Libertarians and democracy

Libertarian Lib Dem Charlotte Gore wrote recently about her decision not to stand for election for Parliament in Halifax. Amongst the barriers that she identified, the main ones were:

1. libertarian ideas are rancidly unpopular with the "people"
2. Halifax is a town which is "pretty much in love with the BNP" [sic], and there are very few liberal democrats who live there
3. election campaigns are a lot of hard work and involve being able to raise money, motivate activists etc.

I think Charlotte has probably made the right decision in not standing for election (not least, starting off a campaign by calling her electorate fascists is an unusual campaign tactic). But I'm not sure that her preferred alternative of writing a very strange letter to people in Halifax is quite going to do the trick.

If they want to break up the cozy consensus of the ConLibLab identikit politicians, Team Libertarian are at some point going to have to figure out how to address this problem about the "people" not wanting to vote for them[1]. Since every libertarian on the internet believes fervently that their policies would make everyone better off and free them from being enslaved by the state, it is rather a mystery why they are having quite so much trouble in doing this.



[1] I guess the alternative to winning popular support would be to wait for a military dictator to do the hard work of securing power and then persuade him to hire them as policy advisers, as in Pinochet's Chile. There's nothing quite like having the overwhelming might of the state to crush dissent to enable libertarian ideas to get tried out.