Can There Be Anything Positive From A Liberal Majority?

It has been a few weeks since the Liberals won a majority government under the leadership of Justin Trudeau.  I felt confident based on the polling numbers that we would have a minority government but margins of error being what they are, we wound up with a majority.

What now?  I could be expected as one who has never voted Liberal in my life to be entirely negative and say the sky is falling but I can point to some positives and points of hope.


Less War

When I shifted from self-identifying as a conservative to a libertarian I moved from being unsure to okay with war to feeling that there are very few cases where it is justified at all.  So here is my first positive with Justin Trudeau.  Bringing back some of our jets from bombing in Syria.  This will keep us out of a messy war in the Middle East which has been going on for decades (I am lumping together everything from the first Gulf War up to and including the present conflicts), hopefully prevent some blow back, save the lives of innocent civilians and save us money from operating in that theatre.


Marijuana Legalization

On this issue the Conservatives have been quite behind on the direction the public is moving.  I do not by any means think that the public is alway right, in fact they are often very wrong.  But it is hard not to see the parallels between the war and drugs and prohibition in the 1920's.  Prohibition turned many people into criminals who were doing no harm to anyone else and created a class of violent criminals as well.  One of the unintended consequences of drug laws is to make drug more potent and deadly.  When you think about it this makes a lot of sense when you think of it in terms of economics.  Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute points out that by raising the stakes, criminals will make drugs more potent and concentrated in order to make it more worth the risk they are taking.  It seems that if you calculate the cost of the war on drugs and drug prohibition is much more costly than allowing people to bear the responsibility of their bad decisions themselves.  I think private charities, individuals and families can do a much better job of helping people with addictions than police, jails and courts.


Debts and Deficits

While it is not likely we do have examples in recent history of Liberals being pretty good with the purse strings.  The question for Justin Trudeau is will he follow in the steps of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, or his father?  This could go wildly in either direction.


The Big Negative

The problem with the Liberals that differentiates them from the Conservatives is the degree to which they think they know better than I do what is good for me.  They feel they know how to engineer society and the economy better than anyone else.  But from a Libertarian perspective, this is the great delusion of politics, the assumption that any one person or group of individuals is either smart enough or more importantly has the right to run our lives and tell us what to do.

It is the lack of government meddling that is characteristic of the most prosperous countries in the world.  So when Justin Trudeau comes to realize that the government not only has no business in the bedrooms of Canadians but neither do they in our boardrooms, bank accounts or pay-stubs!  But this is a fantasy for it would make them Libertarians and not Liberals!