My Perspective on the 2024 Election
Vote for the candidate that most closely aligns with your political philosophy
Michael Huemer recently argued in his Substack piece, “I Don’t Care About the Issues,” that he’s not voting for Trump based solely on Trump’s imprudent conduct following the 2020 election.
There’s really only one thing that I care about. The U.S. President, for the first time in the history of the country, made a concerted and credible, illegal attempt to not leave office after he was voted out.
I’m sympathetic to his argument, but I can’t bring myself to vote for Kamala Harris.
This post explains my perspective. I realize your perspective will be different, so as long as you’re respectful, feel free to share some of it in the comments below.
Let’s start with a clean slate. A good starting place in deciding who to vote for is to vote for the candidate that most closely aligns with your political philosophy. My political philosophy emphasizes freedom and respect for all individuals. I care most about the fundamentals.
My number one priority is safety. I want to avoid war. I seek to protect my family from danger. I’m out to protect them.
What might threaten their safety that involves the President? War with China or Russia. I want to avoid that. I prefer Donald Trump over Kamala Harris on this issue.
After safety, I care about freedom of conscience. What threatens this? I would say that governmentalization of social affairs, especially in education and social media, disturbs me the most. I’m grateful for the First Amendment that we have, but I think it should be broadened to keep government out of education and social media as much as possible. The ubiquity of DEI in schools is very disappointing to me. Government-backed censorship of social media is disturbing to me. In order to protect freedom of conscience, we need Supreme Courts justices that prioritize it. I prefer Donald Trump over Kamala Harris on this issue.
After safety, and freedom of conscience, I care about the environment and the economy. Let’s consider both simultaneously. I want people to be able to use their resources freely. I also want a clean environment. I believe the best way to achieve this is through property rights. Again, I would like to see Supreme Court justices that prioritize property rights. I prefer Donald Trump over Kamala Harris on this issue as well.
On immigration and trade I think Donald Trump’s rhetoric is awful. Surely I can think of worse than Donald Trump on these issues, but he’s pretty bad. My view is simple: let people associate, trade and hire who they want to, regardless of nationality. Let’s work toward order at the border.
Those are my priorities. Pretty straightforward. I’m not voting for Kamala Harris. This leaves me with two choices: Donald Trump or the libertarian candidate, and I don’t even know the name of the libertarian candidate off the top of my head.
Should I vote for the libertarian candidate or Donald Trump?
Chase Oliver is the Libertarian candidate. I'd like him to win the presidency, but it won't happen since hardly anyone knows he exists. Even if by some miracle he did win, I doubt congress would let him get anything done.
I won’t tell you who to vote for, but consider this: the immigration issue is not Donald Trump‘s or Kamala Harris’s to decide, it is Congress’. We have immigration laws that Donald Donald Trump during his term was endeavoring to enforce as was his job, but the Biden-Harris administration blatantly violated them with impunity. If you’d like the laws of immigration and hiring to be different, then look to Congress to change the law. My two cents.