What She Said ....

I can't improve upon this editorial, I really can't ... :-)

Hope? Well yeah ... kinda.

This morning, a friend of mine posed the following question to me:

"Are you even a bit excited about the election results?"

My initial reaction, probably to no one’s surprise, was to point out that to me it’s all part of a great continuum: the continuum of statism. We’re coming to the end of the reign of a statist, war-making president, who will be replaced by an even more statist but perhaps (hopefully?) slightly less war-making president. In other words, we haven’t had a president since Calvin Coolidge who actually read, understood and followed the principles of limited, constitutional government, so why should I get excited about the election of yet another collectivist who will centralize even more power in Washington? As I pointed out in my last post, the cult of the president and the wisdom of the majority are illusions of belief anyway.

But on the other hand, I guess I am a bit excited. My objective in life is to convince people of the benefits of liberty: limited government, free markets, and free people - enlightened by science and learning and liberated from the shackles of mind-numbing religion and pseudoscience. And taking this into consideration, there’s a part of me that believes that Obama may help the cause more than anyone realizes.

After all, he’s probably the most openly socialist president we’ve ever elected. Where in the past it was possible to blame our economic woes on capitalism and the pro-capitalist president who was sitting in office at the time, this time it won’t be so easy. Moreover, hope as people may, socialism doesn’t work in the long run. You can only spread the wealth around as long as someone is still creating the wealth, and since human greed tends to outstrip human production in the long run, it doesn’t take too long before those with their hands out outnumber those with their noses to the grindstone. Socialism encourages parasitism, dependence, and that childlike reliance upon a mother/father figure to always be there for you (in this way it's really just another religion). Enter the Chosen One - our new president.

But there’s a big difference between promising things on the campaign trail and actually delivering them. Just as legislating morality is difficult (you’ll note that laws against "immoral" behavior haven’t really stopped any of it … for thousands of years no less), trying to direct the economy from above doesn’t yield particularly good results either. And while many old hippie boomer types have a love affair with labor and the unions that wish to have a stranglehold over it, it’s also well documented that unions restrict employment, raise prices, and reduce competitiveness in the marketplace. In other words, if Obama actually does what he promises, the economy is going to go even further in the tank than it is now, because just as Bush couldn’t spend and legislate his way to prosperity, neither will Obama be able to pull off this reality-defying feat.

And that’s why I’m slightly hopeful. When a well-attested socialist, collectivist, "progressive"* president dusts off the same old tired socialist policies that have insured decades of economic stagnation in western Europe and then ratchets them up even more than his predecessors, there’s no place to go but down.

Maybe government has to get REALLY big and REALLY oppressive before people notice it and start to rediscover limited self government and true federalism. I think Obama’s up to the challenge.

Maybe there is indeed hope for real change.

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*Just as an aside - I love how socialists now call themselves "progressives". Nice little semantic shift. Instead of owning up to the fact that they are indeed socialists, they instead wish to gain power so we can progress ever forward toward socialism.

PS -- if you want a neat little flashback to show just how little political discourse and our perceptions of our system have changed, take a gander at this little Pete Seeger clip from 1964.

Election Reflection

People, for better or worse, tend to be a credulous bunch. Sure, there are exceptions, but all in all the overwhelming majority of the human race is quite comfortable believing things they know little about, and then turning that belief into an identity ... or even worse ... a suit of armor that is used to deflect anything that contradicts their belief. This is the root of a logical fallacy called confirmation bias. It's also the thing that keeps religious and political enthusiasts closed to new ideas, interpretations, etc. I always think about this on election night. I think even more about how to crack the armor.

Before I begin, I will be honest with you. I sit here this evening proud of the fact that in 28 years of voting and political activity, I have never voted for a winning candidate for president. I've voted in every election, but always for the candidate with whom I agreed. I realize it's a futile gesture on my part. Liberty is not palatable to the overwhelming majority of the electorate, because they're addicted to government. They're truly convinced that government is there to help them with their problems, catch them when they fall, and bail them out when they're stupid. Before we can convince them of the value of liberty, we must first cause them to question the very notion that government works, and that the majority is wise.

