarianism and freedom. It is just another numbers game.

In final analysis, it does not matter how many laws are on the books or how many are repealed. What matters is whether the authorities are able to enforce the laws, however many there are. When a law becomes unpopular enough, the authorities cannot enforce it; it becomes a dead law...one that has been de facto repealed by the withdrawal of public consent to it. History is replete with such vox populi repeals.

In fact, America was founded on the vox populi repeal of law. The 13 colonies had stacks of laws, regulations, and policies; there were British soldiers in the street along with Loyalists to enforce them. Yet every single one of those government measures, including governmental institutions like the courts, became irrelevant once a sufficient number of ordinary people said "no." The government itself became irrelevant because its will was unenforceable. What happened and what mattered was a change in the hearts and souls of the people -- a change that was brought about largely through the ceaseless, stellar efforts of writers like Thomas Paine who infused classical liberalism into the political psyche of the colonies. They did not produce a fickle change but one that inspired loyalty...not to men necessarily but to ideas -- especially the ideas of freedom and independence.

What would have happened, do you think, if the likes of Paine and Jefferson had "gone through channels"? If they had petitioned the king, run for the local school board or a higher position, if they had tried to repeal the Stamp Act and other laws one-by-one. I suspect there would have been no America because there would have been no revolution, no vox populi repeal of government itself. Instead, the American revolutionaries went to the source of all real social change -- the hearts and souls of men. They did the hard work and they showed how quickly a society could be turned around; it took something akin to 15 or 20 years for their ideas to create an expanse of freedom in the world.

I understand the appeal of the numbers game. Cultural change is difficult to impossible to quantify and this introduces frustration into the life of anyone attempting to accomplish change. It would be amazingly helpful to log onto a website every morning and get a graph of feedback, even if the feedback were negative. Alas, it is not possible. Nor is real change possible without doing the hard and frustrating work. There is no quick fix that cannot be as quickly undone.