Success Quote by L. Neil Smith

There’s a gleeful tactical cynicism baked into Smith’s line: because a libertarian candidate is presumed unelectable, he’s free to treat the campaign not as a governing audition but as an ideological purity test. That premise does two things at once. It mocks the electoral system as a rigged pageant where serious dissent can’t win, and it turns losing into license - a way to speak in absolutes without paying the price of implementation.

The rhetoric hinges on theft, a deliberately incendiary moral frame for taxation. Smith isn’t arguing policy; he’s prosecuting character. “All taxation is theft” collapses the messy reality of public goods, consent, and democratic compromise into a street-level crime. That’s the point: it strips the state of legitimacy by translating it into something any listener can viscerally reject. Calling policy-making “cook[ing] up new ways to commit theft” then caricatures the mainstream candidate’s job as finding cleverer rationalizations for coercion.

The subtext is equally pointed: participation in presidential politics risks contamination. If you start negotiating rates and revenue, you’ve already conceded the state’s right to take. Smith recasts political seriousness (budgets, tradeoffs, incremental reform) as ethical surrender, while redefining seriousness as refusal.

Contextually, it reads like a manifesto for the movement’s recurring tension: is a libertarian campaign meant to win power, or to function as propaganda and boundary-setting? Smith answers by embracing the outsider role, turning inevitable defeat into moral superiority - and daring opponents to call that anything other than honesty.