So the Chosen One has been elected. Soon his followers will reach new heights of ecstasy as they envision a world of bliss instantly coming into being thanks only to the benevolent light shining off of Barack Obama's smile. They've won. It's all gonna be alright now. This naive notion of the president would astound me, had I not long ago accepted the utter ignorance of large parts of the American electorate.

For the most part, this supermajority ignores two basic facts:

1. Winning an election doesn't mean you're right - just that you've hoodwinked more people into believing in you than your opponent did.


2. History gives us a good idea of how wisely the majority has chosen in the past.

Let's take a quick look back in time. I'll arbitrarily begin in 1964, only because that was the first election in US history that some baby boomers were allowed to vote in (the world was a different place before they came along and subsequently spawned, and I would argue that the changes have not all been for the better). So, here's how wisely the majority chose:

• 1964 - LBJ wins big. His guns and butter policies are going to end poverty, cure racism, protect South Vietnam and generally solve everyone's problems. By 1968 he managed to cheese off so many people that he dropped out of the race rather than be embarrassed any further.


• 1968 - Richard Nixon wins. In 1972 he wins big. He taps into the heart of the "Silent Majority", promises to end the Vietnam war with "honor", and vows to bring law and order back to the country. He also extends the Vietnam war into Cambodia, institutes wage and price controls, and winds up having to resign rather than be impeached for breaking laws about wiretapping, perjury and burglary.


• 1974 - Jimmy Carter wins. In a folksy rejection of a GOP that gave us not only Richard Nixon but also our only unelected president (i.e. Gerald Ford), Carter rolls into Washington as an outsider who will fix everything. Within two years he's firing most of his cabinet, and two years later he's soundly run out of town by Ronald Reagan as inflation and unemployment skyrocket.


• 1980, 1984 - Ronald Reagan wins big twice. He campaigns as a libertarian - asserting that government is too large and the cause of most of our problems. Once elected, he proves this point by doing nothing substantive to reduce government. But he does succeed in spending the Soviet Union out of existence.


• 1988 - George Bush Sr. wins pretty big. He asks us to read his lips when promising no new taxes. Then he proves his ability to be bipartisan by raising taxes. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union collapses on his watch AND the fact that we won the first Gulf War, he still manages to be a one-termer (the fates are indeed fickle).


• 1992, 1996 - Bill Clinton wins, then wins bigger against the personality-free Bob Dole (who later winds up doing Viagra commercials ... wasn't that disturbing?). He proves he's a "new kind of Democrat" by screwing the labor unions with NAFTA (not a bad thing, but it happened nonetheless), getting us involved in a couple of mini-wars in Bosnia and Somalia, and helping America discuss the exact definition of "sex" (not to mention "is"). Passionately loved and viciously hated, his presidency helped depreciate the level of debate in America to epithets and absurd emails from mysterious people.


• 2000, 2004 - George Bush Jr. wins (barely), then wins again. Where to begin? Can we all just agree this guy was really, really bad regardless of which party you support? Please?

In other words, the majority may have been right twice. Reagan and Clinton at least managed to leave office with a significant group of satisfied supporters and a fair number of people who at least weren't wishing for their deaths. That means - for purposes this unscientific discussion - that 5 of the 7 winners of the presidency managed to leave office with the majority of folks disliking them (to put it mildly) after having been elected by --- tah dah!! -- a majority of the folks. The fickle whims of the uninformed electorate underscore how little thought most people actually put into voting.

So how do we save liberty? As H.L. Mencken once observed:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

In other words, politics is all about raising expectations. We've got be the ones to help people clearly formulate what their expectations are. Then we wait. At some point in the future, we should try to help them see how their expectations have not been met. We need to nurture their disappointment ... and THEN apply the wedge of skepticism (i.e. when they "feel" that something is wrong, use facts and reason to help them go with that feeling). Believers are naturally gullible. Until their belief is shattered, their minds will be insulated from thought. Thought liberates.

And liberty will only prosper if we get people to think. Relying on their feelings, they'll just swing back and forth between Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, the Demopublicans and the Republicrats, and things will only continue to get worse.