Excellent pick-me-up to go with morning coffee …

A great article in the WSJ today by Randy Barnett.
The reasoning:

The reason is simple. Unlike a parliamentary system in which governments are formed by coalitions of large and small parties, our electoral system is a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all one in which a winning presidential candidate just needs to get more than 50% of the vote. This means each contending “major” party is itself a coalition that needs to assemble enough diverse voting groups within it to get to 51%. Hence the need to appeal to the so-called moderates and independents rather than the more “extreme” elements within.
To the extent that a third party is successful, it will drain votes from the coalition party to which it is closest and help elect the coalition party that is further removed from its interests. The Libertarian Party’s effort will, if effective, attract more libertarian voters away from the candidate who is marginally less hostile to liberty, and help hand the election to the candidate who is more hostile to liberty.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. In a two-party system, we form coalitions before the election, not after. Third parties are just votes of non-participation.
So who should libertarians vote for?

Libertarians need to adjust their tactics to the current context. This year, their highest priority should be saving the country from fiscal ruin, arresting and reversing the enormous growth in federal power—beginning with repealing ObamaCare—and pursuing a judiciary who will actually enforce the Constitution. Which party is most likely to do these things in 2013?

The Republican Party. I sympathize with those who vote Libertarian, as they are like-minded, probably more so than the average Republican. But they are just asking for socialism, from which our country will find no return.

The prediction is here.

An excellent summation of what is at stake in this election.

Charles Schwab likes our economic growth prospects under a Romney administration.

One of the best analyses of the reasons for Obama’s first debate meltdown.

This final paragraph is stellar:

Obama had seen that his friends would protect him, and so he believed he could mail it in Wednesday, but this was the venue that could not be spun. No filter. No edits. No choosing what to put in or leave out. No shaping of the story. Just the story itself, rolled out in real time, sans narration, before 70 million American voters, undoing six years of hype and hysterics. It revealed one small, not all that keen academic, having been inflated by the narrators beyond all recognition, dissolving before everyone’s eyes.

Being starstruck has its drawbacks …